THE SEARCH

FOR THE
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
OF GOD
The Arian Controversy
318-381

R. P. C. ~ANSON
(

T&TCLARK
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HENRICO CROUZEL
First published 1988 INTER DOCTOS GALLICAE NATIONIS EMINENTI
Latest impression 1997 ORIGENIS ILLIUS CELEBERRIMI STRENUO DEFENSORI
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 Preface
Writing a book such as this resembles the attempt to photograph a
running stream. The photograph gives a picture of what the stream
was like at one instant, but the stream flows on and never remains the
same. This book undertakes to represent the state of scholarly opinion
on its subject up to the summer of 1987, with a very few touches
gleaned at the International Patristic Conference held in Oxford in
August of that year, but notlater. It is to be. regretted that I have been
unable to take into account R. D. Williams' informative and
stimulating work, Arius: Tradition and Heresy.
To avoid loading the footnotes with excessive detail, I have for the
most part referred the reader for full information about the books
and articles mentioned in the text or notes to the Bibliography, and
have used the abbreviations codified in a well-known international
work of reference. With very few exceptions, all the translations into
English of any language quoted in the book are my own, often
because no other exists, but also because English translations of
Patristic texts tend to be old-fashioned and redolent of Wardour
Street.
lowe a great debt of gratitude to my brother, the Revd. Professor
A. T. Hanson D.D., and to his wife Miriam for their care in reading
the proofs. They saved me from several mistakes and on occasion
improved the phrasing of my English. I must also thank my wife for
help in one or two laborious tasks necessary to the preparation of the
book; Miss Molly Whittaker, my former colleague on the staff of the
University of Nottingham, for correcting the Greek accents; the
Speediprint Company of Wilmslow for their efficiency in copying
my manuscript; and the staff ofT. and T. Clark for their sympathetic
co-operation during the production of The Search for the Christian
Doctrine of God.

R.P.C. Hanson

vu
-----------------------------_
.. _ - - - - -

Contents

Preface vii
List of Abbreviations xiv
Introduction xvii

PART I
The Origins

Chapter 1: W)i~t did Arius Teach? 3

I. Arius' Career up to 318 3
2. Arius' Own Words 5
-3. The Account of One Contemporary 16

Chapter 2: The Early Supporters of Arius 19

I.Athanasius7 I Arians' 19
2. Some of Arius' Contemporaries 27
3. Eusebius of Caesarea 46

Chapter 3: The Antecedents of Arius 60

I.Possible predecessors 60
2. Philosophical Background 84
3. Conclusions 95

Chapter 4: The Rationale of Arianism 99

I. Sources for Arianism .99
2. A Reduced God 100
3. Inferiority and Imperfection of the Logos 106
4. A Suffering God 109
5. More Detailed Christology 117
6. The Attitude of Arians to Arius 123
ix
 Contents Contents

Chapter 5: Events Leading to Nicaea 12 9 4. Ossius and Liberius 334

I. From the Outbreak of the Con90oversy to the 5. The Third Exile of Athanasius 341
Council of Antioch of 325 6. The Sirmian Council of 357 343
2. The Alexandrian Alternative Theology
3. The Council of Antioch of 325 Chapter 12: Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three, 35?-361 348
I. The Rise of the Homoiousians 348
Chapter 6: The Council of Nicaea 152 2. The .Council of Sirmium of 358 357
I. The Calling of the Council 15 2 3. The 'Dated' Creed of 359 36 2
2. The Proceedings of the Council 157 4. Constantius' Final Solution 371
3. The Creed of Nicaea 163 5. The Aftermath of Nice 380
4. The Immediate Repercussions of the Council 172
Chapter 13: Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
PART II I. Eusebius of Emesa
Period of Confusion 2. Cyril of Jerusalem

Chapter 7: Semantic Confusion 181

I. Hypostasis and Ousia 181 PART III
2. Homoousios 190 The Rival Answers Emerge
3. Other terms 202
Chapter 14: The Doctrine of Athanasius 417
Chapter 8: Eustathius and Marcellus 208 I. The Dates of Athanasius' Works 417
I. Eustathius of" Antioch 208 2. The Theology of Athanasius: the Father and the Son 421
2. Marcellus of Ancyra 217 3. Homoousios 436
3. Photinus 235 4· The Incarnation 446

Chapter 9: The Behaviour of Athanasius 239 Chapter 15: The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of PoWers 459
I. Estimates of Athanasius' Character 239 I. Hilary's Career and Works 459
2. Athanasius' Career to the Council of Tyre 246 2. His Theology: Introduction 471
3. From the Council of Tyre to the Council of Rome 262 3. The Relation of the Son to the Father 475
4. Hilary's Doctrine of the Incarnation 492
Chapter 10: Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One, 341~349 274 5. Conclusion 502
I. Was there an Arian Conspiracy? 274
2. The Council of Antioch of 341 284 Chapter 16: The Western Pro-Nicenes II 507
3. The Council of Serdica of 343 293 I. Eusebius of Vercelli and Lucifer of Calaris 507
4. Period of Reconciliation 306 2. Phoebadius of Agen and Gregory of Elvira 516

Chapter 11: Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two, 35~357 3I 5 Chapter 17: The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus 531
I. Constantius II 3I 5 I. Marius Victorinus: Introdu~tion 53 I
2. The First Sirmian Creed (35 I) 32 5 2. His Christology 534
3. The Councils of Aries (353) and of Milan (355) 329 3. His Doctrine of the Incarnation 547
x Xl
 Contents Contents

4. His Doctrine of the Trinity 55 0 2. Abortive Attempts at Agreement 795

3. The Beginning of the Consensus 802
Chapter 18: Homoian Arianism 557 4. The Council of Constantinople 805
I. The Identification of Homoiap: Arianism 557 5. The Creed of Constantinople 812
2. The Theology of the Homoian Arians 562 6. The Immediate Sequel to the Council 820
3. Homoian Arian Polemic 57 2
4. Homoian People 579 Chapter 24: The Development of Doctrine
I. The Influence of Scripture
Chapter 19: The Neo-Arians 598 2. The Influence of the Emperor
I. Aetius: his Career 598 3. The Influence of Philosophy
2. Doctrine 60 3 4. The Development of Doctrine
3. Eunomius: his Career 6Il
4. Doctrine 617 Bibliography 878
General Index 901
Index of Modern Authors 922
PART IV Index of Biblical References 921
The Controversy Resolved

Chapter 20: Athanasius and his Heirs 639

I.The Council of Alexandria of 362 639
2. Didymus and Pseudo-Didymus 653
3. Epiphanius 65 8
4. Ambrose 667

Chapter 21: The Cappadocian Theologians 676

I. Introduction 676
2. Basil of Caesarea 679
3. Gregory of Nazianzus 699
4. Gregory of Nyssa 7 15
5. Conclusion 73 0

Chapter 22: The Doctrine of the Spirit 73 8

I. Introduction 73 8
2. The Holy Spirit in the Thought of Athanasius
and his Followers 748
3. The Macedonians 760
4. The Holy Spirit in the Cappadocian Theologians 772

Chapter 23'. The Council of Constantinople 79 1

I. Imperial Policy before the Council 791
xii xiii

-
!
 List of Abbreviations

Studi for Simonetti's Studi suit' Arianesimo.

Urk for Opitz, Urkunden zur Geschichte des arianischen Streites III.
US for American edition.

N.B. the word 'diocese' has throughout been used for a division of
the Roman Empire and not in an ecclesiastical sense.
List Of Abbreviations

The abbreviations used in this book follow those listed by Siegfried

Schwertner in his International Glossary of Abbreviations for Theology
and Related Subjects (Berlin 1974), but in addition the following have
been used:

AC for Gwatkin's Arian Controversy

C for the Creed drawn up by the Council of Constantinople held in
the year 381.
CCT for Grillmeier's Christ in Christian Tradition, Vol. I.
Crisi for Simonetti's La Cnsi Ariana nel Quarto Secolo.
DSS for the treatise De Spiritu Sancto of Basil of Caesarea.
EOMrA for C. H. Turner's Ecclesiae Occidentalis Monumenta Iuris
Antiquissima Vol. I.
ET for English Translation.
Fr Tr for French Translation.
GPT for Prestige's God in Patristic Thought.
HE = Historia Ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical History).
LXX for the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek.
MS for manuscript.
N for the Creed drawn up by the Council of Nicaea of 325.
n for note.
NT for New Testament.
OT for Old Testament.
PG for Migne's Patrologia Graeca.
PL for Migne's Patrologia Latina.
PTAA for Politique et theologie chez Athanasc d' Alexandrie (ed:
Kannengiesser).
SA for Gwatkin's Studies in Arianism.
xiv xv
 Introduction

This book is about what is conventionally known as 'The Arian

Controversy', but neither the word .Arian' nor the word
'controversy' appears in the main title. The reason for this is that the
author is convinced that the expression 'the Arian Controversy' is a
seriousmisnomer .
In the first place Arius was not a particularly significant writer and
1

the people of his day, whether they agreed with him or not, did not
regard him as a particularly significant writer. He may have written a
lot of works apart from his Thalia and one or two letters, which are
all that survive. But ifhe did write other works neither his supporters
nor his opponents thought them worth preserving. Those who
follow his theological tradition seldom or never quote him, and
sometimes directly disavow connection with him (e.g. Auxentius of
Milan and Palladius ofRatiaria). He was not a great heresiarch in the
same sense as Marcion or Mani or Pelagius might deserve that term.
He virtually disappears from the controversy at an early stage in its
course. It is true, of course, that during the controversy accusati~ns of
'Arianism' were thrown around freely. It might be said that at the
Council of Serdica in 343 one half of the Church accused the other
half of being' Arian', while in its turn that half accused the other of
being 'Sabellian'. But these were wild unsubstantiated pieces of
propaganda. The doctrinal issues scarcely appear in a recognisable
form. capable of being attacked or defended, until in 357 the Second
Council of Sirmium, twenty-one years after the death of Arius,
produced an unmistakably Arian Creed. and even this Creed makes
no reference to him. The views of Arius were such as in a peculiar
manner to bring into unavoidable prominence a doctrinal crisis
which had gradually been gathering, without giving one school of
thought among those existing at that time complete satisfaction. He
was the spark that started the explosion. but in himself he was of no
great Significance.
xvii
 Introduction
The epithet 'Arian' then is scarcely justified to describe the
movement of thought in the fourth century which culminated in the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. But is the word 'controversy'
adequate either? That there ,:"as plenty of controversy during this
period nobody can deny. But the controversy raged round different
subjects at different times, and at some times there was almost no
controversy at all. If there was any controversy from 330 to 34', it
was a controversy about the behaviour of Athanasius in his see of
Alexandria. Eusebius of Caesarea could during those years write his
Commentary on the Psalms and (probably) Athanasius his Contra Gentes
and De Incarnatione without making any direct reference at all to the
'Arian Controversy'. There was a long period of confusion and
uncertainty from 34i to 357 when it was far from clear what the
controversy was about, if there was a controversy. The situation was
peculiarly complicated by the constant use of similar or identical
terms by different parties in different senses, without any party
realising that the others were using the same words, such as ousia, and
hypostasis, in different meanings. Tertullian had long before provided
the term persona to Latin-speaking theologians to describe that which
within the Trinity should be regarded as Three rather than One. But
Western theologians in the fourth century, in as far as there were any,
were curiously shy of using this term. Hilary seldom uses it; Ambrose
in his De Fide scarcely employs it at all. Marius Victorinus explicitly
and emphatically rejects it. Eastern, Greek-speaking theologians had
no agreed term for this concept whatever. Latin substantia was as
equivocal as Greek ousia or hypostasis. When apparent agreement was
reached at Nicaea in 325 the Creed which was the instrument of
agreement contained in one of its anathemas a confusion of terms so
disastrous as to render its eirenic function virtually worthless. Should
this state of affairs be called a controversy, or a search in a fog. a
situation when
'ignorant armies clash by night'?
Another important point to realise about the period which forms
the subject of this book is that it was not a history of the defence of an
agreed and settled orthodoxy against the assaults of open heresy. On
the subject which was primarily under discussion there was not as yet
any orthodox doctrine. The accounts of what happened which have
come down to us were mostly written by those who belonged to the
school of thought which eventually prevailed and have been deeply
xviii
Introduction
coloured by that fact. The supporters of this view wanted their
readers to think that orthodoxy on the subject under discussion had
always existed and that the period was simply a story of the defence of
that orthodoxy against heresy and error. But it ought to be obvious
that this could not possibly have been the case. If the solution to the
problem was clear from the start, why did the controversy last sixty
years? Why did it involve several successive Roman Emperors and
entail the holding of at least twenty councils? Why the polemical
treatises, depositions of bishops of all opinions, riots, antagonism of
parties, numerous creeds, division between Latin-speaking
Westerners and Greek-speaking Easterners? The defence of well-
established and well-known orthodoxy could not possibly account
for such widespread and long-lasting disturbances. Both sides -
indeed''!!l sides, for there were more than two - appealed confidently
to tradition to support them. All sides believed that they had the
authority of.Scripture in their favour. Each described the others as
unorthodox, untraditional and unScriptural. And most had some,
though only partial,justification for their claims. In fact nobody, not
even Athanasius, had a wholly unblemished record of orthodoxy in
the course of events. Some of the Easterners had indeed readmitted
Arius to communion. Almost all the Eastern theologians believed
that the Son was in some sense subordinated to the Father before the
Incarnation. But t~the Westerners had at Serdica in 343 produced
a theological statement which appeared to have the most alarmingly
Sabellian complexion, and 'Athanasius had certainly supported this
statement, though he later denied its existence. Marcellus of Ancyra
had produced a theology which was ingenious and in some respects
percipient, but which could quite properly be called Sabellian; and
for many years Athanasius and the Pope refused to disown Marcellus.
With the exception of Athanasius virtually every theologian, East
and West, accepted some form of subordinationism at least up to the
year 355; subordinationism might indeed, until the denouement of
the controversy, have been described as accepted orthodoxy. Hilary
in order to defend his Trinitarian theology plunges wildly into
Docetism. Pope. Liberius signs a doctrinal formula which was widely
believed in the West to be rankly Arian and certainly was not in
accordance with pro-Nicene orthodoxy. Ambrose supports the
Apollinarian Vitalian for some time after his unorthodoxy has been
evident to Eastern theologians, and Damasus supports the near-
Sabellian Paulinus of Antioch. This is not the story of a defence of
xix
 Introduction
orthodoxy, but of a search for orthodoxy, a search conducted by the
method of tria} and error. This is what constitutes its interest and its
importance.
It is because this manner of presenting the 'Arian Controversy' has
not hitherto been found in textbooks that this work should be
thought to have its raison d'2tre.1t is worth taking up the subject again
in spite of its treatment by able scholars in the past such as Gwatkin
and Harnack. Even the remarkably capable and full treatment
recently accorded the subject by Manlio Simonetti has not quite done
justice to this point (and how many theological students in the
English-speaking world can read Italian?). Since the time ofGwatkin
and Harnack, again, much important work upon the period has ,been
done. Schwartz has established much of the chronology of the period
more securely. H.1. Bell has published the papyrus which throws
such a lurid light on the behaviour of Athanasius in his see; though
this was published nearly sixty years ago the significance ofit has not
yet sunk in everywhere. It is astonishing to read an article in TRE on
the subject of ,Athanasius' by Martin Tetz written as recently as 1977
and find no mention of this document, so important for our
estimation of Athanasius' character. The existence of the Synod of
Antioch of 325 has now been brought to light. The Homilies of
Asterius have been published. The works ofEusebius of Ernesa have
been properly edited. A store of Arian literature hitherto unkno.wn
or little known has been made available by Turner, Gryson and
others. The philosophical background of the fourth century has been
much more effectively explored. For English-speaking students at
least the time is over-ripe for a new review of the period.
The subjects under discussion between 31B and 3B1 were not, as has
sometimes been alleged, those raised by Greek theology or
pl1ilosophy and such as could only have been raised by people
thinking in Greek terms. It was not simply a quarrel about Greek
ideas. In the fourth century there came to a head a crisis (as Simonetti
has aptly called it in the title of his book La Crisi Ariana nel Quarto
Seeolo) which was not created by either Arius or Athanasius. It was
the problem of how to reconcile two factors which were part of the
very fabric of Christianity: monotheism, and the worship of Jesus
Christ as divine. Neither of these factors is specifically connected
with Greek philosophy or thought; both arise directly from the
earliest Christian tradition. Indeed, as will, it is hoped, be shown in
this book, it was only by overcoming some tendencies in Greek
xx
Introduction
philosophy which offered too easy an answer to the problem that a
solution was reached. Greek philosophy and religion could readily
accept a monotheism which included an hierarchically graded God
and could easily accord a qualified divinity to the Son. Neither was in
the end accepted by the Church. But it would of course be absurd to
deny that discussion and dispute between 318 and 381 were
conducted largely in terms of Greek philosophy. The reason for this
was, paradoxically, because the dispute was about the interpretation
of the Bible. The theologians of the Christian Church were slowly
driven to a realization that the deepest questions which face
Christianity cannot be answered in purely biblical language, because
the questions are about the meaning of biblical language itself. In the
cour~e of this search the Church was impelled reluctantly to form
dogma. It was the first great and authentic example of the
development of doctrine. For theologians who are to-day interested
in the subject of the development of doctrine, the study of the period
from 318 to 381 should present an ideal case-history. This is another
reason why the period is of permanent interest and importance.
In order to set out adequately the history of doctrine during this
period it has been necessary to pay close attention to the sequence of
historical events. The reader will have to endure much discussion of
historical points. In this case the historical events cannot be separated
from the formation of doctrine. In fact it would be unrealistic to
present any history of doctrine without paying attention to the
historical events which took place during that formation. The result
may be a certain 'sandwich' impression left by the book; historical
narrative alternates with accounts of the doctrines of the leading
theologians. But that is inevitable. Mind is involved in history and
affected by it, and historical events are influenced by mind. The
account given in this work will attempt to do justice to both.
xxi
 PART I
The Origins

-l
 I
j

What Did Arius Teach?

I. Arius' Career up to 318

In t!:>e year 318 1 Arius, a presbyter in charge of the church and district
of ihucalis in Alexandria, publicly criticised the Christological
doctrine of his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. Arius must have
been born about 256,2 in Libya. We can be confident that Arius was
Libyan in origin, not only because Epiphanius says SO, 3 but because
Arius himself in a letter written to the Emperor Constantine, which
has not survived, claims that 'the whole people of Libya' were on his
side, 4 and because it was the Libyan bishops, especially Secundus of
Ptolemais, who supported the cause of Arius most persistently. 5
Arius is alleged to have supported the schismatic bishop Melitius of
Lycopolis at the beginning of his agitation against Peter bishop of
Alexandria. During the persecution of Diocletian, Peter had taken
refuge in flight and Melitius had taken upon himself to administer, as
well as he could, Peter's see.
against Peter's protests; and even when
Melirlus was condemned to labour in the mines at Phaeno for his
Christian convictions he had ordained both bishops and other clergy
in defiance of Peter's authority, probably maintaining that by his

I The date of the outbreak of the controversy is discussed below. pp. 129-38.
2S0 G. Bardy calculated, Recherches sur Saint Lucien d' Antioche et son ecole, 247-8,
but this may be too early. For a more recent treatment of Arius' earlier life. see M.
Simonetti La Crid Ariana nel IV Secolo, 985-6, and E. Boularand L' Heresie d' ATius et
la Foi de Nicee, 9-[7.
lPanarion 69.1, Loafs (art. 'Arianismus' in RE II (~897)7). Bardy (op. cit. 247-8),
Simonetti (op. cit. 985-6) and Kannengiesser ('Athanase et les Melitiens' in Politique
et Theologie chez Athanase dJ Alexandrie, 3.1-33).
4H. G. Opitz Urk III, No. 34. 20 (71), a fragment quoted by Constantine in his
Letter 10 Arius and llis Companions, written in 333.
5S ee H. Chadwick, 'Faith and Order at the Council bf Nicaea', HThR LIII
(1960), reprinted in History and Thought oithe Early Church XII; also J. Barnes and H.
Chadwick 'A Letter ascribed to Peter of Alexandria',

3
 The Origins
flight Peter had forfeited his ~ee. After a lull in the persecution
occasioned by Galerius' Edict of Toleration (3 I I), Maximus resumed
persecuting in his portion of the Eastern Empire, and at this point
Peter was imprisoned and finally martyred (312). Some material in
the Collection of Theodosius the Deacon throws light on this
controversy, and a confused passage in it connects Arius with
Melitius. It says that two people who wished to be regarded as
learned, Isidorus and Arius, when, after all the bishops, presbyters
and deacons of Alexandria had been martyred, Melitius came to
Alexandria, joined him and indicated to him which were the pres-
byters to whom Peter (perhaps from prison) had given authority to
visit the needy in the diocese. Whereupon Melitius, commendans eis
occasionem separavit eos et ordinavit ipse duos, unum in careere et unum in
metallo. 6 The meaning of this last sentence is unclear; oecasio in late
Latin can have a number of meanings. ranging from 'opportunity' to
'accusation'. The first three Latin words may mean 'suggesting to
them that this was an opportunity', and the rest that Melitius
separated and ordained the two, one in prison and one in the mine.
But if we identify the Arius here mentioned with our Arius, then
Melitius must have ordained him at least deacon, perhaps priest.
certainly not bishop (as Kettler in a fine article' on the documents
concerning the Melitian schism in Turner's edition of the Collec-
tion makes clear). Epiphanius says' that Melitius made some sort
of pact with Arius when the latter had been (after 318)
excommunicated by Alexander, but does not suggest that the two
had had relations with each other earlier. Sozomenus 9 says that Arius
first adhered to Melitius and then to Peter, by whom he was made
deacon, and that he was later deposed for opposing Peter's hard line
against admitting Melitians to the church, but was readmitted to the
clergy and made presbyter by Achillas (who succeeded the martyred
Peter as bishop for a very short time, 312-313), and that Alexander,
who succeeded Achillas, respected Arius (and probably, we may
surmise, put him in charge of the church at Baucalis). Ifwe attempt to
take all these statements au pied de la lettre we shall have to conclude
that Arius was made deacon three times, once by Melitius, once by
Peter, and once again by Achillas! But this would be absurd. It is not
6C, H. Turner EOMIA, Vol. 1,635--6.
7F. H. Kettler, 'Der Melitanische Streit in Agypten', 170.
epanarion 68.4.1-3 (1«).
9HE 1.25.2.
4 5
What did Arius Teach?
likely that Melitius actually ordained Arius deacon. Athanasius in
describing the origin of the involvement of the Melitians with the
Arians does not say that Arius was ordained by Melitius,'° and
Athanasius is unlikely to have omitted anything to the discredit of
Arius. In fact. the association of Arius with Melitius in the early years
of the latter's schism rests upon rather frail evidence. Arius was a
common name, and the Arius associated with Isidc5rus in meeting
Melitius may have been another person. We may, however,
confidently conclude that Arius was ordained deacon by Peter and
priest by Achillas, and was a presbyter in good standing in the diocese
of Alexandria when the dispute began.
Arius very probably had at some time studied with Lucian of
Antioch. Epiphanius says that he had done so in Nicomedia," and
Adus confirms this when, writing to Eusebius bishop of Nicomedia
in the early -stages of the affair. he addresses his correspondent as
crOA.A.OUlCluvt<rta 11A.1]9iii<; {'truly a fellow-disciple of Lucian '),12
Epiphanius alleges that Arius at Baucalis captured the allegiance of
7 00 consecrated virgins of the church, seven presbyters and twelve
deacons, and even some bishops {including Secundus ofPtolemais).'3
The Emperor Constantine in a letter violently critical of Arius, with
what might be described as the usual imperial bad taste, taunts Arius
for being worn and wasted in body and pale in complexion 14 (as he
well might be at that time), and Epiphanius tells us that when the
controversy began he was already old. ls This is all that we can glean
from the evidence about the personality and career of Adus up to the
year_3 18.
2. Arius' Own Words
But what did Arius teach, that had so explosive an effect upon his
contemporaries? As far as his own writings go, we have no more than
three letters, a few fragments of another, and what purport to be
IOAthanasius Apologia Secunda 59.1--6 (139,140) R.D. Williams, i~ a ~ec~nt
article .. Arius and"the Meletian SchisDl:', gives some further reasons for diSSOCiating
Arius of Baucalis from Melitius.
liPan. 69, 5.1-2 (156).
120pitz Urk III No. I.5 (3). For a discussion of Lucian, see below, PP·79-84·
13Pan. 69.3.2 (154).
140pitz Urk III NO.34· 73. 74 (35)·
15Pan. 6g.I and 3.
 ,
TM Origins
fairly long quotations from the Thalia, verses written in the Sotadean
metre or style to set forth his doctrines. After that we have no more
than reports of what either he or his followers are supposed to have
taught, mostly from the pen ofAthanasius ofAlexandria, his bitterest
and most prejudiced enemy, so presented that it is virtually
impossible to distinguish between the views of Arius and those of his
early supporters. We are told that Arius wrote many other works,
but no trace of them has survived, either quoted by his supporters or
by his opponents. We do not even know the names of them. We do
not know of any Homilies or Commentaries, nor of any ,separate
treatises, polemical or not. As we shall see, the heirs ofhis theological
tradition hardly ever quote him. It may be. doubted, in view of this
total dearth, whether Arius ever wrote any but the most ephemeral
works. The earliestletter of Arius is that written ilot long after 318 to
Eusebius bishop ofNicomedia, an old friend of his, complaining of
the injustice done to him in that Alexander of Alexandria has
excommunicated him for heresy,16 He spends more time presenting
or parodying his opponents' views (with which we shall be
concerned later) than giving his own. He claims as his episcopal
supporters not only his correspondent, Eusebius of Nicomedia, but
also Eusebius of Caesarea, Theodotus of Lao dicea, Paulinus (ofTyre),
Athanasius (of Anazarbus), Gregory, Aetius (ofLydda) and generally
all the bishops in the east (except Philogonius (of Antioch) and
Hellanicus and Macarius); all these believe with Arius lin ltpoultapxei
6980<; tOU u{a\) dvapxmc;.17 Arius next sets out his own doctrine more
fully:
'That the Son is not unbegotten (dytwll'tO<;) nor in any way a part of
an Unbegotten. nor derived from some (alien) substratum
(6nOKtlJ.ltvO\l t1 vor;), but that he exists by will and counsel before times
and before ages, full of truth, and grace, God, Only-begotten,
unaltering (dvaAAoi(!)'tor;). And before he was begotten. or created or
determined or established, he did not exist. For he was not unbegotten
(or unoriginated).'
He goes on to say that he is being persecuted because he teaches that
'the Son has an origin, but God is unoriginated' (dvapxoc;), and also
16The Greek text is g~ven by Opitz, U,k III. No. 1.1-3. taken from Epiphanius
Pan 6g.6.Itf, and Theodoret HE I.j. Below this he prints two different Latin texts
one of them fro~ Marius Victorinus' imaginary Arian exponent, Candidus, th;
other the text pnnted by D. de Bruyne in Revue BhrJdicl;ne 26 (1909) 93-95.
l?'That God has been existing limitlessly before the Son', op. cit. 3 (2).'
6 7
What did Arius Teach?
that 'the Son derives from non-existence' (&~ O~K 5vtmv &ativ). But
Arius ·teaches this because the Son is not a 'portion' (J!tpOC;), nor
'derived from some divine substratum' (&~ 6ltOKElJ!tvounvoc;).'8 This
dislike of envisaging the Son .as part of God is emphasised when a
little earlier in his letter Arius alleges that Philogonius, Hellanicus and
Macarius teach either that 'the Son is an exhalation (tpeuytlv, Latin
eructatio, eruptio, see Ps. 45 (44):2 (LXXp~'lpe"~wro 1'\ Kap5!a ~ou
)"6yovuya66v, 'my heart has belched forth a good Word'), or an issue
(ltpO~o),.itv, Latin, emissio, probole), or that he is 'co-unoriginated' (or
'co-unbegotten'), GUvaytvv'ltOV (with the Father).'> This doctrine
Arius clearly wishes to avoid at all costs.
The next letter consists of a Profession of Faith, to be dated about
32(j~ent by Arius and his companions to Alexander in the hope that
Alexander will recognise their orthodoxy and withdraw his
excommunication. 2o They have set out their beliefs on the points
under dispute: They profess the uniqueness of the Father, with much
use of the word 'sole' (monos), including 'sole true, sole wise, sole
good', and then,
'He who has begotten the only-begotten Son before aeonian times
(xp6voov a(oovioov), through whom also he made the aeons and.
everything, who produced him not in appearance but in truth, giving
him existence (61toc.rri)craV'ta) by his own will, unchangeable and
unalterable (lil'pE1t1'6vn; Kat dVaAAO{Cl)'tOV), a perfect creature (1CtiC1lla)
of God, but not like one of the creatures. a product (ytvvTUJ.a), but not
like one of the things produced (yey.vv~~vrov), the product of the
Father not as Valenrinus laid down an issue (npopOATtV), nor as Mani
taU'ght a consubstantial part (IltpO<; 6llooumov) of the Father. nor as
Sabellius said, dividing the Monad, a 'Sonfather' (u!oxat6pa), nor, as
Hieracas. a light lit from a light or as a lamp (spread) into two. nor as
one who existed before but was later made into a Son by begetting or
creation . . . but, as we hold, created by the will of God before times
and before aeons and having received life and being from the Father
and various' kinds of glory, since he gave him existence. alongside
himself. For when the Father gave him the inheritance of everything
he did not deprive himself of that which he possesses unoriginatedly
(ciYEVVi)'t~) in himself; for he is the source of all. Consequendy there
are three existing realities (67toO"'taGE1<;). And God is the cause of them
"Ibid. 4, 5 ('-3)·
"Ibid, 3 (.).
2olbid. No.6, 2-5 (12-13), to be found in Athanasius De Synodis 16 and
Epiphanius Pdn 69.,.
 The Origins
all for he is supremely sole (~OVOOtaTO,) without beginning (/!vapxo,),
and the Son, having been begotten timelessly by the Father and
created and established before aeons, did not exist before he was
begotten. but, begotten~ timelessly before everything, alon~ has been
given existence by the Fadler; for he is not eternal nor co-eternal
nor co-unoriginated. with the Father, nor does he possess being
parallel with (litJ,a) the Father, as some say who rely on the argument
from relations21 thereby introducing twO unoriginated ultimate
principles, but as the Monad (~ova,) and origin (apxi)) of everything,
so God is prior to everything. Therefore he is also prior to the Son, as
we have learnt from you (Le. Alexander) when you were preaching in
the midst of the church.'
The Father, Arius continues, is the Son's origin (apx1\) from which he
derives his glories and life everlasting, and the Father is the Son's God.
Arius dislikes any statement that the Son is. 'from' (tK) the Father,
because it implies that the Son is 'a consubstantial part of him and like
an issue', and this means that God is composite and divisible and
mutable and even corporea\. It is to be noted that Arius has no
objection to saying that the Son is beyond change and alteration nor
that he is begotten, as long as this is taken to be equivalent to saying
that he is created and established (Prov. 8:22 LXX ahyays lurks in the
background when these words are used), and he thinks that to say
that the Son is consubstantial with the Father is to regard him as, so to
speak, a broken-off bit of God. It is noteworthy too that·here Arius
deliberately refrains from describing the Son as 'deriving from non-
existence' .22
The third letter of Arius is a short one. sent to the Emperor
Constantine by Arius and Euzoius who are in exile and are in this
letter pleading for a return from exile and a re-admission to the
Church (which they presumably imagine that Constantine can
effect).23 It contains an entirely colourless creed which has been
carefully divested of any controversial wording, and a statement that
they 'receive truly Father, Son and Holy Spirit' as the Church and the
Scriptures teach, and they suggest that all 'discussions and
unnecessary arguinents arising from discussions 'should be put aside
2100'i tive'i )..tyOUO'I 'til np6'i 't1 i.e. that a Father necessarily implies a Son.
22See R. P. C. Hanson 'Who taught E~ 06K 6V't(l)v?' in Arianism, ed. Robert
Gregg.
2lOpitz Urk III No. 30 (64), from Socrates, HE 1.26.2 and Sozomenus 11.27.6. It is
to be p~aced at the end of 327.
8 9
What did Arius Teach?
(n&p'UP'l!l<VWV tOiv ~'lT'lI1(\TWV Kat TOiv tK TOiv ~'lT'll1tiTOlv
n&p""'OA.oyIOlV). It is purely a plea for restoration, without
theological significance. We cao reconstruct some of the content of a
fourth letter of Arius which has not survived but which was quoted
In a letter whIch Constantine wrote to Arius in the year 333. 24 In this
letter. the Emperor refers to a letter, now lost, which Arius had
recently written (probably to the Emperor) pleading his recent
rehabilitation by a Council, and asking that he shall be allowed to
remain in the status given him on that occasion (rehabilitation but not
acceptance by the see of Alexandria), and may be permitted to
celebrate the ,eucharist. 25 Constantine quotes Acius as saying, 'What
then am I to do if nobody thinks me suitable for acceptance?'!" to
which Constantine only answers with blustering abuse. Shortly
afterwards Constantine begins quoting fragments of a Rule of Faith
which Arius had included in the last letter·: 'One God ... there is an
unoriginated and unending word of his substance' (ftva 9&ov ... Tii,
OI)crla, auTOU avapxov Kat aTtA&UT'lTOV A.6yov &lVal). and 'the alien
nature of the body for the sake of implementation of the divine
activities' (t1)v 'rou (JcOJ.l.a'to~ ~Ev(av 1tp6~ ob,:ov,olliav troY 9&trov
tv&pY&lOiv) and 'the spirit of eternity was in the superior Word' (TO
nv&u~a Tii, aio1<Yt'lto, tnq, un&ptxovn A.oyep y&y&vijcr9a,), and 'an alien
being' (unom:amv ~tV'lV).27 Later the Emperor quoted Arius as
saying 'No! I do not wish God to be involved with the suffering of
~nsul'" (linay&. ou POUA.0l1al TOV 9&ov tyoo 6PP&OlV nti9&l tvtx&cr9al), and
whatever you take away from him, in that respect you make him
less';28 and later still, 'Christ suffered for us ... yes, but there is a
danger that we may appear to lessen him in some way',2-
These fragments of remarks by Acius, torn out of their context are
not at first easy to reconcile with what we know of Arius' doct~ine
from other sources, even if we assume that Constantine has not
240p~tz Urk III No. 34 (69-75); it can be found in Athanasius' De Decretis (Opitz
Athanaslus' Werke (11.1), 40.1-24 (38-40» and in Ge1asius HE 111.19.1. References
here to the version in Urk III.
"Ibid. 5 (69): 9 (70).
26 1 I (70).
27 13 , 14 (70, 71).
"29 (73).
29 32 (73). In those quotations where I have placed dots these are not my omissions
but t~ose of Constantine. I have not included passages which are apparently
parodies of !'-rius' ~a~g. by Con~tantine, but have confined myself to those
. passages which OPitz Identified as direct quotations. .
 The O,igins
distorted them in reproducing them. Certainly if Arius described the
Son as 'unoriginated and unending Word of his substance' this
represents a complete volte face from his other teaching; but it is more
likely that these words of Arius refer to the Logos, not to the Son,
because, as we shall see, Arius distinguished these two and believed in
a Logos who was not a separate hypostasis from the Father, and to
whom these terms could be applied; and the same could well apply to
the 'spirit of eternity which was in the superior Word.' Then 'alien
being' (hypostasis) might have been used by Arius as a description of
the SonJor we have already seen him using hypostasis in this sense
when in his letter to Alexander he said that there are three
hypostases,30 and he could have emphasised starkly the difference of
the Son's hypostasis fronl that of the Father. The remaining
quotations are particularly interesting as preserving for us some of
Arius' rare utterances about the Incarnation. They must all be taken
as warnings of the consequences of describing the Son as
consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father; you are bound, if you do
so, Arius thinks, to compromise God by exposing him to suffering in
the Incarnation. The last quotation must refer to God the Father, not
to the Son; so at least Constantine takes it when he replies to it in his
letter. These fragmentary remarks on the Incarnation are not
inconsistent (as we shall see) with the doctrine of early and later
followers of his theological tradition on the same subject.
When we attempt to reconstruct what appear to be quotations
from the Thalia, Arius' only known theological work, we meet the
difficulty that they are all quotations made or reproduced by
Athanasius, a fierce opponent of Arius who certainly would not have
stopped short of misrepresenting what he said. Some control in this
difficulty is supplied by the undoubted fact that the Thalia was
w.ritten in verse, and therefore that where we can find a metrical
pattern in words attributed to Arius we can be sure that they are
original. On the other hand, it is a matter of considerable uncertainty
to determine what metre Arius used in this work. Athanasius says
that he wrote in Sotadean verse and reproaches him for using so
vulgar and improper a metre for his work (0,. can. A,. 1.2; De Syn.
IS; cf Philostorgius 11.2 'songs for sailors and mill-workers'). No
doubt Arius chose this. form in order to make his propaganda (for
propaganda the Thalia certainly was) more popular and more
30See above, P.7.
10
What did A,ius Teach?
effective. Sodates had written verses of a humorous. sarcastic and
sometimes obscene type. It is not always possible to detect Strictly
Sotadean metre in passages alleged to be from the Thalia which
nevertheless seem to be metrical. The matter has been discussed with
great learning by G. Bardy, who attempted to reconstruct the text of
the remaining fragments of the Thalia in his work on Lucian of
Antioch, and more recently by Stead,31 and by West. 32
Kannengiesser has recently introduced a further complication by
suggesting that what has hitherto been regarded as the second of the
extensive quotations of the· Thalia is not from the hand of Arius but
comes from a follower of his theological tradition writing almost
twenty years after his death, possibly Aetius himself'3 The two
passages in Athanasius usually relied upon to provide us with direct
quotations from the Thalia are Orationes con. Arianos 1.5--6 and· De
Synodis IS. Kannengiesser argues that chapters I and 2 of Orationes
con, A,ianos I is a re-working made about 3 S4 of the original text of
the work produced 339/40, and into this re-working Athanasius
introduced quotations from Asterius' Syntagmation, which (on
Kannengiesser's view) had not been written when Athanasius first
wrote Orationes con. Arianos I. The passage in De Synodis, however, to
which Athanasius has given in his text the title 'The Blasphemies of
Arius', is the unaltered reproduction of a re-statement of the
arguments to be found in Arius' Thalia by an admirer of his in the
350S, and cannot be taken as the ipsissima verba of Arius. "
This theory is still sub iudice and so far has not been received with
unanimous agreement by other scholars.34 One point certainly
K-annengiesser has made which must be conceded. Whereas the
quotations from the Thalia in O,ationes can. A,ianos I.5~ are full of
derogatory and hostile editorial corrections clearly emanating from
A,.thanasius, the quotations in De Synodis IS, on"ce we except the title,
are linked by editorial remarks that are not at all disparaging but are
on the contrary favourable. In other words, we must conclude that
somebody other than Athanasius put together these extracts. But one
3t'The Thalia of Arius and the Testimony of Athanasius',}ThS, (29 NS), Part I
April 1978, 20-52. The earlier reconstruction is in Bardy, Lucien d'Antioche,
35 2 -378.
32M. L. West, 'The Metre of Arius' Thalia',}ThS 33, Part I, April 1982,98-105.
3JSee Colloquy 4,12-19. and Athanase d'Alexandrie, caps. 182.
34See the criticism.levied against it by Kopecek and Stead in Colloquy 4, 51-68
and 73-'76, and by Williams in Arianism 1-36.
II
 The Origins
important observation must I)'e made, that neither Stead nor West
found any difficulty in grouping the quotations in De Synodis 15 into
metrical form; indeed West is able to detect in this passage a regular
metre paralleled in other literature of the period, allowing for ~ little
editing of the text mostly consisting of bracketing words put m for
explanatory purposes by the compiler. Now, we can hardly Imagme
that the anonymous. compiler of ' The Blasphemies of Arius' himself
threw the quotations into metrical form; the verse must be that of
Arius himself. What we are faced with in these two passages,
therefore, are two short compilations from the Thalia, one mad~ by
Athanasius, the other made by somebody else, reproduced and given
its title by Athanasius. As the compiler of the second was, unlike
Athanasius, favourable to Arius, it is likely that he has repro'tluced
Arius' words more faithfully than Athanasius has. To say that these
are not the ipsissima verba of Arius in contrast to the quotations made
directly by Athanasius, which are, is to fly in the face of probability.
But in fact if parts of the first passage and all the second are readIly
reducible to metric form, as they 'apparently are, we can reproduce
them, even though they come from different compilers, with some
fair confidence. We shall therefore print here first a short passage
which looks like direct quotations and then a paraphrase of
Athanasius' account of Arius' teaching, both from Orat;ones con.
Arianos 1.5--{), and then a translation of Stead's text of the extracts
from the Thalia given in De Synodis 15, taking this to be a reasonably
reliable account of the surviving fragments of Arius' only known
theological work. 3 '
Orationes contra Arianos 1.5-()36
'According to the fu.ith of the chosen ones of God, the knowledgeable
children of God, the holy orthodox ones who have received the Spirit
of the holy God, I have learnt these things from those who share
wisdom, smart' people, taug~t of God and wise in every way; in the
steps of these I have come, '1 going along with them, I, the well-
35Text of Orationes con. Arianos I given in William Bright, Orationes ad Ariatlos
pages 5 and 6; text of De Synodis from Stead op. cit. pp. 218-50, We can dismiss the
view ofLoofs (,Arianism us', 13) that the Thalia consisted of prose mixed with Verse.
The notion ofP: Nautin that our quotations of Arius'letters have been interpolated
by pro-Nicene writers has found no agreement from anybody else and is not
considered here. See Simonetti, Studi 88-109 and Boularand, L'Hh-esie 45 n 18.
36Direct translation is in inverted commas. The rest is a close paraphrase of the
Greek of Athanasius, with occasional.Greek words quoted.
12
What did Arius Teach?
known. who have suffered much for the glory of God, who have
learnt wisdom from God, and I know (inside) knowledge.'
God was not always Father, but there was a time when he was
solitary. The Son did not always exist. Everything has corne into
being from non-existence (t~ 01)" oVtIDV), and everything that exists is
created and produced (nol~llata), and the Word of God himself came
into existence from non-existence, and there was a time when he did
not exist, and he did not exist before he came into existence but even
he had a beginning of being created. God was solitary and the Word
and Wisdom did not yet exist. Next, when he wanted to make us, he
then made a certain Person (nva) and called him Word and Spirit and
Son so that he could make us. There are therefore two Wisdoms, one
God's own who has existed eternally with God, the other the Son
who was brought into existence in this Wisdom, and only because he
shared (IlBttXOvta) in this one was he called Wisdom and Word.'
'Wisdom existed in Wisdom by the will of the wise God.' So there is
another Word in God besides the Son, and it is because the Son shares
this that, once again, he is called by grace (or courtesy, Xaplv) Word
and Son.
There are many powers (SUVUIlBIC;). One of them is that naturally
proper to God and eternal, but Christ is not the true power of God,
but he is one of those who are called powers, among which are also
the locust and the caterpillar OOel2:25), and there are many powers
like the Son, and David says in the Psalm concerning them 'the Lord
of powers' (Ps. 24 (23): 10). The Word is, like everybody, changeable
"in his nature and he remains good in his own freewill as long as he
chooses, but when he wishes he too can be changed as we can, for his
nature is alterable.
'God foreknew that he would be good (KUA6v) and in anticipation
(7tPOAaP&v) granted this glory to him which at the Incarnation
(iiv8pm7toc;) he possessed also because of his virtue thereafter, so that
God made him to be the sort of person that he was (i.e. possessing
glory) because of his actions which God foreknew. The Word is not
true God (aA'l81.V6r; 8s6t;) , eveD ifhe is called God, but he is not true,
but God by being sharer of grace,just as all other people are (sharers),
so he is called ·God only in name.'
As everything else is alien to and unlike God in substance (Kat'
ouaiav), so 'the Word is different from and in all points unlike the
Father's substance and individual. character' (<UA.6tPIOC; J1&v "ai
13
 The Origins
av6~olO, Kata 1tavta tii,')tOil 1tatp6, ouala, Kat 1610t'ltO,). He is
properly 'of those who come into existence and are created'
(,,£vviltOlV Kat lC't1.O'I.UI'tCOv). And 'the Father remains invisible
(<i6pato,) to the Son, and the Word cannot see or know his own
Father completely and accurately.' The Son cannot comprehend
(Kata).a~eiv) the Father; the Son does not know his own substance
(ouaiav). The substances (ouaint) of the Father, the Son and the Spirit
are divided, alienated and separated in nature and they differ from
and do not participate in each other: 'They are .unlike (av6~OtOt)
altogetherin their substance (ooaint) and levels of glory infinitely.' As
far as likeness, glory and substance (or ousia) are concerned, the Logos
is totally different from both the Father and the Holy, Spirit.
De Synodis 15
'God himself, therefore, in himself remains mysterious (appr!,to<;). He
alone has no equal, none like him, none of t::qual glory. We call him
unoriginated (6:ytV[V],fl'tOV) in contrast to him who is originated
(ytVVTl't'ov) by nature ... we praise him as without beginning in
contrast to him who has a beginning. we worship him as eternal in
contrast to him who came into existence in times (XP6vot<;). He who
was without beginning made the Son a beginning of all thi:n.gs which
are produced (YEVvtl'tCl)v). and he made him into a Son for himself;
begetting (teKVon01~"a,) him. He (the Son) has nothing peculiar to
(iOtov) God according to the reality of that which is peculiarly his
(KaO' tmoO'tac:nv t8t6't11'tO~), and he is not equal ... far less is he
consubstantial (6IJ.oo6(Jto~) to him (God). And God is wise because he
is the Teacher of Wisdom. As a sufficient proof that God is invisible
(a6pa'to~) to all, that he is invisible to the Son's people and to the Son
himself . .. I will declare roundly, how the invisible can be visible to
the Son: by the power in which God can see, the Son is able to see . ..
the Father according to his individual . .. capacities (toiot~ ... lle'tpO\~),
as is determined (OtJ,l1<;). Certainly there is a Trinity ... their
individual realities (61tocrtaO'Et~) do not mix with each other, and they
possess glories ofdifferent levels (o6~al~ o{,x 6IJ.oiat~). The sole glory is
of the Sole (J.1ia 'tfj~ J.1ia~), infinitely more splendid in his glories. The
Father is in his substance (o{,criav) alien (~tvo;) from the Son because
he remains without beginning. Understand therefore that the Monad
(~ova,) existed, but the Dyad (500,) did not exist before it attained
'existence. So the Son having not existed attained existence by the
Father's will. He is only-begotten God and he is different from any
others. Wisdom became Wisdom by the will of the wise God, and so
he is apprehended in an uncountable number of aspects (e1tlvoiat~).
He is God's Glory and Truth, and Image and Word. Understand too
14
What did Arius Teach?
that he is apprehended as Reflection (ana6ya,,~a) also and Light. The
Greater One is· able to beget (YEvvdv) someone equal to the Son, but
not someone more important or more powerful or greater. It is by the
will of God that the Son has his stature and character (~llKO~ 'Kai i)O'o~)
when and whence and from what time he is from God. For he is the
Mighty God [i.e. the Son, Isa 9: I S1and in some degree (tK fltpou,)
worships (uJ.1vei) the Greater. To summarize, God is mysterious
(apPlltO;) to the Son, for he is to him that which he is, i.e. ineffable
(aA-eno;), so that none of the things spoken ... [text is corrupt for
some words] for it is impossible for him to trace out in the case,ofthe
Father what he is in himself. Indeed the Son himself does not know his
own substance (ousia), for though he is the Son he is really so by the
will of the Father. For what sense does it make that he who is from the
Father should [text corrupt] in comprehending his own begetter? For
it is clear that that which has a beginning could not possibly
comprehend or grasp the nature (o~ 6crttv).ofhim who is without a
beginning. '
(And Stead adds two more rather less securely established lines),
'They are altogether infinitely dissimilar (aV0J.10l0t) from each other
in their levels of glory' (tai, 66~at,). 'He (God) is set apart
(3tl1PUIlEVO;) in himself and in every way without a participator'
(i\~&tOXo,).
If we accept that the second extract is reasonably accurate, it is not
difficu.lt to perceive that the first extract is a reliable guide also to some
of the content of the Thalia. In this last certainly for most of the time
A thanasius is paraphrasing rather than quoting directly, and in places
may be suspected of pressing the words maliciously rather further
than Arius intended. But the resemblance of doctrine between the
two passages is unmistakable. It has indeed been suggested that we
should distinguish between what Arius actually taught and what the
disciples of Lucian who were his contemporaries taught. But this
seems to me a peculiarly futile trail to follow. In the whole range of
Greek Patristic literature, only one person actually describes himself
as a disciple of Lucian, and that person is Arius (see 'fellow-clisciple of
Lucian', above, p. 5)). To suggest that his doctrine is different
from that of other avowed followers of Lucian (about whose
teaching we know almost nothing) is, in the vivid phrase of Martin
Luther, for one man to hold a pail while the other tries to milk a he-
goat.
IS
 The Origins
3. The Ac~l>unt of one Contemporary
Before we finish our survey of Arius' own words, it is worth
considering the account given of what Arius taught by one
contemporary who was closely involved in the theological dispute,
and that is Alexmder, archbishop of Alexandria. Alexander is, of
course, a biassed witness because he strongly dislikes Arius' doctrine
and regards it as heretical. and allowance must be made for this in
weighing his evidence. But he is our earliest witness, and his evide~ce
must be regarded as important. ,especially as it largely agrees WIth
what we have already reviewed,lof the teaching of Arius himself.
The evidence comes almost wholly from two letters written by
Alexander. The first letter was written about 319 and is an Encyclical
addressed to all bishops, explaining why Alexander has thought fit to
excommunicate Arius. 37
'God was not always Father, but there was a time when God was not
Father. There was not always a Logos of God, but he derived from
non-existence (e~ O\~nc 6VtIDV ytyovev). For God who existed made him
when he did not exist out of non-existence. There was a time when he
did not exist (flv note 6te Ot))e Tiv). For the Son is a creature (itiO'J.1u)
and a product (Ttoirll.lU). And he is-not like in substance (oJ.10WC; KUt'
oucriuv) to the Father nor is he the Father's true Logos nor the Logos by
nature, nor his true Wisdom, but he is one of the products
(1to~1lJ.16:trov) and of the things which came into existence (yevTjtrov),
and is only called Logos and Wisdom loosely (Ka,axp~"'tK&,); he
came into existence himself through the proper Logos of God and the
Wisdom which was in God, in which God also made everything and
him (the Son) with it. Therefore he is mutable (tpem:6t;) and alterable
(u)..)..o{rotOC;) in his nature as are all rational beings. The Logos is alien
and different and separated from the substance (ousia) of God, and the
Father is invisible to the Son. For the Logos does not know the Father
fully arid exactly, 'nor can he fully see him. Indeed, the Son does not
know the nature (we; EO'n) of his own substance (ousia). For he was
made for our sake, in order that God should create us through him as
through an instrument. And he would not have come into existence if
the Father had not wished to make him.'38
And somebody asked Arius and his supporters if the Son was mutable
like the devil and they agreed that he was 'for because he has come
370pitz, Urk III No. 4b (6-n), reproduced from Socrates HE I, 6 and Gelasius
HE 11.3.1-21.
"Op. cil. 7-<) (7. 8).
16
What did Arius Teach?
into existence and is created (rEV~<Oc; Kat n",<oc; ,;m'pJ(rov) he is of a
mutable nature.'39 And a little later Alexander says that the Arians
declare that the Son is 'unlike in substance' (UV0I'0tOC; 'tij oll"i~) to the
Father. 40
The next letter of Alexander must have been written in die year
324. and is addressed to Alexander bishop of Thessalonica. 41 In this
Alexander accuses the supporters of Arius of saying 'there was a time
when the Son of God did not exist and he did not exist before and
came into existence later; even when he came into existence he was
then such as is every man: because they say that God made
everything out of non-existence (E~ oIlKllv<rov)42 They say, too, that
we are able to become the SOns of God as he is, for it is written, 'I have
begotten sons and I have exalted them' (Isa 1:2 LXX). But when the
rest of the text is brought against them, 'and they have rebelled
against me'. on the grounds that this could not apply to Christ. who
was of an immutable nature, then they answer that God foresaw that
Christ would not rebel against him, and so chose him above all
others. A,nd to show that Christ was chosen for his foreseen moral
qualities (and was not Son by nature). they quote Psalm 45 (44):8
'thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore has God,
thy God, anointed thee with the oil of gladness beyond thy
companions', and Hebrew I :9. where this verse is applied to Christ. 43
Later still he says that three Syrian bishops (who are in fact Eusebius
of Caesarea, Paulinus of Tyre and Patrophilus of Scythopolis) have
supported these views. alleging Christ's human infirmities (as a proof
of his divine inferiority).44 and a little later Alexander repudiates
with ip.dignation the criticism of his views that he is teaching two
unoriginated principles (urevv~<a)45
39 10(8).
4°13 (9).
410pitz, u.rk III No. 14 (19-29); from Theodoret HE 1.4.1. It is nOw widely
agreed that thIS letter was sent to Alexander ofThessalonica and not to Alexander of
Byzant!um .(as Theodoret says), for this latter had not yet been made bishop of
Byzantium In )24. In fact, as the letter itself shows, it is intended for a wider circle
than merely the bishop of Thessalonica.
420p. cit. 10 (21).
43 10-12 (21).
44 37 , 38 (25).
45 44 • 4? (26). At Urk III, No. 15 (29-3 I) Opitz prints the Syriac text, with a Greek
retroversion by Schwartz, of the Encyclical letter to all bishops from Alexander, to
be da~ed 324. The references to the doctrine of Arius and his companions in this are
so bnef and so much of a travesty that we cannot include them in our survey.
 The Origins

These pieces of evidence are as near as we can attain to

reconstructing the original words of Arius. But if we examine the
views of his early supporters we shall be able to learn more about the
nature of his theology.
2

The Early Supporters of Arius

J. Athanasius' 'Arians'

We have already suggested that in only one or two places can we be

sure that Athanasius is supplying us with the exact words of Arius. To
this point must be added the observation that when Athanasius first
began writing against the views of Arius, at the end of the fourth
decade of the fourth century (Orationes con. Arianos 339/40), Arius
had already been dead a few years (ob. 336), and a body of opinion
consciously supporting his views and extending his arguments had
been in existence for some time. Indeed, as we have seen, Alexander
of Alexandria writes as if such a body existed already only a very few
years after the outbreak of the dispute.' If .therefore we here
reproduce what Athanasius alleges Arius to have taught, we must
realize that it will also include much of what· his early supporters
taught rather than the exact teaching of Arius himself. For most of
Athanasius' polemic the views of Arius and of his early supporters are
identical. 'Arius' is virtually interchangeable with 'the Arians' , (and a
variety of abusive names whereby he distinguishes them). But it is
easy to see that the two cannot have been very different. What we
have already seen of Arius' own teaching compared with what
Athanasius tells us is enough to establish that Arius' early disciples
enlarged and developed rather than altered his doctrine.
A convenient way of summarizing this school of thought has been
provided by Lorentz, who in his Arius Iudaizans?2 divides their
1 And this is an additional reason for placing the date of the outbreak early rather
than late. Had the affair only blown up in 323. as some (e.g. Telfer) have argued,
how can we account for the existence of this body of opinion?
2 A useful book with a silly title: so few people to-day read Latin that a Latin title is
unilluminating; a title with a question-mark throws an air of vagueness round the
book; and the book is in fact little occupied with arguing that Arius' doctrine
derives from Judaism in any form. The summary of Arian doctrine is to be found on
pages 37-49. Lorentz's sources are Or. con. Ar. I 5--6, Letter to the Bishops of Egypt 12,

19
 The Origins
doctrine into nine heads. We will take the liberty of enlarging or
c,?mmenting on Lorentz's summary. The nine heads are as follows: 3
(i) Cod was not always Father, he was once in a situation in which he was
simply Cod and not Father. The incomparability and majestic
solitariness of God was a central point of this theology.
(ii) The Logos or. Son is a creature. Cod made him t~ OOIC/)vrOJV (out of
non-existence). He therefore cannot be related by nature or
substance (ousia) to God who is the Unoriginated, the Eternal
(in the past as well·as in the future). Arius modified this by
saying that the Son was 'oot as one of the creatures'; that is to
say that he was a creature different from all other creatures.
Athanasius explicitly says4 that the Arians taught this from
the beginning.
(iii) There are two Logoi and two Wisdoms (Sophiae), and several
powers (8uvaI'SI,) of Cod. Christians had, of course, long been
accustomed to interpret the figure ofWisdom in the Wisdom
literature of the Old Testament as a reference to the pre-
existent Christ. Arius distinguished between an original
Reason (Logos) or Wisdom immanent from eternity in the
Godhead and the Son who was not immanent in the
Godhead but created, and who could only be given- these
titles loosely or inexactly. The odd reference to the 'locust
and the caterpillar', which we have already encountered (see
above, p. 13) arises apparently not directly from Arius but
from Asterius who observed that these insects were at Joel
2:25 in the LXX called 'my great power' (1\ Mva"i, ,,00 1\
,,'relA.y], R.V. 'my great army'), and probably argued from
this that there were several 'powers' of God, of which the Son
was the greatest; but he did not teach (as his opponents
maliciously alleged) that the Son was no greater than the
locust or caterpillar. 5
De Deuel 6, 1-2 and De Syn 15. It will be seen that this includes a good deal more
than what we have identified as Arius' own words.
lLorentz's points are placed in italics.
·Or. (on. Ar. 1I.19.
sFor Asterius. see below PP.32-41. Notice that Athanasius in his purported
quotation of Arius' Tllalia in Or. £on. Ar. 1.5-6 does not hesitate to introduce this
piece of exposition from Asterius.
20
The Early Supporters of Arius
(iv) The Son is variable by nature, but remains stable by the gift of Cod.
The startling statement of Arius' disciples alleged by
Alexander, 6 that the Son was as capable of moral change as
the devil, was not characteristic of Arius (or originates from
misunderstanding or malice on the part of Alexander),
because Arius' doctrine was that the Son in fact could not sin
because God had granted this character to him in view of his
foreseen merits. It should be noted that we have no reason to
conclude that these 'merits' were confined to the Son's
behaviour during the Incarnation; they apply to his pre-
exis~entlife also. This is a very curious doctrine, more
ingenious than convincing~ it implies that God foresaw that
the Son was going to be good, and so exempted him from
evil in advance, i.e. deprived him of the possibility of earning
merit! This argument about 'foreseen merits' was destined (as
Newman observed in his Essay in the Development of Christian
Doctrine) to playa strange part much later in Mariological
doctrine. But at least it meant that Christ's adoption as Son
by the Father was different from ours. We were not made
sinless. 7 'As he was foreknown to be destined to be of such a
character, he proleptically (1tpoA.a,,~!tv1J) and along with his
coming into existence receives both the name (Son) and the
glory of the name.'·
(v) The Logos is alien from the divine Being and distinct; he is not true
Cod because he has come into existence. Arins does not fight shy
(as the later Neo-Arians tended to) of speaking of the Father
begetting the Son. But for him begetting and creation were
identical, and both always meant dependence. 9 His school of
thought believed that their opponents taught a physical
6See above, pp. 16-17.
7For a discussion of this point. see Lorentz op. dt. 122-127. and Gregg and Groh
Early Arianism. 50-60. 84. The Arians, the latter say (84). always conceived of the
terms 'Father' and 'Son' in empirical rather than theoretical terms, and they instance
the statement in Athanasius that Arian supporters would run into the market place
and ask the first matronly woman whom they met whether she had a son before she
gave birth (Or. con. Ar. 1.22). Gregg and Groh (op. cit. 112/113), in opposition to
Stead, c;mnot believe that either Athanasius or Alexander is misrepresenting his
opponencs on this point.
8 Athanasius (describing Arian doctrine) De Deuel 6.5(6).
9Gregg and Groh. Early Arianism, bring this out, pp. 84-87. Against Boularand.
L'Heresie d'A,ius 122, it must be said that in Arius' day this was not a particularly
'audacious' doctrine. .
21
 The Origins
begetting of the Son, and they insisted on the other side that
the Son was given existence from the Father's wIll. On the
subject of when the Son was produced, Arius, as his words
already quoted suggest, was confused. He and his followers
insist again,and again that the Son was produce~ before tImes
and ages"yet they hold onto the conviction that there was a
time wheh the Son did not exist, and again there was another
time when he was in existence. Athanasius does not fail to
point out this apparent inconsistency.l0 Perhaps they took
. the Platonic view that time only existed when the heavenly
bodies, by which time is measured, were created, so that the
Son, who was at some point brought into existence, but
before the heavenly bodies, could be said in a sense to be
'before times',l1
(vi) The Son's knowledge of God is imperfect. The Son can only know
or see the Father, because he has come into existence (is
y6V1]tO<;) and created things cannot fully know their creator.
This is an important point, because it is one of those whIch
distinguishes early followers of Arius (and at all times
Western Arians) from the later Neo-Arians'"
(vii) The Son's knowledge of himself is limited. This argument too
distinguishes the earlier from the later Arians.
(viii) Anthropocentric Cosmology: the Son has been createdfor our sakes,
as an instrument for creating us. As we have seen above (p. 14)
the Monad turned himself into a Dyad. To say that this
doctrine, means, as Boularand does, 'nous voila en plein
platonisme'13 is not really fair because ever since the work of
Justin Martyr Christian theologians had tended to use the
identification of the pre-existent Son with some similar
concept in contemporary Middle Platonism as a convenient
lOE.g. 0,. con. Ar. I.; cf. Simonetti Studi SuII' Arianesimo, 91~ 114-IS.
"But neither Athanasius nor his opponents ever advert to thiS argument. The
subject is well dealt with in Person, Mode of Decision Making, 22-23·
12But it is not sufficient to say that the Son's knowledge of the Father IS
proportionate to the incarnate Word's advance in wisdom and. knowledge (Luk.e
2:S2) as Gregg and Grob suggest (op. cit. 61--62). We have no nght .to confine thlS
limitation of knowledge to the incarnate Son. In fact, the Arians argued fro~ the
incarnate Son's obvious imperfections to his limitations even in the pre-exIstent
state.
llOp. cit. i 7s.
22
The Early Supporters of Arius
philosophical device. Arius and his followers merely
intensified and sharpened an existing tendency, as they did in
several other points. Arius had a habit of pushing things to
their logical limits, irrespective of the consequences.
(ix) A Trinity of dissimilar hypostases exists: the .three existing
realities are unlike in their substances (ousia). The union
which makes them a Trinity is a purely moral one,14 a unity
of will and disposition. Whether Arius actually said that the
hypostases are anomoiai (unlike) can be disputed, because the
words, allegedly from the Thalia, are attributed to him in
Orationes can Arianos 1.5, 6 where Athanasius may be
inserting his own conclusions into a paraphrase of Arius,15
and the line in Stead's reconstruction at De Synodis IS is not
certain. Later Arians tended to avoid this epithet which was
remorselessly pinned on them by their opponents.
To this analysis of the doctrine of Arius and his early supporters
one or two additions should be made. We have already seen that
Arius taught that the Logos manifested himself in various. epinoiai
('aspects', see above, p. 14). This was a term which Arius certainly
borrowed from Origen; 16 they were 'structures of knowledge'
(Lorentz), which Origen distinguished into two categories, some
belonging to the Logos in himself and in his relation to God, and some
simplY to his relation to human beings. Arius placed all the epinoiai in
the Sl!co\ld fategory, and in particular included in this class the
concept 'Logos' and Wisdom. This is why he taught that the Son can
only be called 'Word' or 'Wisdom' loosely or metaphorically or in a
secondary sense (KUtUXP'lO"'tt1COO<;). It means, says Lorentz, 17 that Arius
attributes eternal. wisdom and reason to God, but not to the creation.
The epinoiai were the same as the 'levels of glory' (doxai) to which
Arius alludes more than once. They included, as well as Logos and
Wisdom, spirit, power (dynamis), truth, and image (eikon), and even
14Athanasius Or. con. Ar. III.lo.
. 15Those who take a more conventional view of Arianism, such as Klein,
Constantius II und die Christliche Kitche, 17-19, and Boularand, L' Heresie d' Arius 76
(and one might add Loofs 'Arianismus' 10) insist that he did, and they have a strong
case, though not, I think. a certain one.
16Loremz, op. cit. 81-85, has an informative note on these epinoiai in Origen and
Arius. Others had used epinoia since Origen, e.g. The Letter of Hymenaeus; cf. R.
Williams, 'The Logic of Arius' 78--'79.
170p. cit. 84.
23
 The Origins
Son (u!6S) or 'only begotten God'.'· Arius only once mentions the
Holy Spirit expressly, in J;he fragment of the letter quoted by
Constantine ('the Spirit of eternity was in the superior Word', see
P.9 above), and. that in SO obscure a way as to give us little
information except that he did recognize the Holy Spirit. But as he
certainly recognized three hypostases we could have inferred this
anyway. His early supporters pointed to the descent of the Spirit on
Christ at his 'li'~ptism as a sign of the Son's limitations and
inferiority.'9 Speculation can be indulged about what Arius'
doctrine of the Spirit would be if we knew it,2° but this is a futile
exercise:!t is enough to say that as he rigorously subordinated the Son
to the Father so no doubt he subordinated the Holy Spirit to the Son.
Certainly his disciples, of every colour and period, did so.
The part of Arius' doctrine which most shocked and disturbed his
contemporaries was his statement that the Father made the Son 'out
of non-existence' (t~ O~K llvtmv). It is signifIcant that Arius includes
this tenet in his letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, hut in his letter to
Alexander of Alexandria, written later, the disturbing doctrine does
not appear. No doubt the bishop of Nicomedia had warned him of
how unnecessarily alarming it was. It does not in fact, at least as stated
in this form, figure at all prominently in general Arian thought, and
later Arianism deliberately dropped it.2l Scholars have usually been
completely at a loss to ac~ount for its ancestry. and those few who
suggest that Arius derived it from one or another of the Middle
Platonist philosophies have not explained that any philosopher who
appears to derive some ultimate reality from non-existence in fact
assumes that the creation 'from nothing' took place from already
existing formless matter. It is likely that Arius, with his usual ruthless
logic, decided that as God had created everything out of nothing (a
doctrine which was well established by his day),22 and as the Son was
created, so the Son must have been created out of nothing.
It is interesting to note that Arius had himself picked out the word
'consubstantial' before the Council of Nicaea and had stigmatized it
as Manichaean. 23 It seemed to him that if this word were used to
describe the Son's relation to the Father, then inevitably he was being
USee Gregg and Groh. op. cit. 28.
19Athanasius, Or. con. Ar, 1.47·
2°E.g. Lorentz, op. 'cit. 86--g0.
21See R. P. C. Hanson 'Who Taught t; OUK QV'toov?' in Arianism (79-"84).
22See G. May, Schopfung aus dem Nicht.
23For a discussion of this word, see below pp. 190-202.
24
The Early Supporters oj Arius
represented as, so to speak, a broken-off piece of the Father,
comparable to Mani's idea that bits of God are to be encountered in
all sorts of places, even in vegetables and food. The same kind of
objection applied. in his view, to regarding the Son as an issue. or like
a fire lit from another fire, SO determined was he to safeguard the
integrity, incomparability and solitariness of God the Father. But we
are driven to conclude that the word homoousios, though not to be
encountered frequently in earlier literature, was' being bandied about
in theological circles at the start of the controversy. We do not know
who had introduced it into· the discussion; we have no evidence that
either Alexander of Alexandria or Eusebius of Caesarea did so.
lt has often been remarked24 that Arius seems to have confined his
doctrine solely to the cosmological rather than the soteriological
aspects of Christology, and some have assumed that he was not
interested in soteriology at all. It is true that almost all the actual
words of Arius which have, as far as we can reconstruct them, come
down to us are concerned with the Son's relation to the Father. This
was, apparently, the point upon which Arius thought that his bishop
was dangerously in error, and it was therefore round this point that
the conflict rages. But it is not accurate to say that we have no
utterances from Arius' lips about the incarnate Christ. Two of the
remarks attributed to Arius by Constantine in his letter to Arius (see
above" p. 14) certainly refer to the incarnate Son, and the second is
particularly significant, because it suggests that Arius' doctrine of the
Incafnation was designed to protect God the Father from being
exposed to human experiences. This intention is certainly present in
the theology of Arius' early supporters. They regarded the Son as an
instrument expressly designed to do the suffering that was necessary
in order to carry out God's plan for saving men. They achieved this
position by constantly putting forward two doctrines. First, the
human limitations and weaknesses ofJesus, the incarnate Son of God,
were a sign of his divine inferiority; his divinity was reduced enough
to be able to encounter suffering without ceasing to be divine. And
secondly, they insisted that in becoming incarnate the Son had taken
to himself, not a complete human individual, but what they called a
"rolla Iiljluxov, a body without a soul. This meant not only a body
without a human psychology or a human animating principle, but
also a body without a human mind. The Word directly animated and
24E.g. G.1. Prestige God in Patristic Thought, ISS.
25
 The Origins
.. ·directed the body, dwelling in it (KatOllc&v). This doctrine is
regularly characteristic ",f Arianism after Arius, and it is the logical
'outcome of the view which he and his followers held about the
relation of the Son to the Father. They wanted to have a God who
could suffer, but they could not fit this picture to their idea of God the
Father. God the $on must therefore be the God who could suffer,
whose divinity was reduced enough to endure suffering. In fact they
said very little about Christ's human mind, because it did not occur to
more than a very few, Arian or anti-Arian, in the first half of the ivth
century, that he could have possessed such a thing. But they were
quite sure that he did not possess a human soul (i.e. nervous rather
than psychological system, but including the emotions). A 'mere
man' (llv9p'Ol'o<; 1JI,..6<;) could not have redeemed us by his Passion.
Somehow God must have suffered. 25
Did Arius share these views? Was ·he wholly absorbed in
cosmology to the virtual exclusion of soteriology? It seems to me
impossible to declare that he did not share, indeed originate, these
views of his early or later disciples on the Incarnation, however
scanty the evidence for his actual words upon the subject. The two
sides of the theology of Arius' supporters and of those who followed
his theological tradition are closely knit together. They held their
cosmological ideas about Christ because of their convictions about
his redemptive acts, and they were able to support their views about
his redemptive acts with confidence because they thought that they
could satisfactorily relate them to their whole concept of God. One
of the consequences of this is that whereas in arguing about
metaphysical theology they often seem at ;\ disadvantage (cf. the
doctrine of the 'foreseen merits' of the Son), when arguing about the
career and character ofJesus Christ himself as,depicted in the Gospels,
they are usually on much firmer ground than their opponents. Here
both Athanasius and Hilary are driven to take refuge in most
unconvincing arguments. It is perhaps worth noting that one of the
very few facts about Lucian of Antioch that may be regarded as
established is that he taught this doctrine of the soma apsychon,26 and
,J that Arius explicitly declares himself in his letter to Eusebius of
! Nicomedia to be a disciple of Lucian. Arianism was a theology of
salvation as well as a theory of the inner relations of the Trinity (if we
25S ee below, cap 4 'The Rationale of Arianism'.
26See below, p.80-81.
The Early Supporters of Arius
may dignify its doctrine of the three hypostases by that name).27 So
we should conclude that its originator was as concerned with our
salvation as his disciples were, even if by chance almost none of his
sayings upon the subject has survived.
2. Some of Arius' Contemporaries
The first name that occurs when we survey those of Arius'
contemporaries who supported him is that of Eusebius, bishop of
Nicomedia. This man has hitherto been treated with little courtesy
by historians of the period. Gwatkin called him 'a court politician'
rather than a scholar.2. Wallace-Hadrill believes that he signed the
Creed ofNicaea because he would not sacrifice his political ambition
out of loyalty to an Alexandrian presbyter,29 and in the same vein
Boular-and calls him ambitious. 3o The conventional picture of
Eusebius is of an unscrupulous intriguer who was more interested in
gaining and retaining power th~n in observing the rules of decent
morality. This is of course because our knowledge of Eusebius
derives almost entirely from the evidence of his bitter enemies. But a
consideration of even the few facts which we know about Eusebius
should cause us to modify this picture. It is generally agreed that he
was first bishop of Berytus and then later (we do not know exactly
when but some time after 314 when Eustolus signed the acts of tlie
Council of Ancyra as bishop of Nicomedia) translated to
Nicomedia. 31 He was related to JuliusJulianus, the Emperor Licinius'
praetorian prefect from 315 to 324, and retained the favour of
Licinius even when this Emperor had turned against Christians
during the last years of his reign. Eusebius was a favourite of
27See Wiles, Working Papers on Doctrine. 35-36.
, 28~he. Arj~n c.0ntrollersy, 21. Harnack uses stronger language: he calls him
~npnnclpled (Hlsto~y of Dogma II1.57-58), says that he 'always thought first of
himselfand then of hiS cause', and brands him as 'an imperious prince of the Church
of a secular type, for whom all means were justifiable' (60, and n. I).
29Christian Antioch, 86.
30L'Heresie d'Arius, 12.
. 31 Barnes Constantine and Eusebius. (70 and 321 n. 78), following the conventional
mter~retation ~f Euse~ius' character, suggests that he can hardly have been
app'omt~d. t? Nlcomedl~ bef,:,re 317, 0':1 the assumption that that was the year in
which LlClDlUS ~oved hiS capital from the Balkans to Nicomedia, and that Eusebius
would then deSire to move nearer to the centre of political power.
27
 The Origins
Constantia, wife of Licinius and sister of Constantine. 32 Schwartz
arbitrarily dismisses as .,gossip the story of his connection with
Constantia but allows that he was related to the imperial house
(Ammianus Marcellinus 22, 9, 4) and says that he had close relations
with Basilina, Constantine's sister-in-law and mother of the Emperor
Julian." IfSchiiferdiek is Correct in his attractive conjecture that the
Eusebius who wrot~ the letter to Constantia about a picture of Christ
was Eusebius ofNicomedia,34 then he showed considerable boldness
in rebuking a member of the imperial family; such an act needed
courage, and it is difficult to imagine Eusebius of Caesarea (to whom
the letter is usually ascribed) summoning up enough independence of
spirit to do such a thing. If we are to agree (as seems entirely
reasonable) that Eusebius accompanied Constantia on her mission to
Constantine when Lidnius her husband was trapped by Constantine
in Byzantium. to negotiate a safe-conduct for Licinius, this shows
even greater courage. The fury which Constantine evinces towards
Eusebius in' his letter to the people of Nicomedia seems to confirm
this story. He calls him 'the co-initiate of the tyrant's cruelty' (6 tii,
tupavvl1<ii, ro~6tllto, "U~~"("l1'), and says that he was the ex-
emperor's 'bodyguard' ("po"cpu"a~) and that he only stopped short
of actually bringing armed troops against Constantine. 35 No less
courage is shown in Eusebius' act of welcoming and communicating
with some friends of Arius immediately after the Council of
Nicaea. 36 None of these actions is compatible with the picture of a
32Barnes, op. cit. 70 referring to Philostorgius HE 1.9, Rufinus HE X. 12; Socrates
HE 1.2S and Sozomenus HE 11.27.2.
33Gesammelte Schr!ften m.s, p. 194, n I; cf. Loofs 'Arianismus', 12; Bardy Lucien
d'Antioche, J89. He was attacked by Alexander and by Athanasius for allowing
himself to be translated: see Opitz Urk III. No. 4b. A(7): Gelasius HE 111.4;
Athanasius Apologia Secunda 6.6-7 (92, 9l), quoting a resolution of a synod of
Egyptian bishops, who refer after Eusebius' death to both his translations (to
Nicomedia and to Constantinople); Sellers, Eustathius oj Antioch 197; Declercq,
Ossius of Cordova, 219; Simonetti, La Crisi Ariana 32.
34'Zur Verfasserschaft und Situation der Epistula ad Constantiam de Imagine
Christi', 177-186.
35The letter is to be found in Theod. HE 1.20.1-10: Gelasius HE Appendix,
1.1-17; Opitz, U,k III No. 27 (S8-62): cf. Loofs 'Arianismus', IS. See R. M. Grant
Religion and Poiltics at the Council oj Njcaea, 3.
36For this incident, see below, pp. 173. Tuilier, 'Le Conflit entre Constantin et
Licinius', 2S6, plays down Constantine's allegation that Eusebius had earlier
supported Licinius, in the interests of his theory that the opposition between Arius
and his opponents was at the root of the tension between Licinius and Constantine;
but he fails to convince.
The Early Supporters oj Arius
time-serVing prelate changing his policy for political advantage and
spreadmg hiS sads to catch every wind of imperial favour.
Eus~bius certainly was a man of strong character and great ability.
EuseblUs of Caesarea, writing about ten years after the Council of
Nicaea, calls him :the great Eusebius'. 37 It was he who virtually took
charge of the affaIrS of the Greek speaking Eastern Church from 32 8
until hIS death. The expression 'the party ofEusebius' is to be found in
the writings of Alexander of Alexandria, ofEustathius of Antioch, of
Athanasius and ofSoz~8menus. They all detest him, but pay unwilling
tnbute to his ab1lity. But he cannot be accused of confining his
activities to political intrigue. He also encouraged, when he could,
the spread of the Christian faith beyond the frontiers of the Roman
Empire. We hear of him in connection with Christians in Armenia 39
round the Persian Gulf (what was then loosely called 'India')"o a~d
among the Goths. 41 The fact that the version of the Christian faith
whic~ his missionaries spread in each case was that favoured by
EuseblUs and not Athanasius appears to have blinded historians to
these evidences of his zeal.
. Even ifPhiiostorgius had not included Eusebius' name among the
hst of dlSClples of LUClan of Antioch, we would know that he was
one, b,ecause Acius.caUs him 'c~-disciple of Lucian' .42 Unfortunately I
very httle has surv1ved by wh1ch we canjudse his theolosical views.
37Co~t,a Marcellum 1.4.17, 18. Sellers has noticed this, Eustathius of Antioch, 17; cf.
A~hana~1Us Or. con. 1-r..1.22. eiC 515aO'lca)"tru; EU(JE:Piol.) (no other distinguishing
epithet) and Harnack.1n his HIstory of Dogma in spite of his conviction that Eusebius
was not :oncemed With theology but with power, pays him the unconscious tribute
of speakmg of a 'Eusebian' party as in existence right up to 360.
"Kannenglesser
. . '0'U et Q. uan d Arius Compose-t-illa Thalie?', 347 and n. 13,
In
?bserves that?{ TtEpt Et'.IaeptOv IS a much repeated expression in Athanasius, but that
It also ~ccurs In ~e Letter.ofPopeJuHus and in the letters of the Westerners of the
Councd of Serdlca denotmg non-Alexandrian opponents of Athanasius. He says
that the sole echo of it elsewhere is in Sozomenus HE I.IS. But he has omitted to
note ~etter ojAlexander to all Bishops (Opitz U,k III.4b. 17(S)), where it OCCurs for the
first time, and the use of of uJl/fli 'tov EUG&j310V by Eustathius in the extract quoted by
Theodoret HE I.S.1-5. See R. P. C. Hanson 'The Fate of Eustathius of Antioch'
171, J73· '
39Klein, Constantius II. 17$-177.
4°lbid. 2IS-220.
4lJbid. 2SS-2S~; this is on the likely assumption that the point at which Ulfilas
Was consecrated bIshop for the Goths was the Council of Constantinople of 338 not
th~; of.Antioc~ 341 (Socrates l!E 11.7.2 and Sozomenos HE 11.4.3). '
Phdostorgms HE II. 14; OPitz U,k III, No. I. S (3); cf. Bardy, Lucien d' Antioche
192-4· '
29
 The Origins
That he was a supporter of Arius as long as Arius lived is certain. He
afforded him refuge when he was excommunicated by Alexander,
wrote to Paulinus ofTyre and Alexander of Alexandria on his behalf,
incurred exile for communicating with his friends and was a leading
spirit in engineering Arius's eventual rehabilitation and acceptance
almost everywhere in the East except Alexandria. We have only one
whole letter and two fragments from his pen. The letter is to
Paulinus, bishop of Tyre, remonstrating with him for not showing
zeal in the cause of Arius and urging him to write to Alexander in
order to protest against· his excommunication of Arius, and
contrasting his inactivity with the action of Eusebius of Caesarea in
this respect. 43 His theological ideas afe set out thus:
He objects to a doctrine of two Unoriginated Principles or of one such
Principle divided into two or undergoing corporeal experience
(crCOJ!o.t\KOV mmov96;). His own view is: '(There is) One, the
Unoriginated (lIy6VV~'OV), and One produced (y&yov6<;) by him truly
and not from his substance (01JO'ia). not participating at all in the
unoriginated nature nor in his substance, but produced as altogether
different (f'tepov) in his nature and in his power (BuvuJ.let), being in
complete likeness (6J.lot6tll'ta) of disposition (Bta8tcn:w<;) and power
to him who made him; and his origin: we believe not only
indescribable by word but also incomprehensible by thought not only
of men hue also of all those who are superior to men. '44
Eusebius goes on to say of the Son:
'We have learnt that he is created and established and produced
(K'ttO"t6v, 8eJ.l8A.twt6v, ytvVlltOv) in his substance and in his unalterable
and mysterious (appi}'up) nature and in his resemblance to him who
made him', and the proof-text for this is Proverbs 8:22. 45 But if the
Son was 'of God' (E~aOto6), 'that is, he was "from" him like a part of
him or from an emanation (a1toppo{a<;) of his substance', then he
could not be called created or established. That which comes from the
Unoriginated (aytvVlltOV) could not be created but would be
originally unoriginated. But if there is some colour in calling the Son
'from the Father's substance', because he is produced (or 'generated~,
4lOpitz, Urk 1lI, No.8 (15-18), from Theodoret HE 1.6.1 and the Letter of
'Candidus', for which see below, Pp·534·
440pitz op. cit. 3(26). 'His origin' must refer to the Son, because Eusebius would
not have allowed that the Father had an origin (apxTa). Behind such language the
text Isa 53:8 hoven. Note that Eusebius carefully avoids describing the Son as t~ OOK
6vtrov.
"Ibid. 4 (16).
30
The Early Supporters of Arius
yevVllt6;), then Eusehius can produce plenty of passages in the Bible
where things are said to be begotten which have no connection with
the nature (qn~at<;) of him who is said to have begotten them - Isa 1:2;
Deut 32:18; Job 38:28. 46 The true explanation is that these were
produced by the will of the begetter but not from his nature: 'for
nothing is from his substance, but everything comes into existence by
his will (Po""~~un), each is as it was produced (glCU"'OV cb, lCui
&Y8V£tO Eativ). As for God - some things will come into existence by
being like to him in his likeness by Word, and some things exist from
freewill; but all come into existence through him, by him, and all are
"from" God.'47
Another sentence from a letter of Eusebius to Arius, quoted by
Athanasius" simply reiterates one of the arguments of the letter to
Paulinus:
'that which was made did not exist before qJming into existence; that
which has come into existence (to yev6J.lsvov) has a beginning of
being.'
The other fragment is given us by Ambrose, De Fide Ill. 1 5 (125), and
is said by him to come from a letter which Eusebius wrote (we do not
know to whom) and to have been read out at the Council ofNicaea.
It runs as follows:
'If indeed', he said. 'we say that the Son of God is uncreated, then we
are beginning to declare that he is homoousios with the Father. '49
This is all that survives from the pen ofEusebius ofNicomedia. It is
enough to assure us that he was a strong supporter of Arius' theology
and that he (or the members of his school of thought) had already at
an early stage in the controversy gone far to produce a consistent and
thought-out position on the points under debate. W" may trace the
work of Lucian of Antioch here. The incomparability of God and the
"Ibid. j-Q (16).
47lbid. 7. 8 (17); the last sentence is obscure to the point of incoherence; the-text of
'Candidus' does not help, leaving the crucial 'by Word' in Greek (M'YC9) and
translating 'freewill' (1tPO~ t,KouO"{aO'J.Lov) quite wrongly as iuxta participationem
substantiae; perhaps it had a different text. Stead, 'Eusebius and the Council of
Nicaea', 86-88, Wiles, Working Papers, 34, and Gregg and Groh, Early Arianism,
98-101, all comment on the thought of the letter, but none of them throws light on
this passage.
48De Synodis 17; see Opitz, Urk Ill. No.2 (3); Opitz dates this about 318.
490pitz Urk m.2- (42-) prints this fragment: Si verum, inquit, Deifilium et increatum
dicimus, 61l00UO"lOV cum patre incipimus confiteri,
31
 The Origins
impossibility of his communicating his essence were the fixed points
in his theology. The faint hint conveyed in the reference in his letter
to Paulinus to his disinclination to allow that God could undergo
corporeal experience may suggest that he followed the rest of his
school in seeing the Son as a reduced divinity capable, unlike the
Father, of becoming incarnate. He shares with the others a strong
dislike to the term homoousios as applied to the Son, but he apparently
draws the line at describing him as derived from non-existence.
The next contemporary of Arius who was his decided supporter to
be examined is Asterius. He was a sophist, i.e. he combined the roles
which today would be occupied by the theologian, the scientist, the
journalist and the advertising agency. During the persecution of
Diocletian he had apostasized from the Christian faith by sacrificing
to some pagan god (so that Athanasius usually refers to him as 6
9uaac;, i.e. 'the Quisling'), and in consequence he was never ordained
either presbyter or bishop. He had returned to the Christian church,
had studied under the martyr Lucian of Antioch and when the
controversy broke out was regarded as a leading theologian. Some
time before the Council ofNicaea he wrote a Syntagmation in defence
of Arius; he also at some point wrote a work defending Paulinus of
Tyre for the letter to Alexander of Alexandria which Paulinus wrote
(as we have seen) at the instigation of Eusebius of Nicomedia on
behalf of Arius. Fragments of this work have survived quoted by
Eusebius of Caesarea from the quotations of the same work by
Marcellus of Ancyra (who was attacking Asterius and whom
Eusebius was in his tum attacking). Some further fragments from
Asterius can he gleaned from quotations of him in the works of
Athanasius. who of course is quoting him in order to refute him, and
several Homilies on the Psalms which can safely be ascribed to Asterius
have quite recently been edited in the original Greek by Richard. 50
The fragments of Asterius have been conveniently collected by
Bardy;51 they will be considered first:
50For genera1 information about Asterius see Jerome De Viris Illustribus XCIV
(46) (but the reader should be warned that in this work ofJerome 'in the reign of
Constantius' has a very elastic meaning); Philostorgius HE 1.10; Gwatkin, Studies of
Arianism, 76, Harnack, History of Dogma IV.20 n2, Bardy Lucien J'Antioche.
)28-341; Simonetti La Crisi Ariana, 43-44; Kopecek, Neo·Arianism I, 28-34,55-57.
51 Lucien J' Antioche. 341-353: they are to be found in Athanasius, Or. con. Ar. 1.30.
32; 11.24. 28. 38, 40; IlI.2, 10,60: De Synodis 18. 19; De Decretis 20; also from Eusebius
Can. Marcellum. The first sixteen are from Asterius' Syntagmation and are quoted by
32
The Early Supporters of Arius
Fragment I (De Synodis 18; Orationes con Arianos 1.32)
Here Asterius distinguishes between two types of power (ouvaJlt,)
and Wisdom (crocp(a) In God, appealing to I Cor "24 and Rom
1:20. One is 'the peculiar (loiav)' power and wisdom of God
(without a definite article), which is natural and innate
(cruvu1tapx oucrav) unoriginatedly and is that which produces and
creates the whole world, the 'invisible power and Godhead' of
Romans I :20, th~t is of the Father himsel£ The other power and
WISdom IS mamfested by Christ and is visible 'through the
products themselves of hIS ministerial activity' (OU1 <Oiv spyrov
al>"toov tfjt; BtalCoviar;-autou).
Fragme?t II (De Synodjs 18; Orationes con Ariano; 1.32) ,
God s eternal power and WISdom, which the Bible calls 'without
beginning' and 'unoriginated', and distinguished from the many
powers whICh are created by God, of which Christ is the first-born
and only begotten (1tpro<6WKO, Kai Jlovoy.v~,). Other examples of
these powers are the locust Goel 2:25, see above, pp. 13), and the
powers which are called upon to praise God (e.g. Ps 103 (102): 21).
Fragment 1II (De Synodis 19)
Christ is the first of the things which have come into existence
(Y£Vll trov ), and one of the spiritual natures (VOlltrov fj>UOeCOV),just as
the s~n, which is itself one of the phenomena (cpatv6Jlsva),
Illuminates everything.
Fragm~nt IV (De Synodjs 19)
Before the production of the Son the Father had a pre-existent
capacity (l;",cr"t1jJl~v) to produce, just as before a physician Cures he
has a capacity to heal.
Fragment V (De Synodis 19)
The So~ was created by (God's) dynamic abundance (I;vspysnKfj
cptA-onJlt(1), and the Father made him out of the overflow
(1tspwucri(1) of his power.
Athanasil!s, the next twenty fr~m Asterius' work defending Paulinus and are cited
by Eu~eblUs Contra Marcellum; In these I have given the number of the fragment in
Eusebl,us' t~~t after the number given it by Bardy. These fragments are followed in
Bardy s edition by several long passa~es from Cateqae and other fragments, all on
the Psalms. None of these has any bearing on the subject ofthis book and must have
been largely superseded ~y Richar~'s work. Bardy, Lucien D'A~tioch 320-3 2 1,
shows that the Syntagmatlon was Written before Nicaea.
33
 The Origins
Fragment VI (De Synodis 19)
If the will of God travelled through all the creatures successively, it
is evident that the Son, who is a creature (1toillJ.1u) came into
existence and has been made by his will.
Fragment VII (Orationes can Arianos 1.30)
That which has not been made but has existed always is
unoriginated (aY8V11t6v).
Fragment VIII (Orationes can Arianos II.24)
When God desired to have a .created nature, he saw that nature
could not endure to experience his unmediated hand (aKpcitoo
X8'p 6S), so he first makes and creates, himself sole, a sole being, and
he calls this Son and Logos so that through this as a mediator the rest
could be created.
Fragment IX (Orationes can Arianos II.28)
(The Son) is a creature and one of the products (Y8vTjtiiiv); he learnt
to create as from a teacher and cr,aftsman, and so he ministered to
God who taught him.
Fragment X (Orationes can Arianos II·38)
He is not a Son because of a birth (YEVV11utv) from a father and as
peculiar (io,ov) to his substance (ousta) , but he is Reason (Logos) for
the sake of rational things, and Wisdom for the sake of things
endowed with wisdom, and Power for the sake of empowered
things, and so he is called a Son for the sake of those who a« made
sohs (olo1tOloo)1tvooS).
Fragment XI (Orationes can Arianos 11.40)
There is one Reason (Logos) of God, but many rational beings; and
one substance and nature of wisdom, but many wise and good
beings.
Fragment XII (Orationes can Arianos 11.40 )
You would hardly call the children of God words (1.6y01) or full of
wisdom. There is only one Logos and Wisdom, and the substance
of the Logos could not be attributed to the great majority (til>
1tAtlS8') of the children, nor the name of wisdom.
Fragment XIII (Orationes can Arianos I1I.IO)
Since what the Father wishes the Son also wishes and he (the Son)
does not oppose him in either his ideas or his judgements, but is in
34
The Early Supporters of Arius
everything harmonious (crul'CProvos) with him, and presents
identity of doctrines and a consistent and exact correspondence
with the Father's teaching, for this reason he and the Father are one
Uohn 10:30).
Fragment XV (Orationes can Arianos I1I.60)
This fragment is concerned to maintain that creation is not
unworthy of God, nor is the will to create, and 'let his superiority
be postulated in the case of the first product' (Y8VV~I'atOS, i.e. the
Son).
Fragment XVI (De Deeret 20)
The argument is here that all the epithets applied to Christ are also
in the Bible applied to us: 'Like' (01'010<;): man is the image and
glory of God (I Cor 11:7); 'for ever' (a8i): we who live are for ever
... (2 Coq:II); 'in him' (i.e. in God): in him we live and move and
have our being (Acts 17:28); 'immutable'; it is written that nothing
shall separate us from the love of Christ (Rom 8:35); on the subject
of 'the power'; the locust and the caterpillar are called 'the power'
and even 'the great power' U0e!2:25), and often it is applied to the
people, for instance 'all the power of the Lord went out from
Egypt' (Exod 12:44), and there are other heavenly powers: for the
text runs 'the Lord of powers is with us, the God of Jacob is our
refuge' (Ps 46 (45):8).
Fragment XVIII (34)52
The letter of Eusebius to Paulinus, Asterius said, was designed to
assign the genesis of the Son to the Father's will and not to imply
human experience (1tciSoS) nor to an issue (npo~oA.tl) which is in
effect a corporeal begetting involving human experience
(naSTjttK~).
Fragment XX (65)
Asterius declared his belief in God the Father Almighty and in his
Son the only begotten God our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Holy
Spirit, and that the Father must truly (aATjSiiis) be Father and the
Son truly Son and the Holy Spirit similarly.
5 2 Here begin the fragments from Eusebius of Caesa rea's Con. Marcellum. They
are not all reproduced because they are not all relevant to the theme of this book,
and some simply repeat what has already been recorded.
35
 The Origins
Fragment XXI (96)
The Father is distinct (liAAo<;), who begot from himself the only-
begotten Logos and first born of all creation, sole (begetting) the
sole, perfect the perfect, King the King, Lord the Lord, God
(begetting) God, the exact image of his substance and will and
glory and power (o~criag t8 Kai ~ouA~<; Kai M~TJ<; Kai OUVU Il8CO<;
(mapaAAaKtov 8!K6va).
Fragment XXIII (18)
The Logos was produced (Y8Y8vv~cr9at) before the ages.
Fragment XXIV
Asterius wished to allegorize Psalm 110 (109):3 ('this day have I
begotten thee') to refer to the original production of the pre-
existent Word.
Fragment XXV (190)
He (the Son) who came forth from him (the Father) is not the
Logos (and this is the way that birth really takes place), but simply
the Son only.
Fragment XXVII (63)
Which does ExodJ:I4 (the appearance in the Burning Bush) refer
to, Son or Father? Having in mind the human fle,h which the
Word of God assumed and through which he was manifested,
Asterius said that there were two distinct realities (hypostases) of the
Father and of the Son, and so separated the Son of God from the
Father S3
Fragment XXVIII (67)
Here Asterius seems to have used the word ltp6crcolta (prosopa) for
the distinct existences of the Father and the Son.
Fragment XXX (76)
Asterius thinks that the Son must be divided from the Father by
hypostasis as the Son of man because he regards the human flesh
which he assumed for our sake as a difficulty (crKavoaA[~61l8vo<;).
Fragment XXXI (67)
The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.
53 Marcellus dislikes this use of hypostasis which seems to him to verge towards
trithcism; he expresses the same dislike in Fragment XXIX (69)·
i The Early Supporters of Arius
Fragment XXXII (72)
Asterius said that the Father and the Son are one and the same thing
in that they agree (crullq>COVOUcrt) in everything. 'I and the Father are
one' Uahn 10:30) refers to their exact agreement in all ideas and
activities.
Fragment XXXIII (104)
Asterius describes the authority given to Christ as glory, and not
just as glory but as pre-mundane (ltPOKocrIlOV) glory.
Kopecek 54 points out that in all these fragments there is no
reference at all to the Son's knowledge of the Father being limited,
and suggests interestingly that Asterius disliked the idea of a mystery
within the Trinity which might obscure the distinctions between the
Persons. It is possible that in Asterius we can detect the faint
beginnings of that rationalism which was later to become so evident
in the thought 'of Aetius and Eunomius. It is noticeable too that
Asterius says nothing of the Son's being produced out of non-
existence; instead he has a doctrine-of the Father always possessing an
immanent generative capacity. Here he has overcome one of the
main drawbacks of Arius' theology. Asterius is quite as emphatic as
Arius about the creatureliness and inferiority of the Son, but in spite
of all his apparent desire to assimilate his status to that of redeemed
human beings in. fact he gives him a quite different position within
creation. He is a mediating being.. through whom the rest were made.
Fragment VIII makes it quite dear that Asterius assumed that, in order
to reveal himself to men and to become incarnate. God had to
produce some sort of a reduction of his divinity. This too is why
Asterius insisted 'so sharply upon distinguishing Father and Son as
two different hypostases; the Father must not be compromised by the
Incarnation, as the Son could be. It is perhaps the prominence which
he gave to this word hypostasis that accounts for the dislike which the
pro-Nicene writers later evinced for it. But in the end Christian
orthodoxy was to adopt it, in a sense not very different from that of
Asterius. 55 Asterius insists also. with Arius, upon the generation of
the Son from the Father's will, not his substance, and on the doctrine,
which is a logical inference from this, that the unity of Father and Son
is moral, not substantial. It is remarkable to find in Fragment XXI the
~41n a review of Asterius' theology, Neo-Arianism. 28-31, cf. Simonetti La Crisi
Arlana, 218-251.
sSFor a fuller consideration of hypostasis, see below, pp. 181-90.
37
 The Origins
expression 'the exact image of the substance, will, glory and power',
an expression which will recur in the Dedication Creed of 34,56
Asterius was not the first writer known to us to use the term 'exact
image'. It occurs (as we shall see) in a letter of Alexander of
Alexandria. But it is noteworthy that Asterius did not object to
calling the Son the image of the Father's substance.
When we tum from these fragments to the continuous
composition of Asterius' Homilies on the Psalms, we are at first sight
surprised. There is almost no treatment of the relation between the
Father and the Son here. Asterius eschews recondite theology and
addresses himself to moving and instructing his lay audience in terms
which would be familiar to them. His usual method is to fasten upon
some phrase or sentence In the early part of the psalm which he is
expounding, sometimes the Heading, to repeat it at intervals through
the Homily, interpreting and applying it in· different ways, often with
vivid illustrations and always with effective rhetoric designed to edify
his hearers. 57 He must be reckoned one of the best Homilists of the
IV th century. He uses allegory sparingly, but does not eschew it
altogether, and never employs it in the tradition of Origen. He will
not disdain to play on words. 58 He presents us with a pleasing picture
of a preacher who is seriously concerned with presenting the
Christian faith as he understands it to his people.
But if we look below the surface of Asterius' Homilies on the Psalms,
we can find plenty of evidence of his theological views, and
particularly on the Incarnation, a subject upon which our .canty
remains ofArius' work throw almost no light. 59 Everything that he
says on this subject suggests that he believes in a God who can suffer.
He can use the expression 'he became man' (tvT]v8p<i"'11".v)60, but
this does not of course imply necessarily that he believed that Jesus
56See below, pp. 286-91. Philostorgius does not like this introduction of ousia, see
HE B.IS.
57But the rhetoric is not always happy; e.g. 'What a miracle! Hades has
swallowed the Lord Christ and has not digested him. The lion swallowed the lamb
and vomited. Death swallowed life, and, feeling sick, vomited up those whom he
had previously gulped down' (XL3 (76». For Asterius see also M. F. Wiles, & R. C.
Gregg, Arianism I I I-52.
S8E.g. ror; h: xup9tvou licmopov, olhcor; AI( l"QfpOU li<p90pov. A pun which cannot be
reproduced in English (11.1) (9».
59The two references to the generation of the Son at 1.5 (2) and XVI.6 (119) came
from Homilies which Richard cannot with confidence attribute to Asterius; neither
is particularly significant theologically.
"XY.I7 (lIS).
The Early Supporters of Arius
Christ was a complete man. He can declare as man he was
slaughtered and as God he was given life', 61 and 'in order that he
might transform the murdered man into God'. 62 The heretic. he says,
will object to our saying 'the Creator was crucified', for this befits a
man but not God. Asterius answers, the Creator made coats of skin,
that is of very poor material, for Adam and Eve; the Creator walked
in the garden looking for Adam and Eve as if he were ignorant:
'so then when you hear that he made coats of skin and that he walked
and that he searched and asked, "Where art thou?", and that he
tolerated human activities' and experience, and you do not say "a
[mere] man"; so when you hear that he who made Adam was
crucified, that he was hung up, that he was nailed in the flesh, do not
say "A mere man" ('V116v liv8pomov),' but God in the flesh making
the suffering and the death of the flesh his own,
(ohceto1totllcr~~evov). 63
Elsewhere he says that as he who insults the Emperor's written order
insults the Emperor.
'So the-blows dealt to Christ's body did not damage the body as much
as they damaged him who wore the body. And the body was,
crucified, but the Lord of Glory was hung up ... And the flesh was'
struck, but the God was insulted. And if the slave was scourged, yet
the master was ill-treated. '64
And a little later:
'the body indwelt by God (O'ro~a fvgeov) was crucified. and how
could he who wore it not be insulted?'65
The Emperor, he says again, wore a private's breastplate and gave his
gold-encrusted one to a private. in order to deceive the usurper
«upavvov); 'he took flesh and sacrificed his Godhead ... he accepted
poverty and sacrificed riches.' This garment of flesh which he
borrowed the Jews pierced with nails and tore with the spear. 66
Asterius does not of course mean that Christ threw away or
"XI.) (76).
62XVI.I3,(122).
63XXII.2-3 (173), quotation from 3.
64XII.5 (172-174), quotation from 174.
"XXll.6 (174).
66XXX·7, 8 (241). Of course it was the Romans who crucified Christ, not the
Jews, but the universal anti-Semitism of the ancient Christians prevented them
seeing this.
39

The Origins
abandoned his Godhead but that he exposed it to injury for our sakes.
He can also speak movingly of God's condescension ("o'Y"'a,a~a",<;)
and benevolence (<p,)"av9proltia) and providence (S1tOlttB!a)
manifested in the Incarnation. 67 He does not hesitate to go the whole
length in speaking of a crucified God: 'For when the natlOns and the
peoples ... crucified the God of the fou~ comers of th~ ~!~th, they
crucified him because he who was crucIfied tolerated It.
'Teach her, Lord Christ, not to laugh at your nakedness, but t~at she
rna y learn that your nakedness clothed the world. because, Just as
though you were rich yet for our sakes you became poor that we
might be rich. so you who clothed yourself with h.~~ven and earth
became naked so that you might clothe the world.
He can even say that God was buried. Angels and soldiers surrounded
his tomb, which could not therefore have been that of a mere man
(uv9pcil1too '1"),,00).70 Judas met his wretched fate because the devil
caused him to betray 'God as man' ,71 The pre-exIstent ChrIst who
appeared in the Old Testament on :arious oc~asioJ?s was the sa,me as
he who was crucified, and for Astenus the cry Save me, 0 God ofPs
16 (15):1 is the prayer of the Son to the Father. 72 It is (as we shall se~)
characteristic of Asterius' school of thought to stress the fact that ill
the Bible the Son is presented as worshipping the Father. His
insistence that the incarnate Son was not what he qIlls onthropos psi/os
(mere man) is most marked. What Asterius means here is, a complete
man (with psyche) and nothing more. This is almost the hall-mark of
Arian doctrine concerning- the Incarnation. One who was fully man
(and nothing more) could not redeem; and tho~gh Asteriu~'
opponents of coutse said that ~hnst was ~ore t~an a mere man.
their interpretation of the person of the mcarnate Son seemed to
Asterius and people ofhis school to remove the Godhead from the act
of redemption.
Asterius' treatment of the Incarnation ip. these Homilies establishes
one point clearly. Arian doctrine cannot be accused o~ ignoring
redemption, of concentrating on cosmology, on the.relau6n of the
pre-existent Son to the Father, at the expense of sotenology, of how
"XXV.2S (198).
68 11.3 (5)·
69VIl,12 (59),
70VIII,IO (68),
7tXV.17 (195).
72XXVIII.6 (225, 226).
40
The Early Supporters of Arius
we are saved. 73 On the contrary. it could be said that their doctrine
took redemption more seriously than did that of their opponents,
because it made proper allowance for the scandal of the Cross, for
what Paul called 'the weakness of God' (I Cor 1:22-:25), for the
involvement of the Godhead in the sufferings of Jesus Christ. This
was a point which their opponents unanimously and consistently
played down. We can also see that the issues at stake in this dispute
were not, as has often been suggested, simply issues raised by the
exigencies of Greek philosophy. They begin to show themselves
beneath the upper layer of Greek theological terms; how can we
reconcile the worship of Christ as divine with monotheism? In what
sense was God involved in the historical career of Christ? We can also
see that Arian theology is not, as, e.g. Harnack represented it,
composed of two disparate parts. 74 It should be clear that the
soteriology and the cosmology are closely linked: the Arians saw that
the New Testament demanded a suffering' God, as their opponents
I failed to see. They were convinced that only a God whose divinity
I was somehow reduced must suffer. Hence the radical Arian doctrine
of Christ, but hence also the Arian readiness to speak of God as
suffering. We can see here the attraction of the Arian doctrine. But
we can also see the high price which it had to pay in order to attain its
ends.
Another pronounced follower of Arius was Athanasius, bishop of
Anazarbus (ecclesiastically the metropolitan see of (Eastern) Cilici. II
and therefore not an obscure place; it is called by Athan.sius of
Alexandria Na~ap~iOv, De Syn 17; I). He was later, Philostorgius tells
us (HE JIl.iS), a teacher of Aetius. He did not attend the Council of
Nicaea, perhaps having found means of evading what would to him
have been an unpleasant experience. 75 A fragment of a theological
discourse from what is apparently a series of obiter dicta by famous
early Arians translated from Greek into bad Latin was first printed by
Mai and later brilliantly restored by de Bruyne. It runs thus:
' ... God the supervisor, judge and supplier of everything who created
and established (construxit) everything, who made everything out of
73As Prestige God in Patristic Thought, ISS, 156 (the famous passage about the
'glittering syllogism') suggested; Wiles, Working Papers, 35-36, contra. Asterius'
doctrine is treated further in cap. 4. .
74f1istory of Dogma IV.39.
75S ee Kopecek, Neo·Arianism. 26-27. 41~42, for Athanasius of Anazarbus see also
Bardy Lllden d'Antioche 182, 206, 214,
 The Origins
nothing. Next this same Athanasius brings out memorials of the men
of old and ofDionsius the bishop of (of Alexandria) to show that the
Father existed before the Son was begotten, saying uSo he is Father,
Father and not Son; not that he is made, but that he is; not from any
source, but eternal in himself. Again the Son [is Son] and not Father;
not that he was, but that he was made; not from himself, but from him
who made him, and achieved the dignity of Sonship". Then
Athanasius himself:, "For the Son does not exalt himself against the
Father. nor does he think that he is on equal terms with God (paria esse
cum Deo); but he yields to his Father and confesses and teaches
everybody that he [the Father} is greater than he, greater. not in extent
nor in size, which of course are appropriate to bodies, but in eternity
and in his indescribable paternal power and capacity to beget, and
because he is himself eternal and has fulness in himself and derives his
existence from nobody" .'76
Next we can examine a fragment which survives in the original
Greek from a letter of Athanasius of Anazarbus to Alexander of
Alexandria quoted by Athanasius of Alexandria, De Synodis. 77 In this
the bishop of Anazarbus first reprimands Alexander for blaming
Arius for his doctrine that the Son is a 'creature from non-existence'
(tl; o~" oV<(DV "<I"l'a),, and' one of the mass' (BV <iiiv 1tUvt(Dv)', (i.e. one
of the flock of sheep) and then says that the Parable of the Lost Sheep
meant that Christ was one (perhaps he meant the lost one) of the
hundred, i.e. of all men, and if all men were created and produced
(Y6V11<u), then so was he. It has been plausibly suggested by Martin
Tetz that a Homily originally published in Greek by R. P. Casey can
be, ascribed to Athanasius of Anazarbus;78 the manuscript attributed
it to Athanasius of Alexandria but it cannot possibly be by him.
Certain expressioris in it seem to be unmistakably Arian: the author
says of Christ 'he is not called a man' and 'he did not teach on earth in
your semblance (01'0.6, "00) but as God from above'.7' Tetz makes
heavy weather of these terms, but they pretty clearly reproduce the
76Mai Script. Vet. NOli. Coli. Frag. XVI (231-232): Gryson Scripta Arriana Latina
Frag. 4 (235-236). it is evident that the anonymous author is first quoting
Athanasius' quotation of Dionysius and then Athanasius' comment on this. The
doctrine could well be that of Dionysius of Alexandria. De Bruyne 'Deux Lettres
Inconnues', 106-110, has reconstructed the text.
77 17 : printed Opitz Urk JII, No. II, p. 18.
18R. P. Casey' An Early Homily on the Devil', 1-10; M. Tetz 'Eine Arianische
Homme unter den Namen des Athanasius von Alexandrien', 299-30'].
79Tetz 300-301.
42
The Early Supporters of Arius
consistent Arian doctrine that Christ incarnate was not 'a mere man'
(i.e. a complete man) but was God inhabiting a human body. Soon
after, the writer declares, 'the judge of all the earth was judged for
your sake, that you might be exalted'.'o Once again Tezt does not
qu'te und::stand thi~'.1t is clearly the Arian doctrine of a suffering
God; the Judgment IS not the Last Judgment (concerning which
Arians consistently teach that God the Father has handed Over
judgment to the Son), but Christ's trial during his Passion. The
sermon ends with a clearly Arian ascription:
'Gi:e t~anks in everything to the all-holy God who created a't the
begmnmg ... and to him who created after this; through whom he
(God) made and renewed and saves, glory, power, honour with the
Holy Spirit now and always and for all ages of ages. Amen.'81
It is obvious that Atha~asius of Anazarbus was a consistent expou~der
of the theology_ of Anus, even to the doctrine of the creation of the
Son out of non-existen"ce.
We have on~ brief fragment only of the work of another early
supporter of :'-nus, Theogms, who was bishop ofNicaea at the time
of the CouncIl there, was exiled with Eusebius ofNicomedia for the
same offence as his, but with him recovered his see, probably in 328.
H~ IS na~ed more than once as one of the party of Eusebius of
NlComedla. This fragment Comes from the same Source as the Lnin
manuscript edited by Mai, by Gryson and by de Bruyne, which gove
us some pIeces from the. pen of Athanasius of Anazarbus. 82 De
Bruyne's convincing emendation has enabled us to see the reference
to Theognis. It runs thus:
'Simila~!y too the Bithynian bishop Theognis writing to the Pope83
[says~: . Therefore we call the Son originated ·(genitum), indeed an
unongmated Son could never be. We know from the Holy Scriptures
the Father alone to be unoriginated (ingenitum) (we worship him
IIOTetz 301-302.
IIITet: 302-~03 .. The part omitted represents the word ttlltl0Uvtl in the
n:'anuscnpt, whIch IS clearly corrupt. Casey obelizes the whole clause and Tetz (op.
Cit. 302-30~) can, understandably, make nothing of it. Perhaps the Original reading
was 6EIl&AU!)OUVtl.
112See above, n 76. Bardy has much information on Theognis Lucien d' Antioch
206-21 4. "
113What 'Pope' we do not know. Many eminent bishops in the IVth century were
addressed. as 'papa'. and Arius so describes Alexander of Alexandria in his extant
~etter t? him; ~eorgepf Antioch calls Alexander 'Pope' also (see below p. 44); and it
IS not Impossible that Alexander was the person addressed here.
43
 The Origins
alone): but we reverence (veneramur) the Son, because it is [held as]
certain among us that this glory of his ascends to the Father" I.
And a little later again:
'When therefore he shows that the Father is greater than he, it is
certain that the Father is God not only because of the argument from
creation, but because he is unoriginated.'
He [expresses himself] similarly in another letter:
'To speak adequately (iusta) about the Father and the Son, as you
know, is to, walk on the clouds. 84 That is why I first seriously entreat
the Lord that he may give me pardon because of the obligation that
lies on me, and so I begin on this subject, not dealing with a vast
investigation (plurimis quaestionibus). nor in a roundabout way. but by
a summary (compendium).'
The authentic Arian note is certainly struck here.
A few more fragments of remarks by some other of Arius' early
supporters can be gleaned. George, a presbyter of Antioch who was
harassed by Eustathius, bishop of that city, and later made bishop of
Laodicea, wrote to Alexander of Alexandria a letter about the year
322, and another in the same year to Arius' supporters in Alexandria;
Athanasius has preserved a few sentences of each. 85 The first runs:
'Do not accuse the party of Arius if they say that there was a time
. when the Son of God did not exist. In fact Isaiah was the son of Amoz,
and all the same Amoz existed before Isaiah was born, and Isaiah did
not previously exist, but was born later.'
The second is an attempt to reconcile the Arians to Alexander's
teaching, though on their own terms:
'Do not accuse Pope Alexander,' it says, 'when he states that the Son is
from (etc) the Father-in fact you need not hesitate to say that the Son
is from the Father. If the apostle wrote 'all things are from God' (I Cor
II:I2), and ifit is clear that all things have been created by God, then
the Son is also a creature and one of the people created. So the Son
could be said to be from God just as all things are said to be from God.'
Eusebius of Caesarea in his Contra Marcellum gives us some fragments
from Paulin,\s of Tyre, mediated through Marcellus, whose
quotations of Paulinus Marcellus is giving to discredit him and
84I.e. to attempt an impossible task.
85De Sytlodis 17: both printed in Opitz Urk Ill. Nos. 12 and 13 (19).
44
The Early Supporters of Arius
Eusebius is retail~g to. support him. 86 The extracts are apparently
from the letter WrItten ill 320 or 321 by Paulinus to Alexander at the
instigation ofEusebius ofNicomedia. 87 Paulinus apparently h~d first
quoted Ongen to support hIS argument (whatever it was) and then
added his Own comment:
'It is time now when we are debating about the Father and the Son and
the. Ho~y Spirit to set out a fe:v points which were omitted then [i.e. in
Ongen s day]. On the subject of the Father, that he is Father as
un~iv~ded ~nd not imparting himself to the Son (ciJ.lEP\crtOC; oiov). not
bnngmg him forth (ltpo~a)'<bv). as some people think. For if the Son is
a~ Issue (ltp6~).,wa) of the Father and a production (ytvv~I"l) from
him, as are the productions ofanimals, then it is necessary that both the
producer and the produced shall be a body.'
And apparently in the same letter Paulinus called Christ 'a second
God' and said that he had become God in a ·more human way; and On
occaSlOn he could describe him as a creature. The same work of
Eusebius also. reproduces from M~rcellus' original quotations some
remarks which Narcissus of Neronias, another of Arius' early
supporters, made in a letter which he wrote (we do not know exactly
when), to Chrestus (perhaps the temporary bishop of Nicomedia
dunng Eusebius' exile) and Euphronius and Eusebius [/ of
N~comedla J.lt saId ~~at once (and we shall conjecture presently when
thIS occaSlOn was) when bIshop OSSIUS asked him whether
following Eusebius of Cae sarea, he agreed with him and believed tha;
there were two ousiai, Marcellus knew from the records that
Narcissus replied that he believed that there were three. Marcellus
also accused Narcissus of saying that there was a first God and a
second. 89 Fi?ally, we can find an Egyptian bishop called Achilleus,
one of Anus fnends, quoted by Ps.-Gregory of Nyssa as saying that
the _Son IS a creature and alien to God's substance (UA.A.6tP10V tii, too
9&ou ouaia,), and asking how, if the Father is perfect and fills
everythmg can there be any place left for the Son (who is perfect) to
fit m?90 .
86S ee Opitz Urk III. NO.9 (17-18); Eusebius Con. Marc. 1.4, 18-20.
S7See above, P.30.
88See below, PP:ISo-I.
890pitz, Urk III. ~o. 19. (41). ~ro~ Con. Marc. 1.4.39. We cannot be Sure that the
rest of th~ passage gn:en In OpItZ IS Marcellus reporting Narcissus Or Marcellus
commentmg on NarCISSUS.
I 9~PS. - Gregory of Nyssa, Adversus Arium et Sabellium 80, 82; the author does not
say rom what work these remarks are taken. For lists of the friends of Arius, see
~ 45
1.
 The Origins
3. Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius. bishop of Caesarea in Palestine. was certainly an early
supporter of Arius. He was claimed by Arius as a supporter; he wrote
several letters on his behalf and attended at least one local synod
which vindicated his views as orthodox and at another synod was
censured and disciplined for refusing to condemn propositions
ascribed to Arius." But he must be placed in a rather different
category from the others because from the point of view of theology
he was a much more important person. He was unIversally
acknowledged to be the most scholarly bishop of his day. He left a
large body of literary work to posterity. Neither Ari~s n?r anU-
Arians speak evil of him. Six later hIStOrians paid him the
compliment of writing a continuation of his Church History. Though
2
a supporter of Arius he cannot precisely be classified as an Arian.·
Eusebius waS not primarily a theologian. though. like all bIShops of
that period. he was compelled to interest himselfin theolo~y. He was
an historian and an antiquarian. His style is elaborate and meffect~ve
and he has little skill at expressing his thoughts clearly or preservmg
strict intellectual consistency. But some of his works were necessanly
concerned with theology and on the doctrine in contention. the
Christian doctrine of God. he could not avoid expressing himself and
had no wish to avoid doing so. He was born in or before 264 (death of
Dionysius of Alexandria). was orda.ined presbyter in Caesarea about
29.0 and began a career of study and scholarship. He was a dedicated
adlnirer and supporter of Origen. to whom he devotes a large
amount of space in his Church History. though he by no means
reproduces faithfully all Origen's theology in his own. He co-
operated with another presbyter. Pamphilus. to produce a Defence of
Origen (which only survives in part). He visited Pamphlius when he
I
Opitz U;k Ill. No. 49. 1-3 (6), 4b, 6 (7) and 6, 5 (13), and Theodoret HE 1.5·3; cf.
SeUers, Eustathius, 18. . Wallace-Hadrill suggests 335 (Eusebius, 57). Gwatkin places the Vita Const. in 338
91S ee below, p. 146. For eikon in Eusebius see R. P. C. Hanson, Studies in Christian
Antiquity 253--6.
92Por a general account of Eusebius, see WaUace-Hadril! Eusebi~s of ~aesarea;
Gwatkin, Studies, 41-42; Stead, Divine Substance, 23 1-2]2: Slmo~ettt ~tudl, 48:-5~,
I
Crisi, 60-66; Opitz 'Euseb von Caesarea als Theologer', 1-19; Grillmeler, ChriSt In
Christian Tradition, 170-190: Lorentz, Arius Iudaizans? 203-209. The value of
Lonergan's book, The Way to Nicaea, can.b~ judged from his st~tement on p. 68 that
Eusebius of Caesarea 'urged that the oplO1on of Marcellus, bIshop of Ancyr~, ~e
accepted as the authentic exposition of the Nicene Pormula'. Se~ also Studies In
Christi(ln Antiquity 48--64.
l 47
The Early Supporters oj Arius
was imprisoned for his Christian beliefs in the year 308 (Pamphilus
was martyred in 310). He was made bishop of Caesarea about 313.
attended the Council of Nicaea in 325. presided over at least one
Council of Antioch in the vacancy of that see about 330. attended the
Councils of Tyre and Jerusalem in 335. delivered ail address in
honour of Constantine at his tricennalia in 336, and died in 339. 93 His
chief theological works which survive are the Praeparatio Evangelica.
the Demonstratio Evangelica. Contra Marcel/urn. Theophania.
Ecclesiastica Theologia. an oration in praise of Constantine delivered
during his lifetime (usually called Laus Constantim'). a life of
Constantine (Vita Constantini written after his death). a Commentary
on the Psalms and a Commentary on Isaiah, and several relevant
letters. 94
Eusebius had in his episcopal library at Caesarea at least Origen's
Hexapla. which he can be shown to have used in his Commentary on
93Purther details of his career will emerge later in this work. There is some
dispute about the date of his death: Gwatkin places it in 339 because Eusebius is not
recorded as having played any part in the election of Gregory to Alexandria (SA,
I I I n2); Simonetti suggests 339 or 340 (Crisi, 14Ci-? n31): Barnes with great
confidence places it on May 30th, 339 (Constantine and Eusebius, 194): cf. Meslin Les
Ariens d'Ocddent. 25$, n 2.
94The first draft of the Church History may have been finished as early as 303. but
several additions were made to it, including the text of a discourse delivered by
Eusebius at the dedication of a new church in Tyre in about 3 14. and Eusebius later
included, and later still omitted, complimentary references to Licinius and· Crispus.
It is difficult to date the DE and the PE with any accuracy. They give no clear sign of
being conscious of the Arian Controversy and cannot have been written long after
the end of Diocletian's persecution (313). Simonetti wishes to place DE after the
outbreak of the Arian dispute (Studi, 104 n. p) but most scholars would not agree
with this. Wallace-Hadrill (Eusebius 49) places PEin 313 or 314and DE between 3 14
and 318. Loofs regarded the Eee Theol as Eusebius' last book ('Arianismus', 25);
Barnes placesLaus Const. onJuly 25th. 336 (C and E 238), but Heikel (ed. in the GCS
Ser.) conjectured 336 or 337. Barnes thinks that the Contra Marcellum (which cannot
be earlier than 335, the date of Marcellus' deposition,. which it mentions) and
Ecclesiastica Theologia should be placed between 337 and 339 (C and E, 243), but
(SA, J II, n.2) and most would agree with him, but Wallace-Hadrill dates it 337
(Eusebius, 58). Comm. on Psalms cannot be earlier than 335, for it mentions the
completion of Constantine's Anastasis in Jerusalem in that year (PC 24: 1064, on Ps
88 (87): II), and Comm. on Isaiah may wen be later (,Well after 324', WaUace-
Hadrill, Eusebius, 51-52). Barnes (C and E, 186-7, 249) places the Theophany in 325
or 326, but Wallace-Hadrill regards it as among the last of Eusebius' works
(Eusebius, 53-57) and this view would commend itself to most scholars. The dates of
the letters will be dealt with as they are encountered in the text; Wallace-HadriU
(Eusebius 39-58) has a thorough and useful discussion of the dates of all Eusebius'
works.
 The Origins
the Psalms, and quite possibly copies of most ofOrigen's other works
too, and he regarded himself as in a sense Origen's champion. But his
theology on the subject of the relation between the Father and the
Son is markedly different from Origen's. He makes a strong
distinction between the unoriginated Father and the Son who has an
origin.
'The Hebrew Scriptures'. he says, 'next to the unbeginning and
imoriginated (livaplov Kat u"{evll't6v) substance (ousia) God of the
universe, which is unparticipated (liJ.111C'tOV) and beyond all
comprehension, present a second substance (ousia) and divine power,
origin of all things which have come into existence (yevr}'crov),
subsisting (imoc:rtdauv) first and produced (YEYEVTjJ.16VTlV) from the
First Cause, and they call this Word and Wisdom and the very Power
of GOd.'95
Eusebius recalls with approval Philo's description of the Logos as 'the
second God' (tOV SEuttpoV OEOV). 'The God prior to the Logos', he
says, 'is greater than any rational nature. It is not right that anything
produced (YEvv'lt6v) should be assimilated to him who is beyond the
Logos in the highest and uniquely existing Ideal (ttV, t~a,pttql
KaOEatiiltlifit'1).'96 A little later in the same work he says that the
substance (ousia) of the Logos comes second after that of the Father,
deriving its source from him and fashioned after his image
(a1tE'KOv,a~tv'l). This Logos.!s chiefor rules OVer all things which have
cQme into existence (Y&V1lta), so as to be calle~ 'image' (ElKova) of
God and Wisdom and Logos.97 First is the 'ineffable and infinitely
great (aV&KcppaatOu Kal a1t&,po~yt9ou<;) power of the God of the
universe', and then 'coming next (S&ut&pEuou"lJ<;) after the Father the
power, both creative and illuminating, of the divine Logos.'9' In the
Demonstratio the same drastic subordination and distinction of the
Son appears. Moses, says Eusebius, calls Christ 'sometimes God and
Lord, sometimes the angel of God, establishing directly that this was
not the supreme God, but a second, named God and Lord of
9SPE VII.12. 1,2. The proof-texu for this statement are Ps 33 (32): 6, 9; 2:7, 8; 110
(I09):3;]ob 28:20; Prov 8:12, IS. 22ft"; Wisd 7:22-26; Gn 1:26; 19:24.
9061bid. VII: 13.2.
• 100 5. 14. ?:-J9. Ko~ecek (Neo-Arianism, 47) gives a Jist of these references to a
97VII.IS.I, 3; cf. XI.I4.1. The reader should be warned against assuming that
ousia in Eusebius or in any writer of this period has the same meaning as was a~tached
to it in later pro-Nicene theology. Similarly it would be unwise at this stage to see a
significant difference between genetos and gennetos. See below, pp. 181-90.
98 15 .
5 .6. . .
The Early Supporters of Arius
Godfearing people, but messenger (angelos) of the supreme Father. '99
Most of the epiphanies ofGod in the Old Testament are of this second
God. 'OO
It seems likely that by the time Eusebius wrote the Demonstratio the
su~ject which was to be central to the Arian controversy was being
Widely canvassed. Indeed, it is unlikely on a priori grounds that the
controversy should have suddenly blazed forth with no preliminary
WIder spread debate. In the Demonstratio Eusebius gives his more
carefully thought out account of the relation of Father and Son
'There is,' says.Eusebius, 'a doctrine common to all men about th~
first and eternal and alone unoriginated (ay&vv1jtOu) and supreme
Cause of the Universe, almighty ruler and sovereign, God ... "., This
sole true unoriginated omnipotent God desired to create a rational
c~e~tion and determined to make some 'incorporeal. spiritual and
dIvme powers', a~d also human souls, who would possess free will,
and proper places for them to live. For this purpose he thought it
nght that there should be 'a single manager (OiKOVO~OV) and ruler of
aU Creation; and kin.g of every thing.' '.2 What the supreme God
Wills comes thereby mto eXIStence. It is wrong to think that God
created anything out of nothing. His will is the material (G1..'l) for all
created th.ings.I03 Not long afterwards he gives a more elaborate
account of the Logos.
[God] 'gives him ~istence as his first product (y.vv'l~a) of aU beings,
th~ first born W~s.dom~ whole £ro111 whole, spiritual (voepay)' and
ratIonal and all-wIse, or'rather Mind in himself. and Reason in himself
. ~n~ Wisdom in itself. and further it is right to conceive him as Beauty
In Itself and Goodness in itself (ao't"6vol)v . .. aO't"6l..oyov .. . aO't"ocrocpiav
. . . aU~~KaAov. '" aO't"oaya8ov) among unoriginated things
(y~VV'l't"01.~), ThIS first foundation of everything 'that was to come into
eXIstence afterwards h~ puts foith, the perfect creation of the Perfect
and wise construction ((LpX1.'t·eK't6v'lJ.la) of the Wise, the good issu~
(YEvV~JlP.) of the good Father, and what else but the protector and
guardIan .and saviour an,d physician of whatever later received being,
and the pIlot of the creation ofeverything who grasps the rudders?'1 04
99DE 1.5,13,
second God 10 EuseblUs.
10iDE IV.I.2.
1021.4.
1031.6, 7.
104IV.2.1.
49
 The Origins
And later in this work he describes the Son in even stronger language
as 'called God and Lord by the divine (ev9licp) Spirit of his God and
Father, by whom he participates in (I1"taOXrov) the unoriginated
Godhead."o, But this does not prevent Eusebius from teaching quite
explicitly one doctrine typical of Arianism at all stages of
development, that the Son worships the Father as God. In an
elaborate allegorization of the Church which ends his sermon
delivered at the dedication ofa church in Tyre about 314, he remarks
that Jesus, the only begotten of God
'sends up ... the sweet-smelling incense from everybody and the
unbloody and immaterial sacrifices made by prayers, himself fust
adoring and alone providing adequate wor:shlP to the Father, and then
continually interceding that he should remain kindly and favourable
to all of U5.'106
The same idea recurs at the end of his life in the Commentary on the
Psalms. lO ?
On the subject of the generation of the Son Eusebius is firmly
agnostic, or rather apophatic. Nobody can know how the Son is
generated (Isaiah 53:8 is, as always on this subject, at the back of his
mind). God is infmitely beyond human knowledge, and his
generation of the Son must emphatically be pronounced
unknowable. God produced him 'beyond all modds and by secret
and incomprehensible principles' .'08 But in the Demonstratio at one
point he in fact makes a strenuous effort to define the subject more
closely, in the context of expounding the text which was invariably
chosep. by all writers in the IV th century as applicable to this theme,
Proverbs 8:22:
We a;e 'not to think, says Eusehius, of this generation as a division or
separation or in any human or corporeal way. We must not say 'that
the Son has proceeded from the Father as births of animals talce place
with us .by bodily process (pathos). or a division which produces a
separate part .. ,'109 'So the Son was not unbegotten (dytvvtt'toQ for
IOSIX.IO·4·
106HE X.4.68.
107PG 23:788, on PS70 (69): 23: cf. Bee. Theol. 1.11.70, the Father is the God of the
Son.
108EeC. Theol. 1.12.70-'72; See also IlI.6.I03 (how the Son was not produced): cf.
Grillmeier GeT 176. Perhaps bitter experience of what happens when the
generation of the Son is carefully defined had strengthened Eusebius' agnosticism by
this time.
I09DB V.~.8.9.
so
The Early Supporters oj Arius
infinite and unbeginning ages in the Father, like one thing in another,
as a part of him, which later was altered and emptied out of him. This
process is characteristic of change; and in this way there would be two
unoriginated. (llylivVT(ta) principles, that which put forth and that
which was put forth .. ,'110 It is also wrong to say that the Son is
derived from non-existence (t~ '0~1C OVtIDV 'YEVVlrt6v), like other
created things. for the generation of the Son is different from the
creation of things through the Son .... 111 In fact the best thing is to
say with Isaiah. 'His generation who can declare?' (53:8). But if a
defmition must be given it would run thus: 'Perhaps one might say
that the Son originated (6nO<Tt~Val) like a perfume (eixo5lav tlva) and
ray of a light from the Father's unoriginated nature and ineffable
substance infinite ages agb, or rather before all ages, and that once he
had come into existence he has eternal being and existence along with
the Father (cruveiva1. 'tE Kat cru'Y'YEv6IJ.Evov aEi) like the scent with the
myrrh and the ray with the light,'l12 But t~e Son is not like the ray of
light in co-existing ontologically with its source (o~cncoaroc;
cruvu1tapXE1.). On the contrary, he 'has his own substance and existence
(o~crtcotai tE Kai 6CPSO"tT(KE) and .has not co-existed unoriginatedly
with the Father',113 The Son's relation to the Father is in one respect
not like that of the scent to its source because it has not achieved
separate existence from the unoriginated substance by any material
process (pathos) or division. The Father is uno.riginated, the Son
arii?inated, one is Father and the other Son, 'and anyone would allow
that a father exists before a son' ,114 Finally Eusebius produces the most
carefully worded definition of all: the Son is 'the image (eikon) of God,
in a way mysterious (apPlltCtlC;) and incalculable to us, the living image
of the living God and existing in its own right immaterially and
without any admiJ:rture ofan opposite quality, but not like an image in
our experience, when the form (&130<;) is distinct from the image, but
himself wholly the form. and assimilated in his own reality
(a~toouatQ. a<P0J-l0l0UJ.l8VO<;) to the Father, and so he is the most lively
p~rfume of the Father, once again in a way mysterious and
incalculable to US.'115 .
110 1. 13 .
III 1.25.
. 112 1,18. Eusebius at least before Nicaea favours this analogy of scent or perfume;
It constantly occurs in the work of his middle period.
.1131.19. Notice how the ousia-compound and the hypostasis-compound are
Virtually synonymous.
1141.20.
1151.21. Presumably the Father has no &U)o~ (form) in himself.
51
 The Origins
Earlier in this work Eusebius has emphasized the limitations 'of the
analogy of ray and light and of perfume arid source. They do not
sufficiently allow for the distinctness and subordination of the'
Son,116 nor his own dependence on the Father's will.'17 On the
whole however Eusebius' favourite doctrine is that the Son is in effect
the image of the Father's substance (&he,"v 'ii<; 0~(J(a<;).118 And on the
subject of time, he dislikes using any language introducing the
concept of time, but insists that the Father has existed before the Son
and that the Son is not unoriginated, and has derived from the will
and power of the Father .119
It can be seen already that Eusebius did not ad6pt the doctrine of
the eternal generation of the Son of his master Origen.' 2o Nor could
he when he wrote the Demonstratio have honestly subscribed to the
view that the Son was consubstantial with the Father. 121 On the
other hand, he specifically disowns the doctrine that the Son derived
from" non-existence. One can see why some have thought that the
Demonstratio was written after the outbreak of the Arian controversy.
It touches on many of the pointS raised by Arius, the manner of the
Son's generation, his origin from the Father's will, his relation to
time. But'it is more-satisfactory to take the Demonstratio as witnessing
to the fact that many of the is~ues raised by the controversy were
under lively discussion before Arius and Alexander publicly clashed.
Eusebius has started from a basical~y Origenist position, -influenced
certainly by the concept, widespread in Middle Platonism, of a
supreme being who was tnetaphysically so abstract as to be virtually
or actually unknowable, and a second principle, nous or logos who can
take form (&lSo<;) and make the higher principle known. But, perhaps
under the pressure of events. he appears to be moving in a direction
which would render him more sympathetic to Arius' theology of
drastic subordinationism without having reached entire agreement
with it.
His Christology more or less agrees with this analysis. He is most
insistent upon the distinct reality of the Son, and of the Spirit. We
116IV·3·1--6.
t17IV,3·7.
l'UIV.3.B-12.
119IV.3.13·
120S 0 Lorentz, Arius Iudaizans?, 206, rightly, and Kopecek. Neo-Arianism 7.
121 See R, P. C, Hanson 'Did Origen use the word homoousios of the Son?', Studies
in Christian Antiquity S3""""?0. For Eusebius' behaviour at Nicaea, see below,
pp. 158--60.
The Early Supporters of Arius
find in him the formula which often occurs elsewhereof'Father truly
Father, Son truly Son, and Spirit truly Spirit"22 included in the creed
which he submitted to the Council ofNicaea. He describes the Word
as unlike human words, 'possessing -his own individual existence
(o1tocrtaO"lv) which is altogether divine and spiritual, and existing in
its own mode (l&ico~), and -again acting in its own mode, immaterial
and incorporeal, and in all respects assimilated (ltapOllolco".V1]v) to the
nature of the first and unoriginated and sole God."23 In his late
Ecclesiastical Theology (which is notable for its deafening silence on the
subject of the homoousios) he accuses Marcellus of Ancyra of rejecting
the hypostasis i.e. the distinct individuality, of the Son, but also
condemns another view which is that there are two hypostases, one
unoriginated (dytvTl'toV) and one created out ofnon-existence. 124 It is
not that Eusebius objected to the doctrine that there are two
hypostases. A little later he asserts firmly the distinct reality of the
hypostasis of the Father and of the Son.· 2• But he stopped short of
saying that one of them was made out of nothing. Later in the same
work he declares that the Church does not preach two gods nor two
unoriginated nor two unbeginning, 'nor two substances, juxtaposed
to each other as of equal rank' (BUo O~(JiUl<; ll~ {(JOtlllia<;
Ctvtlnape~ayo"'val<; CtA.A.1jA.Ul<;).
Like Origen, and the Origenist Gregory of Nyssa, he believed that
after the winding-up of history Christ's human body would be
absorbed in the divine life and disappear, But.in his picture of the
incarnate L9gos he does not follow Origen. The Saviour's human
body was a mere instrument used by the Word for his own purposes.
He applies Isa 19: 1, which refers to the Lord coming to Egypt riding
on a swift cloud, to the Flight intO Egypt. Christ's human body is
I made up of earthy substance, and it is as it were riding upon this that
the infant Christ enters Egypt.' 27 On the subject which has attracted
some interest in recent years, and which is of particular interest to our
I 1220pitz Urk III.- No. 22. 4-6 (43). It also occurs in the 'Dedication' Creed of
Amioe? 341. For Eusebius' Creed submitted at Nicaea see below, pp. IS8--g; c£
Gwatkm SA, 42.
I 123DE V,S.I?; cf.. an even stronger stat~ment Comm. on Psalms On Ps 57 (56): 3
PC 23:$09· Grdlmeler notes this emphaSIS upon the distinct individuality of the
Logos, CeT, 170.
I 124Ecc. Theal. 1.10, 69.
1251.20.87; cf. I1l.S""""? (103, 104), 17 (177).
126 11.23.133.
127Ecc. Theol. III.IS (173). Comm. on Isaiah, on Isa 19:1 (PG 24:220).
!! 53
 The Origins
investigation, the recognition of a human soul or mind in the
incarnate Logos, he is, as in some other points, unconsciously
inconsistent. 12s In most of his works it does not occur to him (any
more than it occurred to most non-Arian writers of the first half of
the lVth century) that Jesus could have had a human mind or soul
(1jIUX~, not quite the same thing). Eusebius does not, however,
deliberately avow belief in a 'soulless body' (soma apsychon). In a late
work he can speak of 'the soulful (fl11j1uxov, i.e. life-giving) and
generative and living Word', 129 as if the Word himself supplied the
psyche to the body ofJesus; But in his Commentary on the Psalms he
occasionally encounters passages in which (according to the
hermeneutical principles ofEusebius and all his contemporaries) the
soul of Christ is mentioned, and here he cannot avoid recogni2ing
thatJesus Christ as a man had a human psyche. Eusebius allows that 'he
humbled his soul with fasting' applies to Jesus, quotes Matt. 26:38 and
John 12:27, and remarks 'he endured these experiences in the vastness
of his love, he suffered on our behalf and endured pain on our behalf
like a father for lost sons'. 130 But of course Christ does not experience
emotion for his plight but for ours. He has no difficulty in saying that
Christ's soul was troubled when he refers to the Agony in the
Garden, 'suffering extreme pain in his soul and troubled on their
behalf he was very sorrowful unto death';'31 But this trouble is not
on his own behalfbut on that of the disciples. And he never perceives
the theOlogical significance of allowing that Christ has a human sou!.
Most of the time he writes as ifhe never reckoned with the possibility
ofits existence. In the Ecclesiastical Theology he poses as two mutually
exclusive possibilities, e~ther to assume that the Son exists
independently and activates the body, or that a human soul activates
it, and clearly prefers the former. On Ps 18(17):29 Thou also shalt
light my candle', Eusebius says that this must refer to the Incarnation;
1,28 0 n this subject see Grillmeier GGT. 177-180. where he hardly does justice to
all the evidence, and the morejudicious survey of Stead 'The Scriptures and the Soul
of Christ', 233-250.
129Comm. on Isaiah, On !sa 1:29 (PC 24:101).
'''On Ps 35 (34): 13 (PC 23:308);.cf. on Ps 42 (41): II (381) and on p, 54 (53):
17-20 (484): on Ps 59 (58): 2 (725) (which seems to invite comment about Christ's
soul but re~eives none from Eusebius): on Ps 69 (68): I I (141): on Ps 71 (70): 22
(7 88 ).
"'On P, 88 (87) 4, 5 (1056); on Ps 88 (87): 25 (1068) (Agony in the Garden); cf. on
Ps 89 (88): I ~I069) where Christ says, 'if even human affairs throw my soul into
bewilderment and trouble it, if they cause dizziness and helplessness . .. '
54
The Early Supporters of Arius
but he does not allegorize 'light' as the mind of Jesus, but as 'that
which was born according to the flesh which stood in succession from
David which Christ used when he was in it."32 It is quite clear that
while Eusebius allows that Christ has a psyche on these occasions
when he finds it referred to in the Bible, his doctrine of the
Incarnation is such that he never took serious theological account of
Christ's human psyche nor realized its significance.
Everybody agrees that Eusebius' doctrine of the Holy Spirit is
meagre and inadequate.''' The Paraclete-Spirit is neither God nor
Son', he says. 134 In fact,he is in Eusebius' view subordinate to the Son
(as the Son is to the Father), not divine, a ministering spirit or power
greater than men and angels, but no more. He has a fairly full account
of the matter in Praeparatio Evangelica. He compares him to the moon
(the Logos bdng the sun).
'They place him in the first and sovereign rank of government over
the universe. ruling over those things which have come into existence
later [i.e. after the Son and the Spirit], I mean those which are
subordinate and which need his assistance, just as he is subordinate to
the creator of the universe [i.e. the Son],.
The Holy Spirit ranks as third, presides over the powers subordinate
to him, and assists the Logos in his work. Both are supported by the
overflowing fount of being (<pOOl,) from the Father. The Logos alone
can mediate the ineffable and incomprehensible abundance of the
Father's goodness. He administers and mediates it to the Spirit who
conveys it to the spiritual beings below him.'35 In the Ecclesiastical
Theology Eusebius says that there are three entities believed in by the
Church: 'he who was of the seed of David and of the Holy Spirit [i.e.
Christ's human body); the Son who inhabited it coming forth from
God and having a real existence of his own (oO(nOlS",- o<pe""ilrcu); and
God his Father'.'3. Except as an agent of the Incarnation the Holy
Spirit does not appear here. In a faint approach to articulating a
credible Christian doctrine of God, Eusebius can speak of there being
'one rule, one Godhead, into which the divine existence (6£0}.oy(u) is
132E". Theol. 1.20, 87; Comm. on Psalms 18 (17), PG 23:180.
133Except Prestige; see next note.
134Ecc. Theol. IIl.6.3. Prestige's explanation that this means that he is neither God
(the Father) nor (God) the Son is utterly inadequate (God in Patristic Thought Introd.
XXIV). Grillmeier GGT 172 has a better account of the subject.
135PE VIl.I5.6--9 (quotation from 6). .
136Ecc. Theol. 1.6.64. 65.
55
 The Origins
caught Up';l37 but he does not mention the Holy Spirit. It is only by
courtesy that Eusebius can be described as having a doctrine of the
Trinity. At the end of his life he summed up his doctrine concerning
the great point which had been at issue ten or more years before,
aware of what had happened before and after Nicaea. The second
article of his rule of faith runs thus:
'The Son, the only-begotten God, Jesus Christ who was begotten
before all ages of the Father and is not the same as the Father. being and
living in his own mode and co-existing as truly Son, God from God
and Light from Light and Life from Life, begotten for the salvation of
all things of the Father by processes which are to us ineffable and
mysterious and altogether unknowable, and he does not exist in the
same way as the other originated things, nor does he live a life
comparable to those things which were produced through him. but
he has been brought forth alone from the Father himself and is Life in
himself.'138
The Holy Spirit is not mentioned in this rule of faith. Eusebius has
dropped his terminology of 'image' and 'scent'. Much that was to
become a permanent feature of mainstream Arianism can be seen in
nuee here, e.g. the refusal to speculate about the manner of the Son's
generation from the Father, the consciousness that the Son's
. creatureliness must be distinguished froin that of other creatures, and
the suspicion still lurking behind his formula that, in spite of the
e¥pres-sion 'before all ages,' there was a time when the ~on did not
exist. The absence of any reference to the 'consubstantiality' of Father
and Son is conspicuous. . ofEusebius' themes which appears more prominently in his later than
This, as it were, theological testament of the bishop of Caesarea
brings us to our fmal point. Are those scholars justified who see in the
development of Eusebius' thought a gradual slide into pure
Arianism?139 Let" us begin with an extract from a letter which
Eusebius wrote to Alexander of Alexandria about 320 protesting
against his treatment of Arius and his followers.14o In this letter
Eusebius takes Alexander to task for unjustly accusing Arius and his
friends of teaching that 'the Son has come into existence from non-
137Comm. on lsa, on Isa 43:IO,JI (PG 24:397).
uSEcc. Theal. 1.8.66.
139See Kopecek Neo·Arianism 7-10, 14-16. Eusebius' most important letter ofall,
to his flock after Nicaea, will be considered in cap. 6; see below pp. 159-60.
1400pitz Urk III. NO.7 (14-25). It is taken from the Acta of the Second Council
of Nicaea.
The Early Supporters of Arius
existence like one of the mass' (dl, Er, tiiiy ""v-rCOY), whereas what they
had actually said (in their letter quoted above, PP.7-8) was that the
Son was 'a perfect creature, but not as one of the creatures.'141 He
also defends the Arian group against Alexander's accusation that they
taught 'he who is begot him who was not' (6 liN tOY 1'1] ov-ra
tyeYV1]"E)" on the grounds that this was a perfectly proper statement.
If it is not allowed, 'then there would be two Beings' (06tco, yap liv
060 Eill ta ov-ra)',142 i.e. two grounds of being. Very much the same
sentiments are voiced in a letter ofEusebius to Euphration bishop of
Balanea (a town in Syria).143 written perhaps two years earlier at the
very outset of the dispute. The Father and the Son, Eusebius argues
here, cannot have co-existed eternally, but rather the Father precedes
the Son in eternal existence. If this were not so, then the Father would
not be Father nor the Son Son, and both would be either
unoriginated or originated. But in fact. 'one is regarded as prior to
and greater than the second in rank and honours, so that he is the
cause of the existence [of the other1and of the kind ofexistence which
he has'.!44 The Son himself knows that he is different «"poY) from
the Father and less and subordinate. '45 There is, says Eusebius, the
'one true God' Gn I7:3),and the Son who is God but not 'the one true
God', who has nobody priorto him. The Son is 'like the image of the
true God' and can be called 'God' .146 The image is not one and the
same thing with the original, but 'they are two substances (ousiai) and
two things and two powers' (proof-text I Tim 2:5).'47
This last proof-text, with its reference to a mediator, leads us to one
in his early works. In his Laus Constantini he speaks of the Logos:
'he was the light associating with the Father beyond the universe,
!l'Iediating, and screening the unbeginning and unoriginated Ideal
(IMay) from the substance of all pJoduced things (YEVTJtiiiY), and he,
springing up from the ineffable and unbeginning Godhead, issues
1410p. cit. I, 2 (14).
142Ibid. 4 (15).
1430pitz Urk III. NO·3 (4-6); again, these extracts are taken from the Acta of
Nicaea II.
1440p. cit. 1 (4).
145Ibid. 2 (5); as proofNtext Eusebius quotes a conflation ofJohn 6:44 and 14:28,
'the Father who sent me is greater than 1'. known elsewhere from Origen, Arnobius
and others.
146Ibid. 3 (5).
1471bid. 4, 5 (6).
57
 The O,igins The Ea,ly Suppo,ters of A,ius

forth from the place above the heaven and all that is within heaven, "p6, ttl and not ontological (0\\"100,,,,).153 This looks like an indirect
shining with the rays of wisdom greater than those of the sun'.148 but deliberate rejection of the Creed of Nicaea.
Against these signs of a slide towards Arianism we can set one or
Impressive though this statement sounds, it means that the Son is a
two observations. Eusebius never gives any sign of sharing the Arian
mediator not by virtue of the Incarnation but by virtue of his position
doctrine that the Son's knowledge of the Father is limited. On the
in relation to (one can hardly say within) the Godhead. Origen could
con~rary, at one point he says 'since for the Son the knowledge was
in fact have endorsed this statement. A very similar remark occurs a
available of the name of the Godhead of the mysterious and
little further on, where Eusebius says that it would be 'neither pure
unnameable Father ... '154 He never argues from the limitations and
nor holy' for the supreme God to involve himself in 'corruptible
infirmities of the incarnate Word to the inferiority of his divinity.
material and the body' ,149 But Eusebius carries his doctrine of
Though, as we have seen, us he thinks of the Father as the God of the
mediatorship much further. In his Cont,a Marcellurn at one point he
Son and represents the Son as praying to him, in one place he says that
remarks that a mediator must partake of the side of neither of the
the incarnate Son prayed as man and answered as GOd;156 and he
parties between whom he is mediating but stand in the middle
consistently rejects the doctrine that the Son was produced from non-
between them. In two texts Christ is described as mediator between
existence, even in his late works;157 and though he certainly believes
God and angels (Gal 3:19, 20) and as mediator between God and man
that the Son is a creature, he always refuses 'ld put him on a level with
(I Tim 2:5); 'so he should be thought of as neither the supreme God
other creatures. The argument of Athanasius of Anazarbus about the
nor as one of the angels.'150 At one point in the Ecclesiastical Theology
parable of the Lost Sheep15. would not have appealed to him.
he describes God as 'incomprehensible, illimitable and
We cannot accordingly describe Eusebius as a formal Arian in the
unapproachable' and the Son as in contrast 'he who draws near to
sense that he knew and accepted the full logic of Arius, or of Asterius'
everybody.'1s1
position. But undoubtedly he approached it nearly. Starting off from
That Eusebius is significantly silent in his last works on the
a pOSlt1on .of what .m,ght be called modified Origenist theology (i.e.
hornoousios has already been noticed., s2 This is not particularly
Ongen WIthout hIS doctrme of the pre-existence of souls, of a pre-
. significant in itself. Even Athanasius for about twenty years after
mundane Fall and of the constitution of the Word incarnate), he
N~aea is strangely silent about this adjective which had been
gradually moved towards a theological stance which could be called
formally adopted into the creed of the Church in 325; but in one
modified Arianism. Eusebius' experience was a demonstration of
passage in his Commentary on the Psalms Eusebius insists that the
what could happen if one side of Origen's thought was developed
connec.tion of the Son with the Father is one of relationship (OX'",,;
w.thout the balance of the other Sides of that many-sided theologian's
doctrine being preserved.
148Laus Canst. 1.6. Cf. Schwartz Gesamm. 8thr. 6.124.
149 Laus Canst. I I. 12; cf. 12.6.
15°Con. Marc. 1.1.8. Marcellus apparently,saw Eusebius' weakness here and
attacked him for it. See Con. Marc. 1.4.29-3°. .
ISIEu. Theol. I~.17.I2I. Sever.a! other texts in this vein could be quoted. e.g.
1.13.73; Theophania I.5. Cf. Gencke, Marcellus lion Ancyra 90-102. The passages
adduced by Lee, the translator of the Syriac version of the Theophania into English,
at Yheoph. 11.3 do not prove that Eusebius was orthodox according to pro-Nicene
st~ndards, but that he placed the generation of the Son before the ages, which. as has
now perhaps been made clear, is not the same thing. At one point in the Comm. on 153Comm. on Psalms on Ps 30 (29): I I (PG 23: 264).
the Psalms Eusehius connects mediatorship with the Incarnation rather than with the 154Comm. on Psalms on Ps 9:2 (23:1]2).
Son's position in relation to God (on Ps 68 (67): 5. PG 23: 685. 688). But this single 155See above, pp. SO.
example can hardly offset the other passages which show that he placed lS6Comm, on Psalms on Ps 16 (IS): 2 (23'156)
mediatorship in the Son's status rather than in his taking flesh. 157E.g. Eu. Theol. 1.9,67; 10.69. "
152See above, P.56. 158See above, Pp.42-43.

58 59

3 the Father, can we see any influence on Adus from Novatian, whose
The Antecedents of Arius
I. Possible Predecessors
A very large number of names have been suggested as predecessors of
Arius, though it cannot be said that the world of scholarship has
decided unanimously, nor even by a majority, on any. Wolfson in his
The Philosophy of the Christian Fathers suggested that Philo may have.
been a former of Arius' thought. because he too taught two Logoi,
and the creation of one of them ex nihilo, and the incomparability of
God. But then, Wolfson was obsessed to an excessive degree with the
influence of Philo on the fathers; Philo's Logos-doctrine is confused
and obscure; he does not make the same division between the Logos
and God as did the Arians. We cannot claim Philo as an ancestor of
Arius' thought. 1 There is even less to -be said for suggesting that
Clement of Alexandria, who borrowed so widely from Philo, was a
predecessor of Arius. He may have described the Logos as a creature
(klisma), but if so this was not in Arius' sense; his two Logoi are quite
. different from those of Arius; and in several passages he asserts the
eternity of the Son. 2 There are some resemblances to Gnostic
doctrines in Arius' thought. Basilides is very likely the thinker
responsible for the concept of the world being created out of the non-
existent. Ptolemy stressed the father as the sole unoriginate
(agennetos) in contrast to the Demiurge who is originated (gennetos).
Both he and Arius describe the high God as 'the superior' (kreitton) in
relation to the second God (Demiurge in Ptolemy). But these
resemblances are either too general or refer to terms used for different
things in the two authors. Arius several times rejects the favourite
Gnostic concept of the 'issue' or 'emanation' (probote) of beings, from
God. His application of the word gnosis to himself in what appear to
, the hu~an body: that he misled people because of his worldly and philosophical
ISO Lorentz. Arius Iudaizans?, 103-106, rightly.
2S0 Lorentz again, op. cit. 100-106, where relevant passages are quoted.
60
The Antecedents of Arius
be the opening lines of the Thalia cannot be pressed? Any suggestion
that Arius may have been reacting from the theology of Tertullian
can he dismissed, 4 nor, in spite ofhis open subordination of the Son to
emanationist language would have shocked Arius had he known of
it.5
When we come to consider the influence of Odgen on Arius,
however, we· meet a much more complex subject. Marcellus of
Ancyra, in attacking Asterius'and Narcissus ofNeronias, Eusebius of
Caesarea and Paulinus ofTyre, had accused them of being under the
baleful influence of Origen. 6 He criticized Origen for being too
much under the influence of philosophy, for imitating Plato in his
title Peri Archon, and for reproducing a phrase of Plato's Gorgias in his
Peri Archon (Corgias 454 DE and Peri Archon I (praef.)), all rather
childish charges, as Eusebius says.' But he also blamed Origen for
following his own inclinations in attributing a second hypostasis to
the Logos.8 Epiphanius directly connects Origen with Arianism. He
makes several charges against Origen not relevant to Arianism, 9 but
he also declares that the Arians and Anhomoians learnt from Origen.
Origen taught in the Peri Archon that the Son cannot see the Father
nor the Spirit the Son nor angels the Spirit nor men angels; 10 he
refused to allow that the Son is from the ousja of the Father, for he is
altogether alien (aU.6tpwv) from the father, created, and only a Son
by grace. 11 He quotes a passage from Odgen's Commentary on Psalm
3See Lorentz. op. cit. 119-22 .
4S0 Ritter' Arianismus', 695; cf. Prestige God in Patristic Thought, 220-221.
5See Loafs 'Das Nicanum', 72-'75; for Novatian's subordinationism cf. De
Trinitate (Loi) 18, 103; 27. 152.
6Euseb~us of Caesa rea, ~ont~a ~ar,ellu~ 1.4. 17. 18 (752). Paulinus had apparently
quoted WIth approval Ongen s view (whIch Was endorsed by Arius) that the Father
had not produced the Son as an 'issue' (problema), in the way in which animals and
humans procreate (ibid. 1.4.19 (Fr. 29). 21, 2Z (Fr. 30) (757-'758).
7Ibid. 1.4.21, 22 (76ot61) (Frag. 78). .
8Ibid. 1.4.22 (7~~) .(Frag. ~2). Methodius had of course in the early years of the
fourth century cnticized Ongen severely. and rather obtusely (see Methodius De
Resurrect~one (ed. G. ~. Bonwets~h), and.A. Vitores, Identidad entre el Cuerpo Muerto
y Re~uSCltado en Ongenes) for his doctrlnes of the resurrection body and of the
etemtty of souls. In several respects Methodius was an Origenist himself For
Methodius see also below pp.83-:-84. .
9E.g. that he did not belie~e in the resurrection of the body, had a 'low opinion of
educatIon. Pananon 64·12,1-62,15 (421-499); 64.65.5 (505) and 64.72.5 (523).
tOPanarion 64.4.3 (410).
llIbid.4.
61
 The Origins
1,known to us already from the Philocalia (Robinson 1.3 0 , pp. 3S,
36), to demonstrate that Origen taught that the Son was a creature, of
which the most suspect part runs as follows: 'so that you might
approach and pray to the God and Father of all through our Saviour
and High-priest,. the originated God' (,oii y&v'l,oii a&oii).'2
Epiphanius admits that this is susceptible of an orthodox
interpretation. but asserts that it could not be so because Origen often
declared 'that the only-begotten God is alien from (ulta....o'p'oiina)
the Father's Godhead and substance' (ousia),13 and he insists that to
say that the Son is Y&V1],6v (geneton) is not the same as to say that he is
y&vv'l,6v (genneton).14
Many scholars have regarded Arian ideas in a vague and wholesale
way as an inheritance from Origen's doctrine. 1S Some have
conjectured that Origen had no influence on Arius himself, however
Origenism may have affected the doctrine of later Arians, ,. while
others have countered this argument. 17 Alexandria has been thought
to be the scene of both champions and opponents ofOrigen's ideas
just before the Arian controversy broke out." It is easy to pick out
certain points where the ideas of Origen and Arius coincided and
others on which they markedly differed. They both used the term
1'2Ibid. 64.j.1I-'7.4 (415-417). quotation from 64·7·4 (417).
1364.8.1.2 (4 17).
1464:8.4.5 (417) Jerome. of course, also accused Origen of Arian proclivities. but
his attack falls just outside our 'period.
15SO Harnack, History of Dogma Ill.13? f., IV.3ff.; Prestige, God in Patristic
Thought, 116 and '6;ytv[V]l1'tOC; and rev[v]11't6C; and kindred words in Eusebius and
the early Arians', 487 (where he speaks of the '''semi-Arian'' (!) or old-fashioned
orthodox Origenist position'); Loofs 'Arianismus', 9, 2); Klein, Konstantius II, 19;
and even Kannengiesser, Colloquy 41, 4·
16Pollard 'The Origins of Arianism', 106, 107; Kannengiesser Colloquy 41,31-34
(a fine demonstration that at least in his doctrine of the Trinity Arius owed nothing
to Origen).
17Wiles, Working Papers, 28-32.
18S 0 Wiles; op. cit. and Barnard 'Antecedents of Arius·. 172-187. Simonetti,
Crisi 21 n. 64, discusses and to some extent discounts these views. It is clear that Peter
of Alexandria attacked some ofOrigen's ideas but nl?ne that could have reference to
Arius' main preoccupation, the relation of the Son to the Father: Peter repudiated
Origen's allegorical interpretation of Scripture (Procopius Comm. in Genesis 3.21).
he denied the pre-existence of souls (Routh, Reliquiae Sacrae IV.48. 49) and he
rejected Origen's denial of the material identity of the resurrection body with the
earthly body (Pitra, Analecta Sacra IV.187-194). The evidence is usefully
summarized by Barnard 'Antecedents of Arius', 183; cf Radford. Theognostus,
Pierius and Peter, 72-86.
62
The Antecedents of Arius
epinoia to describe aspectS of the function of the Son/Logos,'9 though
it is not clear that both used the word in precisely the same sense.
They are 'structures of knowledge' ('Erweisstrukturen', Lorentz, 83)
of the second hypostasis of the Godhead, whereby the Son declares
and reveals himself. But Origen distinguishes between epinoiai which
belong to the Logos in· himself and in his relation to God on the one
hand, and on the other those which he p()ssesses in and for his relation
to men. Arius made no such distinction; the epinoiai of the Logos exist,
as the Logos himself exists, only for the sake of the human
understanding of the divine. 20 Both Origen and Arius rejected the
view that the Son is produced by the Father as an 'issue' (ltp6~"'ll1a
prolatio), though Arius attributed this doctrine to Mani who had not
become prominent in Origen's ·day.21 We can see the same idea
reflected in Paulinus of Tyre's approval ofOrigen's rejection of the
concept of 'issue' (see note 6 above). We can note also that both
Origen and Arius described the Son as a 'creature' (ktisma). But here
we encounter a difficulty. It is indeed pretty clear, in spite of the
efforts ofRufinus in his translation of the Peri Archon to disguise the
fact, and of those of Jerome to exaggerate it, that Origen did in the
Peri Archon describe the Son both as 'having come into existence'
(y&v'l,6<;) and as a 'creature' (K<icrl1a), at a period when nobody
distinguished 'having come into existence' (Y&Vij,6<;) from 'begotten'
(YSVV'l,6<;).22 For Origen ltoi&w (to make) was an appropriate word
19At least one document is known to have used this word in the period between
Origen's death and the advent of Arius, the Letter of Hymenaeus; see R. P. C. Hanson
Tradition in the Early Church, 82. 83; incidentally it is worth noting that this letter
uses ousia to mean 'individual entity' (later hypostasis). The text of the Letter of
Hymenaeus can be found in Bardy, Paul de Samosate. 9-34. Cf also the remarkable use
of epinoia in the fragment of a work of Gregory ofThaumaturgus given us by Basil,
Ep 210.5; the Father and Son are E1tlvoiq. ~v 560; oJtoo'too£1.liE gv.
20S0 Lorentz. Arius Iudajzans? 81-8). He points out. that in his Hom. on Jeremiah
8.2 Origen gives a kind of definition of epinoia: 'to!lAv 61COU{p.evov gv tony; 'taic; liE
t1tlvoiulI; ta xOAM ov6...u'ta txt lharp6poov EO"1'1.V.
21See Peri Archon 1.2.4 (118); 2.) (122); IV.4 (28) (400). non enim dicimus, sicut
haeretici putant, partem aliquem substantiae Dei infilium versam, where Rufinus appears
to be reproducing Origen's sense adequately, though hardly his words. The rest of
the semence repudiates Arian doctrine much too precisely to be the original views of
Origen rather than the elaboration of Rufinus.
2ZAt Peri Archon 1.2.2 (Crouzel and Simonetti Traite I, II2, II4) Rufmus' long
paraphrase probably disguises the fact that Origen applied the word lCti~1.V to the
Logos; so Simonetti Studi, 23 (Lorentz, Arius Iud. 69 however defends Rufinus'
integrity here); and at Peri Archon IV.4. I (28) (402) the Greek preserved by Justinian
is probably correct in representing Origen as applying ktisma to the Son; so
 The Origins
to apply to the production of everything invisible and spiritual,
whereas It).Ii''''SIV (to mould) was the correct term to use for the
creation of whatever is visible and material. 23 The Son could
therefore be described as 'made' in this sense. But at the same time he
declares his belief in the eternity of the Son as a distinct entity from
the Father, even in the Peri Archon,24 and frequently elsewhere in his
works. For Origen the Logos/Wisdom is coeternal with God, and he
only calls him a creature because in him God had formed the ideas of
future creation and of all creatures." This is a very different concept
from Arius' doctrine of a· Son who is created at a certain point,
though apparently before time, who did once not exist, who is the
highest of the creatures but still part of creation rather than within the
Godhead. Again Origen, with Arius, can be said to have
subordinated the Son to the Father. But to say this is to say little.
There is no theologian in the Eastern or the Western Church before
the outbreak of the Arian Controversy, who does not in some sense
regard the Son as subordinate to the Father?" Origen has no
hesitation in saying that the Son is not 'greater' (luxup6tepov) than
the Father but is 'subordinated' (~ltOOeE(Jtspov) to him,27 and can
adduce John 14:28 ('the Father is greater than 1') to show that the
Father comprehends the Son (and not vice ve,sa) and that the Father
knows himself better than the Son knows him. 2 ' But this
subordination is still a subordination within a graded Godhead so that
the distinct Persons share the same nature. This is widely different
from Arius' scheme of a Son created at some point by the Father for
Simonetti Studi 23. 24; see note on this in Crouzel and Simonetti (Traite IV.9.
2'42-246). For Origen's use of'Y£V1l't6~ see Crouzel and Simonetti Traite I lntrod ..
02-0 3.
23S0 Origen explains Comm. on John XX.22.
241.2.10 (132. 138); IV.4.1 (28) (402); cf. Gregory Thaumaturgus, whose Expositio
(Hahn Bibliothek deT Symbole 253-255) dearly declares the eternity of the Son. but
who (according to Basil. Epistle 210.5) could. elsewhere. call the Son K'tiO"llu and
Tto{T1J.1u.
2sThis is clearly enough expressed in Peri Archon 1.2.2 (112, 114) and in Comm. on
John, frag. I; see Lorentz op. cie. 69.
26See Crouzel and Simonetti Traite Vol. I Introd .. 34-40,11. 13-1 5 (on Peri Archon
P,.ef. 4 (81)).
27Comm. in John 14; 28. See the remarks upon this passage in Crouzel and
Simonetti, op. cie.ll. n. 2 (74. 75), in connection with Peri Archon 1.3. 7 (160) (where,
it seems to me. Rufinus has certainly tampered with the original).
28Peri ArcJlOn IV.4.IO (37) (428) where Justinian seems to have preserved a
fragment of the original Greek. But see the remarks ofCrouzei and Simonetti Traite
IV.64 (263-266). and below, pp.69-70.
The Antecedents of Arius
the specific purposes of creation, revelation and redemption; who is
external to the supreme Father and of a different constitution from
his.
On the other hand, there are several points where Arius diverged
entirely from Origen's though\ and some where in spite of superficial
resemblances they are in fact wide apart. The most striking is on the
subject of the human soul of the incarnate Word. This human soul of
Jesus (which of course in Origen's view existed eternally before the
Incarnation, as did all souls) plays a large and crucial part in Origen's
theology of the Incarnation,29 whereas Arius' contemporaries and
successors and, as I have argued above (pp. 25-26), in all probability
Arius himself, following his master Lucian of Antioch, strenuously
and steadily denied that the incarnate Word had any human soul at
all. Another marked difference is presented by Origen's doctrine of
the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, which is an essential
part of the whole structure of his theology, so well instanced that it
needs no illustration. Arius' concept of the production of the Son by
the Father is totally removed from this doctrine. Indeed, in his earliest
letter to Eusebius ofNicomedia, he attacks Alexander of Alexandria
for teaching precisely this doctrine, to the point of parodying it.30
Though we may doubt the exact accuracy ofRufinus' words non est
autem quando non foerit 31 as too precisely contradicting in advance
Arius' 'there was a time when he did not exist', we cannot doubt that
Origen's 'whole system of doctrine repudiated such a thought.
On three points the evidence for Origen's influence on Arius is
difficult to determine. The first is that concerning the will of God.
Origen certainly taught that the will of the Father supports the
existence of the Son: natus ex eo est velut quaedam voluntas eius ex mente
p,ocedens, et ideo ego a,bit,o, quod sufficere debeat voluntas pat,is ad
subsistendum hoc quod vult pater." Origen prefers the image of will
proceeding from the mind and that oflight proceeding from the sun
29The doctrioe even occurs in Peri Archon, which is not much concerned with the
Incarnation, 11.6.3 (316).
300pitz, Urk III No. I. 2 (1-2).
31 Peri Archon 1.2.9 (130); comment ofCrouzel and Simonetti 11 . .55 (48). The non
quando non erat ofComm. on Romans 1.5, cited by Crouzel and Simonetti, is ofcourse
the rendering ofRufinus also; I cannot agree with Lorentz's acceptance ofRufinus'
direct contradiction of actual Arian terms, op. cit. 70, 71.
32Per; Archon 1.2.6 (122), 'he has been born from him like some volition
proceeding from the mind, and I think that the will of the Father should be eoough
to sustain that which the Father wills.'
 The Origins
as the best model for the production of the Son." But this
production is a production within the Godhead, so to speak, not
external to it. Odgen is concerned to avoid all suggestion of
anthropomorphic or corporeal ideas in connection with the
generation of the Son. as is Arius, but in Origen's case it is a
generation within the Godhead which involves an imparting of the
nature of the Father, whereas in Arius' scheme the Son is a pure
product of an act of will of the Father which produces a Son external
to him, no partaker of his nature. Arius certainly held that the Son
follows his Father's will simply of his own choice and volition, but
Origen is not clear as to whether the Son is the Father's will or simply
obeys the Father's will. Arius may have followed one side of Origen
here. 34
The second point concerns the terms hypostasis and ousia. At a later
point in this work 35 these two words ·will be examined more
thoroughly. For Origen the words ~,,6CTta<n, (hypostasis),
~"oK£ll1evov (hypokeimenon) and o~"la (ousia) are all synonyms for the
same thing - distinct individual entity.36 He seldom or never uses
ousia to mean essence or substance. Thus he can argue against the
view that the Logos is not separate in hypostasis or ousia from the
Father in Comm. onJohn 1.24 and II.23. He can say in De Oratione 15.1
that the Son is 'different in ousia' (ftepOC;Ka<' ol",lav) from the Father,
meaning that he is a distinct entity from the Father, and in
Comm. on John XX.IS he can deny that the Son is 'derived from the
ousia' (SK <ii, o~"la,) of the Father, i.e. he does not diminish the Father
by subtracting from him, a conviction which Arius is equally anxious
to maintain. 37 His statement in Comm. onJohn 1I.23 (IS) that the Son
33S0 Peri Archon IV.4.I (28) (401).
34S0 Lorentz, Arius Iud. 79-SI. He cites Hom. in Jeremiah 9.4; Comm. in john
XX.23; Peri Archon 1.2.9 (C and S II, 128, 130), the Logos is vigor ipse in propria
subsistentia eJfectus quamvis ex ipsa virtute velut voluntas ex mente procedat tamen et ipsa
voluntasDei nihilominus Dei virtus r:fficitur (where Origen appears to be ready to have
it both ways), and IV .4. I (C and S IV.402), where the Greek fragment describes the
Son as born of the will of the Father and as the image of the invisible God and
6:n:a6'Yaa~a of his 61t6c:naal~, but also as rncr~a.
35See below, pp. ISI-go. A concise account of these terms in Origen is given by
D. Pazzini, In Principio era il Logos pp. 72, 73, n IS.
36'A more or less metaphysical term for "independent object"', Prestige, God in
Patristic Thought, 17g.
37Much of the material of this survey of the subject is drawn from two fme
reviews ofit by Simonetti, Crisi, I I-I 3. and Lorentz, Arius ludaizans?, 72-77. They
agree on the main points but differ in some details. Lorentz (op. cit. 73) calls
attention to Comm. injohn fragment 9 where Origen is represented assaying that the
.66
The Antecedents of Arius
'does not differ' (&1.£CJtTlKtvat) in ousia from the F.ather does not of
course mean that the ousiai of the Father and Son are identical; the
subsequent passage makes it perfectly clear (even if nothing else did)
that they are distinct. But Origen means that they are not unlike, not
of different natures. Origen does not like the concept of three
hypostases united in one substance, as too much verging towards Stoic
materialism, so he substituted for this a model ofintellectual or noetic
generation producing hypostases of different sorts, divine, angelic and
human, the divine distinguished from the rest by possessing
immutable existence not subject to the change which is induced by
the operation of freewill. The Father had the basic principle of
existence (arche), the Son shared this by participation (metousia), and
the Holy Spirit by mediation from the Son." But where Origen was
not restricted by the needs of controversy, he preferred a more
dynamic picture in which the Trinity is the creative and good
potentiality (dynamis), so that in this concept he could interpret the
Son as the activity of God, God-who-acts. 39 Origen never says that
the Son comes from the substance" of the father;40 but in Peri Archon
1.2.6 (122) he says (if we can trust Rufinus' translation) that the Son is
the image of the Father in such a way that 'he contains the unity of the
nature and substance of the Father and the Son'. The image of the
Father is formed in the Son who consequently is born from him like
an act of volition proceeding from the will. 41
Son is ElC 't~<; ot)<ria~ 'tou 1tatp6~. In fact Origen does not here directly say so, because
the first sentence of the fragment is a heading or comment of some collector or
scholiast. 'On the text "as of the only-begotten Father" he suggests that it should be
understood that the Son is from the Father's substance (GlC t~~ oilcrla<; tOU 1tatp6~)'.
The rest is presumably a quotation of Origen's words and does not mention the
ousia of the Father. It is most improbable that Origen said that the Son is GlC t~~
oilaia<; of the Father. For i!.t&po<; lCat' ouaiav see Prestige God in Patristic Thought
Introd. XXVII.
38Peri Archon 1.1.5 (96, 9S); 1.9 (r08, 110); 2.10 (136,138) and 13 (140, 142); 5.3
(IS2) and 5 (192): 6.2 (198); 8.3 (226); III. 6.7 (250, 252); Comm. in john 11.2; XIlI.
23-25.
39Peri Archon 1.4.3 (168, 170); Comm. injohn XIlI.6; Contra Celsum 8.S; Comm. in
Canticum Canticorum Prologue (p.69 ed. Baehrens).
4°Grillmeier, CCT, 160 n. 28 cites as the passages where Origen says that the Son
comes ElC t~C; ouaiac; of the Father Comm. injohn frag 9 (where I have shown, n37
above, that Origen does not say this), and Comm. in Romans 4.10 (where we cannot
trust Rufmus' translation on so delicate a point).
41The Latin for the quotation is: (quae imago) etiam naturae ac substantiae patris et
filii continet unitatem. A very similar statement appears in IV.4.1 (28) (401,402); 1.5.3
(r82); and IV.4.9 (422, 424, 426) set forth a single unalterable divine nature for all
 The Or~gins
The foregoing account should have made it clear that the
likelihood of Origen having described the Son as consubstantial
(6~oot)cno<;) with the Father is very slim. This might have committed
him to saying that he had the same ousia as the Father, a view which
he actually disowned, and would have suggested to him that the
Father and the Son were of the same material, an idea which he was
anxious to avoid. The only evidence for Origen having applied this
word to the Son comes from a hypothetical work on the Epistle to
the Hebrews by Origen which Rufinus alleged Pamphilus to have
quoted in his Apology for Origen. No one except Rufinus ever refers
to or, as far as can be ascertained, knew of the existence of the work.
and when Jerome suggests that Rufinus invented it we are inclined to
believe him. The subject has been examined fully elsewhere by me
and by other scholars.'2 One point only needs to be added, the
significant silence of Athanasius upon the ·stibject. Athanasius in De
Decretis 27.1-3 (23, 24) refers to Origen, enlisting him among those
who taught that the Father was never without the Son. This would
have been a most suitable place to refer to the fact that Origen had
applied homoousios to the Son, and the point would have been all in
Athanasius' favour, for Athanasius never shows any_ hostility to
Origen.'3 Vet he says nothing about it. Clearly Athanasius did not
know of this work on the Epistle to the Hebrews. Arius, in short,
recognizes three distinct hypostases, and he may have had this doctrine
as a legacy, direct or indirect, from Origen, but the conception of
their relationship to each other is quite different in each writer." The
union and common nature of three entities as envisaged by Origen
three p'~rspns. That Rufmus is not embroidering in these passages is shown by
Origen's words at Comm. in John XIX.2, {) uomlP ... 5Ial..t'YE'tal 5te lis cbr; 1tepi
9E10t&par; 1P6Ge~ lCai flvroj.t.&V11r; 'tij d'Y£V11't<P tali 1tatpO~ /pUG£I,
42See R. P. C, Hanson 'Did Origen apply the word homoousios to the Son?',
Studies 53-'70. which deals with this much-contested point. J. N. D. Kelly (Early
C.hristian Creeds (19723), 245) has.meanwhile added himself to the champions of the
view that 0rigen did apply the word to the Son, and E. P. Meijering (Orthodoxy and
Platonism in Athanasjus 195) and R. Klein (Constantius II. 25 n 73) have joined those
who oppose it.
~3Ep .. ad Serap 4.9: w~ere. a court,eous reference i,s made to Origen tholl;gh the
wrtter differs from him, IS nOt certamly by AthanaslUs; of Roldanus 'Le Christ er
J'I:Iomme', 152-153; Kannengeisser Colloquy 41; also H. Saake, 'La Norian de la
Trinite' in PTAA 295. who recognizes the uncertainty of the authorship of the
passage.
44~e say th~ee ~yposiases. ~ut we know so little of Acius' views on the Spjrit that
the,re IS no pomt In companng Origen's doctrine of the Holy Spirit with that of
Anus.
68
The Antecedents of Arius
has no place in Arius' thought. That Origen does not use homoousios
of the Son's relation to the Father is no proof that Arius inherited
from Origen his antipathy to this w()rd.
The third point where the evidence ofOrigen's influence on Arius
is difficult to determine is the knowledge of the Father possessed by
the Son. Arius had, of course, decided that this was limited according
to the limited capacity of the Son. Origen has a number of statements
which seem to give support to this view. At Peri Archon 1.1.8 (106,
108) Origen declares roundly that no one can see God, nor ever has
seen hiin, not even the Son, but that seeing and knowing are two
different things; of course the Son knows the Father. This statement
that the Father is not visible to the Son is repeated at 11+3 (286) in a
passage which Rufinus has probably a little altered. And at IV + 10
(428) occurs a much more explicit statement which survives in a
Greek fragment. preserved inJustinian's letter to Mennas. It runs thus:
'If the Father comprehends (.~nep(ex..) all things, and the Son is
among all things, it is clear that· (he comprehends) the Son also.
Someone else will enquire whether it is true that God is known by
himself exactly as he is known by the Only-begotten, and it will
appear that the text "the Father who sent me is greater than 1"45 is true
in all respects so that in the matter of knowing the Father is known by
himself more fully (1) and more clearly and more perfectly than (he is
known) by the Son.'
Here no doubt the authentic Origen speaks, undoctored by Rufinus.
But we must not rush to the conclusion that the concept of the Son's
knowledge of the Father was identical in Origen and in Arius.
Origen's subordinationism compelled him to limit thus the Son's
knowledge of the Father, but if we ask, what sort of participation or
union did this imply, we find a very different picture. For Arius the
Son participates in the Father, but by appointment (eta,,) not by
nature (cpo".. ), he is united by will and grace but his participation is
accidental or adventitious (Ka<" en'Il&~'lK6<;) not substantial (Kae'
ao<6). Origen agrees that the union of Father and Son is a moral,
volitional one, so that they are one 'in harmony and in agreement and
4SThe text is a conflation (quite well known elsewhere) of John XII: 49 and
XIV:28; the expression 'more fully' a few line.s later has a question mark placed after
it because the text is corrupt at that point. Rufinus' translation carefully removes the
dangerous material in this passage; this is only one of many indications that he
deliberately altered Origen's text in translating the Peri Archon.
 The Origins
in the identity of will.'" But this participation of will is also, and
thereby, a participation in God's immutable goodness which is his
essence. 47 And elsewhere Origen envisages the Son gaining his
Godhead by contemplating the Father in a much.deeper and superior
way to that in which even Moses or any mortal could achieve
divinization. 48 This is much more than adventitious or external
participation such as Arius envisaged.
This survey of the relation between the thought of Origen and that
of Arius, then, suggests that though Arius probably inherited some
terms and even some ideas from Origen, whether by direct
acquaintance with his works or indirectly, he certainly did not adopt
any hirge Or significant part ofOrigen's theology. We would not-be
justified in saying that Origen explained Arius in any but
comparatively minor details. 49
Many scholars have conjectured that the views of Paul of
Samosata, or at least of his school, must have influenced Arius. 50
Lorentz in particular in his Arius Iudaizans? has spent considerable
ingenuity in drawing out the resemblances between.the views ofPaul
and those of Arius. 51 He sees no less than nine points of resemblance,
of which the chief are that the Son did not always exist, and is less than
the Logos, that the Son's union with God is by way ofleaming and
not ontological, that the Son existed before all time in the
460vta. 560 'tij 6nOO"taa&l 1tpaYllu-ra, ev M tfj 6llovo{q Kat 1'ij O'ullqJoov{q Kai tij
tuu.6'tlltl toG ~oui.:ill.1atOr; Contra Celsum 8.12. The phrase is echoed in the Second
Creed of Antioch 341. See below, pp. 286--9.
47Peri Archon 1.2.10 (134-136 and esp. 1]5-136). 13 (140-142), S. 3 (178-182).
Lorentz; in an otherwise admirable passage (op. cit. 76--78), insists upon writing as if
in each of.th~se passages Origen referred to the Son sharing the Father's ousia; but of
course we cannot conclude this because we only have here Rufinus' translation. It
seems to me highly like1y that Origen used the adjective 00(nOO511<; in more than one
of these passages, but that he did not refer to the Son sharing the Father's ousia,
which would have meant for him a sharing of the Father's hypostasis.
48Comm. on John XXIl.27.
49Lorentz, Arius Iudaizansl, concludes that the resemblance did not extend much
beyond the use of some common terms. For further consideration of this question,.
see R, P. C. Hanson, 'Did Origen teach that the Son is ek tes ousias of the Father?',
and 'The Influence ofOrigen on the Arian Controversy' in Origeniana Quarta (ed.~.
Lies) 201-2 and 410-23.
sOThe main works on Paul of Samosata are F. Loofs, Paulus v<!n Samosata (Leipzig
1924); G. Bardy, Paul de Samosate (Louvain 1929); and H. de Riedmatten. Les Actes
de Procts de Paul de Samosate (Freibourg 1952). Alexander of Alexandria had
connected Arius with Paul (through Lucian); see Opitz Urk III No. 14.25 (35).
5tOp. cit. 128-135.
70
The Antecedents of Arius
foreknowledge of God, that the Father alone is God, the Son only so
through grace. Several scholars have taken the same line, assuming
that Paul taught a kind of Adoptianism and opposed any ontological
union of the Son with Father, e.g. Prestige, who attempts too
characteristically to harmonize all the sources, 52 Boularand,53 and
Gregg and Groh. 54 The situation is complicated by the fact that the
word homoousios was used in the arguments which ended in the
deposition of Paul, though for what purpose and in whose favour it is
not easy to determine. 55 It is worth noting that some writers take
Paul to be the intellectual ancestor of a school of thought much
opposed to Arianism, that of Eustathius of Antioch and Marcellus of
Ancyra' 6 Most recently, Rowan Williams believes that the type of
doctrine taught by Paul of Samosata would have appeared to be
Sabellianism to Arius: 'the divine Logos is "internal" to the Father's
substance and does not subsist in any other way; between Jesus of
Nazareth and the divine principle of rationality there is no
intermediary subsistent, no heavenly Son or hypostatic Word. '57
It certainly seems that if we can reconstruct the teaching of Paul at
all, his doctrine is more likely to have been the inspiration of
Eustathius and Marcellus than of Arius. Arius believed firmly in a
pre-existent Son allied in some sense to the Logos, but apparently for
Paul the Son was Jesus Christ the historical figure without any pre-
existent history at all. And the stock accusation made against Paul by
all ancient writers who mention him from the ivth century onward
was that he declared Jesus to be no more than a mere man ('VIM<;
livepro1to~), whereas this is an idea which all Arian writers after Arius
(and, in my view, probably Arius himself) regularly rejected. There
are grave obstades to envisaging Paul as an ancestor of Arius. But in
fact we know very little with certainty about Paul ofSamosata. It is a
S2God in Patristic Thought, 115-116 and 200---209.
53L' Heresie d' Arius, 168-174.
54Early Arianism, p. 165.
sSThe use of the word in this controversy is considered at greater length below,
pp. 190-202. The primary original texts are Athanasius, De Sententia Dionysii and
De Synod,is 43.1-45.7.
56S 0 Sellers, Eustathius of Antioch, 8, Loofs 'Das Nicanum', 75-78 and A. M.
Ritter, 'Arianismus', 695. The cases of Eustathius and Marcellus are treated at
greater length below, cap. 8.
s7R. D. Williams 'The Logic of Arianism', 60; cf. 60-61; cf. ibid., 'Origen and
the Soul ofJesus', 133, where he states that Paul had two positive points, 'thatJesus
had a soul, and that cpe Logos was not a "part" of him.'
71
 The Origins
delicate task to disentangle from the fragmentary accounts which we
have any clear outline of his teaching. Any attribution ofinfiuence
from Paul of Samosata upon Arius must rest almost wholly upon
speculation. We would be best advised to follow the prudent
exam pIe of Grillmeier, and conclude, concerning the affair of Paul,
that 'the necessary critical conditions for its interpretation have not
yet been created. '58
Athanasius, in his De Sententia Dionysii (1.1-3 (46)) tells us that the
Arians of his day were adducing Dionysius of Alexandria as a great
authority in the past who supported their doctrine; it was indeed to
remove this slur on his predecessor in the see of Alexandria that
Athanasius wrote this work. That the Arians invoked the authority
of Dionysius is confirmed by Pseudo-Didymus of Alexandria (De
Trinitate III.S (S49)) who witnesses that the Arians against whom he is
writing use the very figure of the vine and the planter of the vine used
by J?ionysius as a model of the relation between the Son and the
Fatlrer. 59 Clearly Dionysius of Alexandria must be regarded as a
potential source for Arian doctrine and perhaps as' an influence on
Arius himself.·· Dionysius was bishop of Alexandria from 247/S to
264/5, succeeding Heraklas and his predecessor Demetrius both of
whom were open opponents of Origen. Dionysius was involved in
several controversies, but that which concerns us was his conflict with
certain people in Libya whom he suspected of S·abellianism. The
.sources for this affair are Athanasius, De Decretis and De Sententia
Dionysii and Basil of Caesarea, De Spiritu Sancto and Bp 9. Certain
terms which Dionysius had used in writing to those whom he
suspected of heresy caused his namesake, Dionysius of Rome, to
write a work against both Sabellius and the views of Dionysius of
Alexandria and also to address a letter of protest to the bishop of
Alexandria; all we know of these objectionable terms is what
SBCCT 165; Grillmeier (164-165) observes that Nautin has criticised de
Riedmatten's reconstruction of the matter, and has promise!! a new edition of the
fragments and a new account of his teaching. But neither has yet appeared.
59.See below, P.7"3: for a reference to Dionysius as a predecessor by an Arian
writer, see below, P.127.
6°The best modern edition of Dionysius of Alexandria is still C. L. Feltoe The
Remains oj Dionysius of Alexandria (1904), though it is not exhaustive. The best
modem work on this writer is W. A. Bienert Dionysius von Alexandrien (1978). See
also Barnard 'The Antecedents o( Arius', 176-179, Grillmeier CCT15j-159, Loofs,
'Arianismus' 9, H. Chadwick History and Thought ofthe Early Church XII, 175-179,
Simonetti Studi 27-29. and Lorentz Arius Iudaizansl, 94-100. . 65 23 . 1- 3 (62,63), the quotation from 3 (63).
72
The Antecedents of Arius
Athanasius and Basil quote from the letter of the bishop of Rome and
from the work which the bishop of Alexandria wrote, Refutation and
Defence (Blenchus kai Apologia), in reply to this protest. Those who
had called the attention of the bishop of Rome to these suspect
expressions of Dionysius of Alexandria charged him among other
errors with virtually refusing to apply the term homoousios to the
Son;61 Dionysius of Rome must have referred to this accusation in
his work, but his words have not survived. The opinions complained
of were conveyed in these words from Dionysius of Alexandria's
Letter to Buphranor and Ammonius (the anti-Sabellian work):
'the Son of God is a creature and generate (ltohUla Kai YEvY"j"t6v), and
he is not by nature belonging to' (q)\)CrEl 'io~ov) but is alien in ousia from
the Father, just as the planter of the ville is to the vine, and the ship-
builder to the ship; further because he is a creature (nohUla) he did not
exist before he came into existence (aUK nv npiv -y6VTJtQ.l).'
Athanasius defends Dionysius, though he admits that he wrote these
words, on the grounds that the circumstances, since he was
combating Sabellianism, justified such expressions, that when he
referred to the Son as a creature Dionysius meant only the Son's
human nature (a wildly improbable excuse), and that in a later work
Dionysius modified and withdrew many of these views. Dionysius,
he says, in his reply to the bishop of Rome wrote that the Son has
existed eternally and that there was no time when God was not a
Father, invoking the analogy of the sun and its inseparable ray; God is
a sun which never sets. 62 And he quotes a remarkable sentence from
this work: 'Thus we extend the Monad into an inseparable triad, and
we pack up (cruYKEq>a'-atoUJ.lE9a) the undiminished Triad again inio a
Monad.'63 D~onysius apologized for using 'two unsuitable
expressions' (i.e. vine-planter and ship-builder) and accepted the
term homoousios as applicable to the Son. 64 Later Dionysius made
much play with the analogy for the relation of the Son to the Father
of the relation of a word to a thought: 'the mind is like an immanent
word, and the word like a mind expressing itself.'·5 Elsewhere
Athanasius says that Dionysius allowed the. image of shoot from seed
61Athanasius De Sententia Dionysii 9.2 (52) and 10.1 (53).
62lbid. 15.1-6 (57).
"17·3 (58).
64 18.1-5 (59, 60).
73
 The Origins
and river from soutce to describe the relation of the Son to the
Father.·· Basil, in his letter Ep 9, is much more outspoken about
Dionysius of Alexandria, since the honour of his see is not involved.
He says that Dionysius unwittingly sowed the first seeds of the
Anhomoian error, by leaning too far in the opposite direction in his
anxiety to correct wrong Sabellian views. He maintained not oQ,ly
'the difference (almost 'incompatibility' t,"p6,~,a) of the hypostases,
but also the diversity of the ousia and the 'reduction of power and
variation of glory' (within the Trinity). And sometimes he rejects the
homoousion, because Sabellius used it incorrectly in denying· the
distinction of hypostases, but sometimes he accepted it, when he was
defending himself against the bishop of Rome. He also numbered the
Holy Spirit among created things.· 7 And in his De Spiritu Sancto
Basil says that Dionysius uses hypostases to mean, not ousia but
'separate beings. '68 Basil makes no mention of any expressions of
Dionysius which modify these doctrines, as Athanasius does.
Some have seen Dionysius as a straightforward disciple of
Origen,·9 presumably relying ·on Athanasius' account of his
doctrine. But there are strong grounds for rejecting this point of
view. Lorentz thinks that he was reverting to an earlier conception of
the immanent (endiathetos) and uttered (prophorikos) Word found in
the Apologists and in Clement of Alexandria,70 and· even to
Tertullian, but under the criticism ofDionysius of Rome he reverted
to Origen's doctrine. of the eternal generation of the Son. Bienert,
wpo ha's subjected the evidence to a very thorough examination,
con<;ludes that Dionysius, who according to Eusebius (HE V1.29)
took on the catechetical school at Alexandria when the anti-Origenist
Heraklas.was made bishop, was a partisan of Heraklas and an
opponent of Origen,though his attitude to Origen may have
mellowed later. 71 Bienert produces several pieces of evidence which
suggest that Dionysius did not sympathize with Origen's highly
sophisticated speculative doctrines, but employed a simpler, more
directly Biblical kind of doctrine which eschewed allegory and
represented Christ not as the impossible clairvoyant figure Origen
66De Decretis 26.I-S (20, 21).
67Epistles 9.2, I-IS, IS-2I, 23-31.
68De Spiritu Stlncto 29.72 (2OIb).
69E.g. Ritter, 'Arianismus', 697-698.
70 A,ius ludaizans? 96, 99-100.
71 Dionysius von Alexand,ien 106-108.
74
The Antecedents of Arius
depicted, but as one who suffered with us and aligned his will to the
Father to give us an example, but still remained God.72 His literary
work is rhetorical. not theological nor speculative, using the Bible as
a mine of modem examples, not as a mysterious source of deeper
theological meaning. Those who complained of his erroneous
doctrines to the bishop of Rome accused him of dividing the Father
from the Son, of denying the eternity of the Son, and, in the 'models'
put forth in the passage which we have already mentioned,
expounding the Son as the creature of the Father. 73 They particularly
disliked his doctrine of the existence of three hypostases. 74 It can
scarcely be denied, Bienert thinks, that Dionysius of Alexandria used
these very damaging examples of the vinedresser planting the vine
and the ship-builder making a ship, though he later refmed them by
using the model of a poet creating a word. In his reply to the bishop
of Rome, Dionysius said that he had rejected homoousios because it
did not occur in the Bible. He apparently took it to be equivalent to
6110cpu1i<; (of like nature) or 6110Y&v1i<; (of like kind), expressing the
likeness of essence between the Father and the Son. He must have
held a kind of Dynamic Monarchianism which tended strongly to
subordinate the Son. 75 It is clear that this was quite distinct from
Origen's theology. His later doctrine, expressed in his Rtfutation and
Defence, where his models are more refmed and carefully considered,
may have owed something to Origen's ideas. 76
However Dionysius may have refmed his later theology, it is
72Ibid. 111-131, and especially 12S-130.
7lIbid.707-2IL
74Loof5, 'Arianismus' 8, suggests that they thought the three hypostases implied
tritheism. Their solution was apparently to apply homoousios to the Persons (perhaps
the unius substantiae of Tertullian). Perhaps these people took hypostasis to mean
'substance', and perhaps Dionysius of Alexandria took ousia to mean 'individual
entity' .
75Bienert, op. cit. 207-21 I.
762-17-221. Luise Abramowski, in 'Dionys von _Rom und Dionys von
Alexandrien in der arianischen Streitigkeiten des 4 Jahrhunderts' has succeeded in
showing that much of Athanasius' account of the interchange between the two
bishops and the remarks upon it of Dionysius of Alexandria has been coloured by
the vocabulary of a later period and by the ideas of Athanasius himsel£ But whether
we can really identify behind this account a forged or re-worked document of
339/40 by an unknown writer, embodying ideas taken from both Marcellus of
Ancyra and Eusebius of Caesarea, must be regarded as uncertain. It is also hard to
imagine that she is correct in conjecturing that the criticisms of the bishop of
Alexandria by his namesake of Rome in the mid-third century had nothing to do
with a dispute about the use of homoousios.
75
 The Origins
impossible to avoid seeing some influence from his work in the
theology of Arius. The later Arians and Basil were right. The
damning passage quoted from 'his Ldter to Euphranor and Ammonius is
altogether too like the doctrine of Arius for us to regard it as
insignificant. A created Son and (at least in Arians after Arius) a Holy
Spirit who is not divine, not to mention reserve towards the use
homoou,io" are the marks of Arianism. If, as seems likely, Arius put
together an eclectic pattern of theology in order to attain the
particular ends which he had in mind, Dionysius of Alexandria
certainly· contributed to that pattern. 77
The period between the affair of Paul of Samosata and the first
works of Eusebius of Caesarea is almost a 'tunnel period' as far as
works by Eastern theologians are coricerned. Three names have
sometimes been suggested as representing Eastern theological views
during this dark period, those of Victorinus of Pettau, of
Theognostus and of Pierius. Victorinus, bishop of Petavium, a
Balkan see, wrote several works. only two of which have surived,
one De Fabrica Mundi and a kind of Commentary on the Apocalypse,
both written in bad Latin. He was martyred in the Diocletian
.persecution. Jerome says that he did not know Latin as well as he
knew Greek," and this is the only pretext for calling him an Eastern
theologian. He has sometimes been cited as evidence for the existence
Qf'Binitarianism', i.e. the belief in Father and Son but not the Holy
Spirit. in the third century, but this is a highly precarious
assumption. 79 His Rule of Faith shows no special feature which could
connect him with the views of Arius, but in his De Fabrica Mundi he
has the following curious statement about the Word: primus factus
creaturae est, secundus hominis < vel> humani generis, ut ait apostalus,80
which presumably should be translated 'he is made first of the
creation and 'second of man or of the human race', i.e. in relation to
creation first, in relation to the human race second (Col. 1:15; 1 Cor.
77Boularand, L' Heresie (J' A'rius 135-143, comes to the same conclusion. If we can
accept No.1 among the Exegetical Fragments of Dionysius printed by Feltoe as
authentic, then we must acknowledge that Dionysius actually wrote a work against
Origen, for the Fragment is headed 'From the work against Origen·.
78 De Viris Ilfustribus LXXIV.
79See R. P. C. Hanson. 'The Rule of Faith of Victorinus and of St. Patrick'
Studies 319-3 I. Victorinus has a particular interest in that the Rule of Faith which he
gives in his Commentary on the Apocalypse was certainly the basis for the Rule of Faith
of the ancient British Church.
8°8, II IO-I I (Haussleiter).
The Antecedents of Arius
15:47). One cannot, however, press this word factus far. It could be
translated 'he became' rather than 'he was made', and this would
remove· the term from any Arian associations. All that he says of the
Son's generation in his Rule of Faith is Iesum Christum ante originem
saeculi spiritaliter apud patrem genitum. 81 Among the very few. modem
of writers who refer to Victorinus, Zeiller hazarded the view (though
with no great confidence) that Victorinus was an Origenist and that
his doctrine may have contributed to the spread of Arianism in the
Danubian provinces. 82 But the evidence is not nearly strong enough
for us to be confident about these conclusions. Certainly we cannot
assume that Arius had read the works of this distant episcopal martyr.
Something is known about the views of Theognostus, whose
fio,"it Harnack placed between 247/8 and 280 in the edition which he
produced of the fragments of this writer. Photius (Bibliotheca. Cod.
106) gives an account of the main work ofTheognostus, Hypotypose"
which is very reminiscent of Origen's Peri Archon. In this accoWlt
Photius among other points accuses Theognostus of saying that the
Son was a creature ("'{Gj.la).84 A significant fragment quoted by
Athanasius (De Deeret 26.1-5 (20, 21» can be rendered thus:
'The ousia of the Son is not found to be something external nor was it
introduced from non-existence (tIC J.lTJ 6V'tCJ)v), but it was of the
Father's ousia, as the ray of the light, as the steam of water: for neither
the ray nor the steam is the water itself nor the sun itself nor external
(d).,).,6tP10V) to it, but an issue (dn6ppola) of the Father's ousia, since
the Father's ousia does not endure division. For as the sun remains the
same undiminished by the rays pouring from it. so the ousia of the
Father suffers' no change though it has the Son as its image.'
This passage echoes Arian concerns in insisting that the Father· is not
divided. but in other respects there are quite un-Arian views here,
such as the acceptance of the Son as an issue of the Father and the
association of the Son with the Father's ousia. This is not pure
Origenistic doctrine either, for Origen denied that the Son was tIC <iic;
o~Giac; (from the ousia) of the Father, and rejected the concept of his
generation as an 'issue'. It is very reminiscent of the ideas ofEusebius
81 Comm. in Apoc". Xl. I, p. 96, 6, 7 ('Jesus Christ spiritually begotten by the Father
before the origin of the world').
82Les Origines chretiennes dans les provinces Danubiennes de I'Empire romain 210-214.
Cf. Grillmeier CeT 199· n 183.
83Theognostus, Fragments of the HypoJyposes (TV XXIV, Part II), 78, 79.
84Ibid. 74, 75.
i
1 77
!
l
 The Origins
of Caesarea. 85 Grillmeier thinks that we have here the origin of the
expression U1tUpaAAaKtOe; tlKdlv tije; o~oiue; toG 1tutp6e; (exact image of
the Father's ousia), which recurs in Asterius (Frag. XXI, Bardy) and
in the Second (Dedication) Creed of Antioch of 341. 86 Another
Fragment ofTheognostus, from Gregory of Nyssa (Contra Eunomium
III (ii) 121) says tOV O&OV ~ouA6I1&VOV tM& to 1taV KUTUm<&lJcrucrOUl
1tproTOV tOV ulov ol6v ttvU Kuv6vu ttic; 6TJl1lOUpyiuC; 1tPOii1tOcrTticrucrOUl
(,when God wanted to set up this universe he first caused the Son to
become a kind of model of creation'). Gregory himself regards this
opinion as dangerously heterodox, but it can hardly be equated with
Arius' doctrine of a created Son. In Harnack's Fragment IV
Theognostus discourses about the Son, the Word and Wisdom, but
the passage is incomplete and what there is does not suggest affinity
with Arius, especially as Theognostus insists that there is only one
Word and one Wisdom. 87 Harnack describes Theognostus as 'an
Origenist of the strictest observance', 88 and certainly he reflects
Origen more faithfully (though by no means with entire exactness)
than anybody else of the period known to us. 89 There is no reason to
think that by ousia Theognostus meant anything except hypostasis
(individual . entity). Barnard is anxious to see the work of
Theognostus as contributing to the thought of Arius, in his
des'cription of the Son as a creature, in his treatment of Word and
Wisdom, whereby Logos, described as 'issue' (a1t6pp01u) and ray
(U1tuuyucrl1u) refers to his origin and distinctness, and Wisdom,
described as 'image' and 'mirror', refers to his resemblance and
representation, and because he made the Son the personal name of the
secon<i:hypostasis in the Godhead, whereas Logos and Sophia are only
titles of the Son. 90 But Theognostus explicitly disowned the
doctrine,. which Arius certainly held, that the Son was created out of
non-existence, and Photius' statement that Theognostus called the
Son a cr~ature may be no more than his version of the passage quoted
8SSee above, PP.46-59.
86Grillmeier'GCT, 161, following F. Diekamp.
87Harnack, op. -cit. 77-78.
880 p. cit. 92.
. 89IfMunitiz is correct in 'A Fragment attributed to Theognostus' in giving this
small piece to Theognostus, then this author certainly followed Origen in his ideas
about punishment.
9°'The Antecedents of Ariusl, 179-182. See also Radford, Theognostus, Pieriu$,
Peter (a work which many refer to but nobody quotes, written too much in the
subjunctive mood), and Simonetti, La Crisi 49 n. II, 58 and 59:
The Antecedents of !1rius
by Gregory of Nyssa which does not necessarily bear precisely that
interpretation, and Arius in his tum would have nothing to do with
describing the Son as an 'issue', and tended to teach that there are two
Logoi (one immanent in the Father and one a name given somewhat
inaccurately to the Son), whereas Theognostus insisted that there was
only one. We cannot glean any satisfactory evidence that
Theognostus was a predecessor of Arius. About Pierius we only
know what Photius tells us in Bibliotheca II Cod II9 (92-94). The only
points at all relevant to our theme mentioned by Photius are that he
taught two ousiai (of the Father and of the Son), and two physeis, but
that he clearly by ousia meant hypostasis ('Person' in the significance
ofPhotius' day), that he wrote in a heterodox way about the Spirit,
saying that he was inferior to the glory Of the Father and of the Son,
and that Pierus was known as 'the new Origen'.91 There is nothing
here sufficient for theorizing effectively about Arius' relation to the
thought of this writer.
A figure to whom many scholars have looked in order to explain
the origins of Arius' thought is Lucian of Antioch. It must be said at
the outset that the practice indulged in by many scholars of first
explaining Lucian by Arius, and, this accomplished, then explaining
Arius by Lucian, may suffice to amuse the learned but is a most
unsatisfactory mode of procedure which has resulted in a good deal
of erudite but useless speculation. We know much less about the
doctrine of Lucian than we do even about the doctrine of Arius. To
try to interpret Arius by Lucian is therefore a classic example of
obscurum per obscurius. All, and rather more than all, that is known of
Lucian was gathered into an admirable book by Gustave Bardy,
Recherches sur Saint Lucien d' Antioche et son Ecole, published in 1926.
The salient facts as mustered by Bardy are these: the earliest reference
to Lucian is found in Eusebius HE IX.6.3 where he is described as a
presbyter of Antioch .who was 'well versed in sacred learning', was
91C. de Boor (TU S, 1888) printed some fragments (the second text in the
monograph, after that of De Aleatoribus) from the Historia Ecdesiastjca of Philip
Sidetes, among them a few from Pierius, none relevant to the theme of this book.
Pierius fl. c. 290-315 (that is if we believe with Jerome De Vir Ill. LXXVI that he
was not martyred under Maximin Daia but retired to Rome and died there). See
Prestige God j" Patristic Thought 188-192 (where he makes the highly doubtful
statement that it was always unnatural to proclaim three ousiai), and GrilImeier,
GGT 162, 163. See alsoJ. Barnes and H. Chadwick, 'A Letter ascribed to Peter of
Alexandria', where the evidence is set out for concluding that Pierius lapsed during
the persecution of Diocletian.
79
 The Origins
during the persecution of Maximinus arrest~ in Antioch .and
brought t~ Nicomedia where the Emperor resided, was put Into
prison and later killed. The next mention of him occurs in a p~ssage
which we have already noticed, where Anus descnbes Euse~lUs of
Nicomedia, to whom he is writing, as 'a genuine fellow-disciple of
Lucian'.'2 Shortly after that Alexander of Alexandria, referring to
Paul of Sam os ata (to whom he ascribes the origin of Arius' doctrine)
writes 'Lucian succeeded him and he remained excommunicated
under three bishops for a long period'! 3 A Commentary on Job
written in Greek at some- point in the second half of the fourth
century, perhaps earlier rather than later, by a writer called Julian o~
marked Arian views, cites a suggestion handed down by 'tou
q>lA.Oxp!atOo ,.ulptOpo<; AOOlCUIVOO (,the martyr Lucian, dear to
Christ'), and a little later he calls him 'dear to God' (Oeoq>lA.i]<;)!'
Epiphanius in his Ancoratus refers to the' Lucia~ist~, whom he
identifies with the Arians. 'Lucian and all the LuclanlSts', he says,
'deny that the Son of God took a soul [i.e. a human soul), 'in order
that, of course, they may attach human experiences ("1100<;) directly
to the Logos."5 A little later'· he produces two argumen~ used by
the Lucianists. Isaiah 42'1 (Jacob my son, I shall uphold him; Israel,
my chosen one, my soul (psyche) has accepted him,' ET of LXX)
conflated with Matthew 3'17 produced the text, 'This is my Son, my
beloved, in whom I am weIl pleased, whom my soul (psyche) has
loved'., andJohn 1'14 was added. The first was to show that God has a
soul. not a human but divine one, the second to show that the Logos
had assumed flesh, but that nothing was said about God assuming a
soul. They did have the grace to qualify this, says Epiphanius, in that,
they allowed that the idea of God having a soul must be allegorized
(tp01tlKclltepov e!p;jaOat). In his Panarion Epiphanius says no more
about the Lucianists but refers once to a Lucian (who is to be
distinguished from Lucian the Gnostic) whom the Arians have
elected (&"'''''lq>!~OVta,) as a martyr, and a little later he describes this
Lucian as 'he who lived recently in the time of Constantine the Elder'
(meaning of course Constantine the Great)!' Sozomenus tells us that
920pitz Vrk III No. I. S (3)·
93Ibid. No. 14. 2j (36), ftom Theodoret HE 1.4·36.
I
94Julianus Arianus Comm. onJob 30.21-32. IS·
9!5Ancoratus 33.3. 4 (42).
"35· 1-<1 (44. 45)·
97Panarion 43.1, 1 (186).
80
! 81
L
The Antecedents of Arius
those who put forward the Second (Dedication) Creed of Antioch in
341 'alleged that they had found this creed written by the hand of
Lucian who was martyred in Nicomedia, a man of the highest
reputation and versed to the most exact degree in the Holy
Scriptures', but that he could not be sure whether this was true!·
Philostorgius denounces Eusebius of Nicomedia as 'he who is called
"the Great", the _disciple of Lucian the martyr', and numbers also
among these disciples Athanasius of Anazarbus and Antonius of
Tarsus. '9 Jerome (De Vir. Ill. LXXVII) describes Lucian thus: 'a very
learned man, a presbyter of the church of Antioch, worked so hard in
the study of the Scriptures that even today some copies of the
Scriptures are called "Lucianic". Some little works of his about the
faith are in circulation and short letters to several people. He suffered
at Nicomedia for his confession of Christ in the persecution of
Maximinus, and was buried at Helenopolis in Bithynia."Oo Several
other sources, legendary or more dependable. mention Lucian as a
martyr and fragments of some short letters which he is said to have
written on the occasion of the martyrdom of Anthemius bishop of
Nicomedia may be authentic,lOl but nothing more survives which
can give us any hint of what his doctrine was.
The question of whether Lucian the martyr was the same as Lucian
the teacher of Arius and Eusebius of Nicomedia has been much
debated, and also whether both or either of these can be identified
with the Lucian who according to Alexander of Alexandria was a
bishop of the continuing followers of Paul of Samosata in Antioch
and was for long excommunicated. Hamack 102 and Bouiarand 103
were temerarious enough to assume that all three were the same man,
but few have followed them in this reach of speculation. The debate
lies between those who think that the martyr and the teacher were the
same, and those who regard them as two different people. To the first
category belong Zeiller,lO' Schwartz, !05 and Simonetti;!o. to the
98HE III.j.9. For a discussion of the connection of Lucian with this creed, see
below pp.289-90.
99Philostorgius HE 1.8; IIl.IS.
IOOMost of this information, and much more, is conveyed in Bardy, op. cit. 2-32.
The references to Lucian by John Chrysostom and Rufinus are of no historical value
for reconstructing his doctrine.
lOISee Bardy, op. cit. 10--19. I04Les Origines Chretiennes 22] n I.
I02History of Dogma IV.3ff. to!5Gesam. Schr. 111.7, 177.
I03L'Heresie d'Arius 166-168. I06Crisi 19-20.
 The Origins
second Loofs,!07 Bardy, Gwatkin!08 and Barnes.!o. It is difficult to
imagine that Alexander would have spoken of Lucian in such
contemptuous terms had he been a martyr; we should assume that the
excommunicated Lucian. successor to Paul, was neither the teacher of
Arius nor the martyr. Once we have decided this, it becomes very
difficult to distinguish the martyr from the teacher because many of
the most convincing reports of Lucian associate him with both
functions. There is, of course, the third alternative of identifying the
excommunicated successor of Paul with the teacher, but the evidence
for this is more tenuous than that for identifying the teacher and the
martyr. This seems to be the least implausible alternative.
But when we have reached this conclusion, we still are left with
very little evidence about the nature ofLilcian's doctrine. Many large
reconstructions of this have been made. Harnack perhaps went
furthest in this line of speculation,110 closely followed by
Boularand ll1 and Lorentz. 112 Others have been more cautious, hut
still have been ready to characterize Lucian's docttine. Loofs can call
it 'Arianizing' but also 'Origenistic dynamic-monarchian';113
Ritter, though he admits the difficulty of determining anything
about Lucian, can describe his doctrine as Origenist. 114 Moreira is
perhaps most honest of all when he says that we can be sure that Arius
drew on the teachings of Lucian, but that we do not know what
Lucian taught.! IS Simonetti thinks that Lucian was responsible for
Arius',doctrine of the creation of the Son out of non-existence, and
that he may have been the originator of the concept of the Son as the
'exact image' (eikon aparal/aklos) of the Pather."· The only doctrine
which Bardy can associate with Lucian the teacher (who, he thinks, is
distinct from Lucian the martyr) is the Dedication Creed, and we
shall see reason later to doubt the wisdom of accepting this
attribution. ii7
107Paulus von Samosata, 183-186.
108SA 17.
t09Constantine and Eusebius 194.
tl°History of Dogma IV.3ff. and Theognostus, Fragments 90·
IIIL'Herbie d'A,ius 145.
112A,ius Iudaizans? 193-203.
t 13' Arianismus' 10. ' Olympia in Greece) and that he was martyred in the DiocIetian persecution, not
'114'Ariansimus' 698.
tlSPotamius de Ljsbonne 18.
t16Studi 92, n 15; Crisi 50 n 14.
I 17See below, pp.z89-9o.
The Antecedents of Arius
There is one fact, and one fact only, which we can with any
confidence accept as authentic about Lucian's doctrine. The
statements of Epiphanius that Lucian taught that the Saviour at the
Incarnation assumed a body without a soul (soma apsychon) is
confirmed by the fact that this doctrine becomes an invariable feature
of Arian teaching after Arius, and that Eustathius of Antioch, a
contemporary of Arius, attributes it to his followers.11s This is a
useful piece of information, but otherwise we are completely in the
dark about Lucian's theology, influential though no doubt it was on
Arius' thought. Speculation about what it might have been is useless.
No less futile is the suggestion made by some scholars that Lucian
represents one link in the chain of teachers of the 'Antiochene'
schoo!."· It is only by indulging in fantasy that such a continuous
train of docttine can be detected before the end of the fourth century.
Too much fantasy has already been expended on Lucian of Antioch.
Pinally, we should consider Methodius of Olympia as a possible
source for Arius' views. Though he is in some respects indebted to
Origen, he is one of his earliest critics,120 and in his De Creatis he
produces some views which interestingly resemble those of Arius.
God alone, he says, is ingenerate (aY&V1]<6,); nothing else in the
universe is so, certainly not, he il:llplies, the Son, who is wholly
dependent on the Father.!2! God the Pather creates by his will alone;
God the Son, the 'hand' of the Pather, orders and adorns what the
Pather has created out of nothing.!22 God the Pather is the
'unoriginated origin' (livapJ(o, apJ(ij), God the Son the beginning
after the beginning (apJ(il 11&'t1l + accusative), the origin of everything
else created.!23 It is pretty clear that Methodius regards the Son as the
first of all created things. And he appears to disapprove of Origen's
.. USee below. p.212.
I I 9This theory was dear to the heart ofLoofs. But Grillmeier, CCT 218,367, and
Simonetti. Studi 19-20 and Cr;si 53-54. righdy discount it. For further views on
Lucian, see "Sellers. Eustathius of Antioeh I I-IS. Kannengiesser. Colloquy 4J. 3. Luise
Abramowski ibid. 50.1 do not think that the theory of Grill meier (CCT, 232-238)
that Anus', doctrine can be explained by his deliberate and detailed reaction against
the theology of Gregory Thaumaturgus can be sustained.
120Jerome. De Vir III LXXXII. 43. 44. is uncertain both as to his date and the place
of his see, but it is generally agreed that he was bishop of Olympia in Lycia (not the
earlier.
121 Lxxvi (277)'-
1221Il.ix (498).
12.3IIl.xii (499-500).
83
 The Origins
doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. 124 Though we need not
assume that Arius was directly indebted to Methodius, this author
provides an interesting example of how one who begins with the
theology of Origen may develop in a direction which points to
Arianism. 125
2. The Philosophical Background
Earlier writers on Arius, .such as Gwatkin, Harnack, Loofs and
Prestige, tended to ignore or play down the philosophical
background to Arius and Arianism. This was partly because they
thought that his ideas could easily be explained as a form of pagan
polytheism thinly disguised by Christian terms. '2 • But this is a most
inadequate way of account.ing for Arianism. Quite apart from the
fact that when the controversy started in 3 1 8, Alexandria, the place of
its origin, was ruled by a non-Christian Emperor, Licinius, who
would have offered no particular inducement to ambitious pagans to
tum Christian and find in Arianism an acceptable form of Christian
paganism, Arianism was a Trinitarian doctrine which arose out of the
difficulty of conceiving of an eternal generation in God in which the
Son while remaining distinct from the Father will nevertheless
remain equal with him.'27 One might also point out that
undoubtedly one of the chief reasons why George, the Arian bishop
of Alexandria, was lynched in the year 361 by a mob largely
consisting of pagans was because he had been particularly active in
projects to pull down pagan temples.
In recent years, however, much more attention has been paid by
124III.xii (499-500).
12!iStead believes that Arius was directly influenced by Methodius, see below,
p. 96, though he has not here been followed by many other scholars. Grillmeier.
CCT 166, points out that Methodius never mentions the human soul of Christ, here
once more differing from Origen.
I 26Even as late as 1940 Gericke can describe Arianism as 'an ethnic "distortion" of
Christian "monotheism'" (Marcellus von Ancyra 18).
~ 27$0 Boularand, L' Heresie d' Arius 98; Boularand adds 'and consubstantial' to the
'equal' of my paraphraser. But in fact there is little evidence ofa widespread desire to
declare the Son consubstantial with the Father before 325. Boularand rightly scouts
the idea that Arianism was a1lied to the pagan cult of the Deus Summus, an idea
which he attributes to Gwatkin, Harnack, Baritfol, Zeiller and Carcopino (op. cit.
94); he likewise rejects the theory that Arianism can have had anything to do with
the worship of Sollnvictus or Mithraism (op. cit. 99-101).
The Antecedents of Arius
scholars to the philosophical background against which Arius wrote,
with fruitful results. Arius has been, if not wholly explained, at least
domesticated. He can no longer be regarded as the strange monster of
heresy which Gwatkin, and even Harnack, depicted him to be.'2' It
has sometimes been suggested that Arius was influenced by the
thought of Aristotle, and his concern to preserve the ousia of God
intact might be held to support this view.Jerome 12 • says of Arianism
'it borrows the streams of its arguments from the springs of
Aristotle', but he is here almost certainly referring, not to Arius but to
later Neo-Arianism. Loofs believed that an Aristotelian emphasis
upon God's aseity was constitutive for Arius' thought. 130 An
Aristotelian feature remarked on by several writers is Arius'
statement in his Letter to Alexander of Alexandria that the Son does not
'possess being parallel with the Father, as some say who rely on the
argument from relations';131 this, Arius thinks, would result in two
ingenerate principles. This 'argument from relations' (tei np6<; tl.) is
undoubtedly a reference to Aristotle, and goes back to Aristotle
Categories 7b IS, applied in this instance to the relation of that which is
known to knowledge. He said a little later that when an owner exists
then a slave must also exist, and conversely (7b 20). Origen had
applied this type of argument to the relation of the Father to the
Son,132 but Arius rejected it here. 133 But that Arius knows of this
type of argument cannot of itself convince us that he was an
Aristotelian in philosophy, especially as he rejects it. It was no doubt
by his day commonplace in theological discussion.
A much stronger candidate for the philosophical source of Arius'
thought is the tradition of Middle Platonist philosophy. This was the
128For the general backgound to this subject, see Prestige, God in Patristic
Thought, 122-129; Boularand, 'L'Heresie d'Arius', 118-122; Dillon, The Middle
Platonists; The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Mediaeval Philosophy, Parts
I-V;]. M. Rist, Plotinus; Stead, Divine Substance, 25-187: 'The Platonism of Arius';
Barnard 'What was Arius' Philosophy~'; _Rieken, 'Nikaia als Krisis der
Altchristlichen Platonismus'; Blumenthal and Markus 'Neo-Platonism and Early
Christian Thought', 33-46; Ritter, 'Arianismus' 701.
129Dialogus contra Luciferanos I J (174), Argumentationum rivos de Aristotelisfontibus
mutualur.
13°'Arianismus' 10.
1310pitz Urk III No.6. 3 (13) ouot. CillU"tip -nu"tpi"to dVUl £X£l, rot; nvet; AtYOI)(1l to.
1tp6t; n. See above, p. 8.
132Peri Archon 1.2.10 (132).
133See the very full account in Lorentz Arius Iudaizans? 56--7; cf. Barnard 'What
was Arius' Philosophy?' 114-116 and Gregg and Groh Early Arianism 35 n 79. Stead
remarks on this point, 'Platonism of Arius' 28-30.
85
 The Origins
type of revived Platonism (we can call it no more than a type, not a
school) which prevailed among the heirs of Platonic tradition from
about 100 B.C. with Antiochus of Ascalon to about 300 A.D., by
which time the Neo-Platonic philosophy expounded by Plorinus,
·Porphyry and Iamblichus was beginning to be widely known and
followed. No one who has read Dillon's The Middle Platonists can
believe that this particular type of Platonism lent itself readily to
providing a model for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. But it
certainly supplied material which the Christian theologians of the
second and third centuries had thought useful for explaining the
relation of the Father to the Son,'3' and several of its ideas and
technical terms are to be found in the thought of Arius. One of these
is the idea of pre-temporal time. Arius, it will be remembered, held
that the Son was produced before all ages but yet there was a time
when he did not exist. There are several analogies for this apparently
self-contradictory concept in Middle Platonism. Eudorus of
Alexandria (about 40 B.C.),
'argued, with Xenocrates, that Plato's account of the creation must
not be taken literally, but that the world might be said to be created
(genetos) though not "in time". since time is a product ofthe motion of
the world itself. The world must thus be taken to have been created
extra-temporally, in the sense that it is dependent on an external cause,
to wit, GOd.'135
Atticus (c 180 A.D.) was similarly driven to postulate a kind of non-
temporal time."" Another concept which finds an echo in Arius is
that of the Monad and the Dyad. Arius calls God the Monad in his
Letter to Alexander,'37 and he calls the Son the Dyad in the Thalia.'3.
Dionysius of Alexandria had already employed 'Monad' and
'Triad'.'3' Lorentz points out that Arius' statement (De Synodis IS),
'Understand that there was a Monad, but the Dyad did not exist
134DiIlon op. cit. 359-]67 sets out several Middle Platonist accounts of ultimate
reality. Rieken's article 'Nikaia als Krisis' is an excellent short expose of the use of
Middle Platonist concepts as applied to the Son by Christian theologians.
135Dillon op. cit. 132.
136S0 Meijering God Being History 81-88. Lorentz calls attention to this concept
in Middle Platonism also, {trius ludaizans? 55-56.
1370pitz.. Urk III No.6.3 (12); also in Athanasius De Synodis IS.
138Athanasius, De Synodis IS. Barnard calls attention to Arius' use of these terms,
'What was Arius' Philosophy?', I I I-I 12, but regards them as little more than names
used in a theology which was basically Biblical.
139See above, P.7]. Stead, 'Platonism of Arius', makes the same point.
86
The Antecedents of Arius
before it came into being'. could mean either that God was first a
Monad and then on the appearance of the Son a Dyad developed
between them, or that 'Dyad' was Arius' title for the Son. But an
appeal to the usage ofXenocrates, Numenius (fl. c. 150 A.D.) and
Plotinus makes it clear that the normal usage in Greek philosophy
was the first alternative. It is more likely that this is what Arius
intended, and so Athanasius understands him (Orat. con. Ar. 1.17).'·0
Stead, in his article 'The Platonism of Arius' makes it clear that by
'Platonism' he means 'Middle Platonism'. He thinks that indirectly
Arius was considerably indebted to this type of Platonism, through
Clement and Origen, and speaks of 'the Stoicized Platonism of
Clement and Origen' and invokes the influence of 'classical
Aristotelianism and Plotinus'.'" The dualism of Arius and his drastic
subordination of the Son to the Father derive ultimately from
the Platonic concept of idea and participant. Philo had held that the
ideas are the thoughts of God and the Logos the place of them or the
sum-total of thein. Origen on the whole reproduces this idea,
especially when he distinguishes between various realities, such as
Truth, Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption, Word, and
Wisdom, which the Father is in essence (ousia) as the archetype of
them (with the Greek prefix UUtO-), and on the other hand, the image
of all these things (the eikon) , which is what the Son is, being so not
essentially but by participation (metousia) .'42 This kind of disrinction
lies behind the words of Arius, for instance, when he contrasts what
the Father is 'of himself' ontologically, with what the Son is
accidentally or contingently (KUta cru~PEp1]K6r;). The distinction may
go back as far as Numenius. Stead also calls attention to Arius' use of
the terms Monad and Dyad. Monad implies indivisibility; Arius'
God delegates but does not divide. Stead takes Dyad in the second
sense outlined above, as a title of the Son. It implies inferiority and
imperfecti<;m, like Origen's 'second God' (liEUtEpOr;OWr;). Philo (who
in his way;was a Middle Platonist) applies the term to the Logos in
contrast to pure unspoken thought. The concept, though not the
word, can be paralleled in Numenius. 143
Stead is even able to believe that Arius' most exotic doctrine, that
of the creation of the Son out of non-existence, can be paralleled in
140 Arius ludaizans 60-61.
141'Platonism of Arius' 21-24, quotations from 2].
142Ibid. 21.
143Ibid. 18-19.
 The Origins
Atticus. 144 Dillon, however, shows that this is too hasty a conclusion.
Atticus in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus
'asserts, like Plutarch, that the universe was in disorderly motion
before the creation of the cosmos, and, since Time is the measure of all
things, Time existed before the cosmos. The universe in its unordered
state does not have a beginning.'14S
Dillon then quotes directly from this work of Atticus:
'For God, desiring that all things should be good, and that, so far as
this might be, there should,be nothing evil, having received all that is
visible, not in a state of rest, but moving without harmony or order
(plemmelos kai ataktos) brought it from disorder into order, thinking
that this was in all ways \letter than the·other.'146
This doctrine is, of course, a long way from Arius' idea that the Son
was created from non-existent things. This particular view of Arius
has never been supplied with a convincing antecedent. It has always
been an erratic boulder in his doctrine, preventing that doctrine being
easily fitted into any known system and suggesting, more strongly
perhaps than anything else, that his theology was basically eclectic. It
seems to me best to ascribe it to the Biblical rather than the
metaphysical side of Arius' thought. He inherited a well-established
doctrine of God having made the world by a creatio ex nihilo. If the
Son was to be placed among created things, then logically he too
must be thought to have been created out of nothing. This was
certainly the feature of Arius' thought which gave rise to more
scandal than any other. His enemies were casting it up against him
long after he had relegated it to obscurity and his followers had ceased
to profess it. 14 7
Stead does not believe that Arius was an uncritical and whole-
hearted devotee ofPlatonism. His insistence that the Son is not 'a part
of God nor from the same underlying substance'148 is a disavowal of
one strand in Stoicizing Platonism. 149 Lorentz points out that Arius'
I44Ibid. 13 8.
145Middle Platonism, 253.
146Ibid. 253.
147Barnard 'What was the Philosophy of Arius?' 113-114, and Lorentz, Arius
ludaizans? 63-64. remark upon this doctrine's incompatibility with Platonism, or
indeed with any form of Greek philosophy.
148Letter to.Eusebius oj Nicomedia No. 1.5 (3).
149Stead 'Platonism of Arius' 25-26.
88
The Antecedents of Arius
view that man was the purpose of creation is not identical with the
Platonic theory that creation was for the good purpose of God.'sO
A quite different and largely new interpretation of Arius' relation
to philosophy was put forward by Gregg and Groh in their book,
Early Arianism. They do not think that Aristotelianism had any great
influence on early Christian thought. The argument from relations
was a commonplace by the third or fourth century and dialectic was
not confined to the disciples of Aristotle; and Stoics had used it. '51
One of the main arguments of their book is an attempt to show that
an acquaintance with Stokphilosophy lies behind the soteriology of
Arianism.'52 They believe that the Son as represented by Arius,
whether pre-existent or incarnate, was envisaged as an example of
certain virtues prominent in the teaching oflater Stoicism, especially
in view of the Arian doctrine that. the Son, being mutable (,po",6<;),
was capable of showing moral progress ("po"o,,~). The early Stoics
held up as an example the Wise Man who had advanced beyond
emotions to become imperturbable (u"a6iJ<;); but later Stoicism
showed a tendency to emphasize the possibility and importance of
progress towards perfection. The Arians, these scholars think, relied
upon the Stoic link. between freewill and some emoti"ons such as
loving, 'innocent emotions' (ell"'leo,U1), and volition (pou1..1]<n<;),in
contrast to irrational passions. These good emotions included
goodwill (06vo,a), benevolence (eIlJttvota), affection (u<rnacJII6<;) and
partiality (uY«"1]<n<;). They emphasized that Christ's affection
showed his freewill. Hence Athanasius can say that they attribute
human emotions (uvepo>"ae~<;) to God (De Decretis 10.5). Later
Stoicism taught not only knowledge (episteme) as desirable, but also
'rational appetency' (061..oyo<; opeS'<;)' Hence it is that a new class of
emotioq,s categorised under eupatheia can appear:
. 'Thu{~he early Arians put forward a picture of Christ remarkably like
the moderated Stoic advancing one (sic), who possessed the requisite
aspiration to perfection and' virtue though lacking in perfected
knowledge and complete control of his emotions. '153
Gregg and Groh criticize Stead's derivation of Arius' ideas from
150A,ius iudaizans? 63; Gregg and Groh Early Arianism, 25, note this point too.
151Ea,ly Arianism, 3S n7.
152Here I deal only with the subject of philosophy. The larger interpretation of
Arianism by these authors is discussed a little further on PP.97--98.
153Ibid. 15-19. quotation from 18.
89
 The Origins
Origen and from Middle Platonism; they think that he rests his
arguments too exclusively on De Synodis 15, and suggest that as we
have only fragments of the Thalia we must recognize that other parts
of his doctrine may have escaped us. And they point out, as has been
pointed out in chapter 2 of this work, that there are more sources for
early Arianism than Arius' words. 154 The use of the terms 'Monad'
and 'Dyad' does not necessarily imply Arius' devotion to
philosophical concepts. They can be paralleled in Scripture,
especially in 1 Timothy 6:15, 16; to express by the word Dyad a view
of the Son as a perfect creature existing by his Father's will was not
necessarily to disparage him.'" The Arians had argned that the Son
was related to the Father wholly by will, by a moral rather than an
ontological bond or derivation. They reckoned that unless the Son
was produced by the Father's will then he came either by necessity or
against God's will. 15. Athanasius called this Valentinian
emanationism. But, say Gregg and Groh, it is not; it is good Biblical
doctrine, reproduced by Ignatius, Justin, Hippolytus, Clement of
Alexandria and Origen. Asterius had argued (frag. XV Bardy) that if
to will the Son was dishonourable to God, then to will creation was
also dishonourable, but if to will creation was honourable, then to
will the Son was even more honourable. For Asterius, as for all
Arians, will means action. 157 This will does not involve undesirable
pathos on the part of God but (so to speak) proper eupatheia (Asterius
frag. XVlII). And conversely the pro-Nicene concept of the Father
begetting the Son was material or corporeal, involving pathos to a
compromising degree."· For the Arians, Y8VVclOl (beget) and 1C"t!~00
(create) and6p!~00 (appoint) all meant the same thing (and all, we may
add, were derived from the LXX version of Proverbs 8:22fi".).159
Creation is election, and election for our sake. The authors mean that
it is a soteriological rather than cosmological purpose which informs
these ideas of Arius and his followers. '.0 Later in their work Gregg
1541bid. 120 n 19.
1551bid. 87-90.
156Athanasius Or. con. Ar. 1lI.59, 62.
157Ibid. 91""'94.
1·58Ibid. 94-9S: see Eusebius of Nicomedia Letter to Palllinlls, Opitz, Urk III
No. 8.3 (16). Athanasius' reply was to say that nature transcends and precedes will.
159Arius Lette, to Ellsebius Opitz U,k III No. 1.4 (3): Alexander Encyclical Lette,
Opitz Urk III No. 4b, 9 (8): Athanasius De Syn. IS. For the use of Pro v 8::z:ztf. see
Simonetti Stud; 31-34.
160Early Arianism 95-97.
90
The Antecedents of Arius
and Groh traverse the view that Arius' doctrine of the participation
(metoche) of the Son in the Father is derived from Platonic models,
because Platonic metoche means communication of being and not
simple participation. Behind this Arian concept was the Stoic
distinction between 'things according to nature' and 'things
according to participation'.161 'In the Arian controversy these
categories have become polar opposites.' There was a Stoic concept
of metoche in the ethical, rather than the ontological, realm.'·2 The
Arian Christ is one 'whose perfection was achieved by perfection and
moral advance',163 Athanasius was not maliciously distorting (as
Stead believes) when he accuses the Arians of teaching that there are
other 'powers' alongside Christ and like him.'·4 Arius did not teach a
modification of an hierarchical Trinity capable of being fitted readily
into a Platonic context:
'Arians are arguing not for the stratification of the universe but for the
dynamics of redemption whereby creatures, in emulation of the
creature of perfect discipline, may ~e themselves begotten as equals to
the Son.'165
Finally we must consider a paper by R. D. Williams which may
well strike the reader as the most convincing attempt yet to analyse
the philosophy behind the thought of Arius. Gregg and Groh insist
that Arianism is primarily a soteriology, not an exercise in speculative
thought about the relation of the Son to the Father. This, it seems to
me, is ~he great merit ofthdr work, and my reasons for saying so will
beconie clear later in this book.'·· Williams twice declares that
Arianism is not a theology of salvation.'·7 Here he shows the
limitations of his essay and the necessity, properly appreciated by
Gregg and Groh, to go beyond the words of Arius if we are to
understand the rationale of Arianism. But within the limits set by an
161 Ibid. 109-110.
162 IIO.
163 11 1.
1640,. con Ar. I.S: De Deeret 16; Stead 'The Thalia of Arius' 30-31.
165Early Arianism II2-II3. quotation 113. J omit here consideration of the
attempt by Kannengiesser, Colloquy 41 3S-41, to show that the philosophy lying
behind Arius' thought is that of Plotinus because it seems to me, brilliant tour de
force though it is, to be little more than a passing thought thrown out in the course
of discussion, and not in fact to represent a convincing 'fit'.
166S ee below, cap 4.
167'The Logic of Arianism' 57 and 80.
91
 The Origins
exploration of Arius' actual doctrine and the metaphysic behind it
Williams' work is most illuminating.
Alexander of Alexandria, Williams thinks, had maintained that the
Son wa,,~<; tOU nutp6<; 0\l"{U<;i010<;, proper to the ousia of the Father.
To say that the Son is idios (Proper) to the Father is to say that he is a
property or quality of the Father, impersonal and belonging to his
substance. Properties or qualities cannot be substances, as is evident
from Porphyry's Commentary on Aristotle's Categories; they are not
quantities. The statement then that the Son is idios to the Father is a
Sabellian statement, like the doctrine of Paul of Samosata.'·s Arius
and Arians always maintained strictly the reality of the pre-existent
Son. In fact there were three hypostases. No such subject (hypostasis)
can be reducible to 'being part of the defmition of another subject'.
Each subject must have his own 'properties which are not those of
other subjects. Hence the Son cannot have the Father's properties
such as eternity.169 'Father' and 'Son' therefore are not descriptions
of the essence of either but shorthand terms for two independently
existing realities. That they are related as Father and Son is not an
essential part of the being ofeither. God anyway 'cannot be defined as
to what he is by reference to anything else' .'70 It is correct therefore
·to say that God was not always Father; the title identified him but
does not define his essence. 171
Arius also denied that the Son is a 'consubstantial part' (meros
homoousion) of the Fathe~. The Son cannot be a component or
extension of God, for this would be to make God composite, indeed
virtually material, either composed of substance prior to him or (if
extended) mutable, in either case corruptible.'72 Iamblichus in his De
Mysteriis uses the term (consubstantial) of a case where 'different
elements combine to provide a unified reality'. This cannot apply to
transcendental realities which must be simple, incomposite. You
could say that in water, a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, the
two gases were consubstantial, but this cannot apply to intellectual
substances. 173 If we were to apply homoousios to the Father and the
168'The Logic of Arianism', 58-60. For Williams' summary of Paul's doctrine,
see above p.ooo.
169'The Logic of Arianism', 60, 61.
17°Ibid. 61.
171 62.
172
63-64.
1736
4.
92
The Antecedents of Arius
Son, it would mean that together they make up a third greater
substance - and material at that! Arius understood God to be an
'individual spiritual subsistent'. There can be only one of such a kind.
The Son may be God by participation, but there can be no parity
·between Father and $on. 174
Another proposition which Arius condemned was that there were
two ingenerate principles (060 aytvv1jtu). He believes that this is what
Alexander is teaching, and it implies, he thinks, the idea that God can
be understood generically as a substance in which both Father and
Son can participate. Non-dependence is essential in the Father and
cannot apply to the Son. Eusebius of Nicomedia says of the Son 'he
does not in any way participate in the nature of the Ingenerate' (t~<;
<p6"eoo<; t~<; ayevV1jtou).'75 Aristotle's theory of participation and that
of his successors rejected the Platonic theory and substituted one
which held that for two substances to participate in each other they
had to be id~ntical, on the same level, to have the same essence, genus
and species: 'things are not constituted the kind of things they are by
the causal agency of a paradigmatic individual substance in the
transcendental intelligible order'.'7. To say that Father and Son were
consubstantial would then be to say that they were co-ordinate. But
God has no co-ordinates. Two ingenerate principles makes nonsense.
The Son must have an origin, be a creature and a product. 177
Williams then suggests that Arius may have had his own doctrine
of parti~ipation whereby the divine Logos and Wisdom would
'create in the Son their closest possible finite image in sO' far as he is
directly their product. He demonstrates the immediate and
unimpeded effect by Logos and Wisdom, and in some significant
measure reflects what they are like.'178
This participation then is by contrivapce or contingency, not
essential. The Son possesses Logos and Wisdom eternally but not
necessarily and so is in principle mutable, for they are not part of the
definition of his being. When Arius said that the Son possessed these
'metaphorically' or 'by courtesy' (KUtUXP1j<JtlKOO,) he did not mean,
1746 5.
175 66,67; Opitz Urk IV No.8.3 (16).
176'The Logic of Arianism' 67, 68, quotation 68.
177 69-7°.
178 73 --'74, quotation 74.
93
 The Origins
merely nominally, but rather that he is the perfect image of all the
aspects (epinoiai) of God. '79
Finally, Williams turns to the subject of our knowing God. We can
only know God because he creates contingent manifestations of
wisdom, and supremely in the Son.
'The Son's revelatory importance lies in being a maximally endowed
creature who manifests at once the immense and unbridgeable gulf
separating even the highest creature from God, and the fact that God is
not idle or indifferent but wills to create (necessarily fragmented)
images of his own life. '180
We have here a kind of Christological basis for analogy in knowing
God: 'As paradigm creature, Christ the.Son exhibits perfectly what
kind of continuities and what kind of discontinuities exist between
God and creation' .181 The Son is as wise and rational as any creature
can be. Arius' 'not as one of the creatures'is a kind of saving clause.
The Son is the special case revealing to us concretely, not merely
abstractly, the possiblity of wisdom and reason existing in our world.
He stands between ourinstability and God's stability, between God's
Being and our Becoming, a 'becoming creature, and in that sense
ontologically unstable, yet perfectly in communion with the realm of
Being, morally stable by the confluence of God's prior grace and his
own unfaltering response'.182
This account of what liesbehind Arius' surviving words does not
of course explain everything; it leaves unsolved the matter of the
Son's creation out of non-existence, and the terms unmistakably
derived from Middle Platonism. But, partly by its invocation of
Aristotelian rather than Platonic categories, it seems to me to make
sense of a greater part of the evidence than any other account ·of the
philosophical background of Arius. It represents him as holding a
consisteI\t and not ignoble position. And though this position may
not amount to a soteriology, it can hardly be denied that it is
eminently open for a suitable soteriology to be developed from it.
There is no reason why it should not be the metaphysical correlate to
a soteriology. . 'YH
179
75r7 ·
180 77-'78, quotation 78.
181
78-80, quotation 78.
82
1 7 8--'79, quotation 79.
94
The Antecedents of Arius
3. Conclusions
The study of the Arian problem over the last hundred years has been
hke a long-dIStance gun trying to hit a target. The first sighting shots
are very wide of the mark, but gradually the shells fall nearer and
nearer. The diatribes ofGwatkin'83 and ofHarnack'o, can to-day be
completely .gnored. Prest.ge hardly pays sufficient attention to
Ar~an~sm to be able to. understand it. ISS Boularand consistently treats
Anamsm, fro,? the title of his book, L' Heresie d' Arius et la {oi de Nicee,
?nwards as If It had been from the outset an easily recognised heresy
In contrast to a known and universally recognised orthodoxy, which
is far from being the case. More recent and more thorough
exammation of Anarusm has brought a "more realistic estimate of it.
Simonetti sees it as an extreme reaction against a Sabellianism which
was at th~ time rife in the East,186 and a violent protest against the
Alexandnan theology represented by bishop Alexander.'o7 Stead
sums up his impression of Arius' thought in these words:
'Arius draws upon a Platonic tradition evolving without the Church,
rather than representing a violent incursion of alien philosophy. His
theology fits naturally into place among the disputes which arose over
the dis?er~al .of Ori~en's effects. His main debt to Origen is a
subordmanomst doctrme of the Son, which he greatly intensifies and
,
t83'A·dear step back to heathenism' (SA 2): 'an inevitable reaction of heathen
thought ~gainst the d~finite establishment of~he Christian view of God' (ibid. 16);
Alexa?dna. ~as particularly open to Arianism because it was a stronghold of
pagam~m (Ibid. 17-18,20), the doctrine is heathen to the core, for the Arian Christ
IS nothing but a he~then de~i-god' (ibid. 26); the Arians were morally deficient
bec.a~se most ofthel~ extant I.Jteracure is polemical' (ibid. 27 n4. slightly modified
~.1)' an Eastern reac~lOn ofphdosophy a~ai~~t the gospel of the Son of God' (Ae J);
tndee~, t~e s"y~tem IS hea~en to the core (IbId. 7), 'the triumph of philosophy' over
reve~atlon (Ibid. 9); deSigned for people who were heathen 'with the thinnest
poss~~le veneer ofC.hristianitr' (ibid. 12); not only had Arianism many intellectual
affimtles to, h~a.themsm, but It also resembled heathenism 'in its generally lower
~oral tone ~lb~d. 44); the fact that so many Arian writers came from Phrygia is a
sign that Ananlsm was half-pagan (ibid. 131 so also SA 245)
if , .
~story 0 Dog~a ~V.7 and 3? denies that Arianism had any soteriology, 39-"44
damns It as AdoptlODlsm combined with Greek philosophy and using Biblical
language.
18s'.And behind ~ll .expres.sion of Arian thought lay the hard and glittering
syU~glsm that God IS ImpaSSible; Christ, being ),evvllt6c;, was passible; therefore
Chmt was not God', God in Patristic Thought 156.
186Studi 124, n66.
187 Studi passim.
95
 The Origins
divests of its qualifications. But he is indebted to Origen's critics,
especially Methodius, for the doctrine of the Father's priority, which
he considers necessary for monotheism. God the Father existed before
all things and created all things out of nothing by his unprompted act
of will. '188
Much turns upo~ whether we are to assume that Arius, and after
him Arianism, paid any serious attention to soteriology. As we have
seen, R. D. Williams and Harnack denied that Arius, at least, had any
soteriology. Most scholars have, perhaps unwittingly, come to much
the same conclusion. It is understandable that this should be so,
because almost every word (though not quite every word) by Arius
that survives is concerned with the relation of the Father to the Son
independently of the Incarnation. In -strong contrast to almost
everybod y who had preceded them in this field, Gregg and Groh
maintain emphatically that Arius and Arianism had a soteriology,
that the Arian Christ was specifically designed to be a Saviour, and
that neither Arius nor Arianism can be understood 'until this point is
realised. 'Servanthood by a creaturely nature freely electing such and
divine fatherhood by grace are the twin foundations of early Arian
Christology' .189 Christ was one Redeemer, the one chosen, but there
could have been others chosen. Hence the emphasis on the 'one', e.g.
the 'one of a hundred sheep' of Athanasius of Anazarbus. 190 'Arians
are arguing, not for the stratification of the universe but for the
dynamics of redemption whereby creatures, in emulation of perfect
discipline, may be themselves begotten as equals to the Son."9'
Gregg and Groh claim that the Arian Christ was not a demi-god, half
god and half man, but 'a created Creator as well as a saved
Saviour' .192 The Arian Christ is vulnerable, mutable, passible,
because he is the example given by God the Father to man and
woman that they can, like him, achieve that moral progress (procopej
, them to become divine as he is, or as much as he is.
which will enable
This emphasis upon the soteriology of Arianism is welcome and
timely. It is inconceivable that Arius had nothing to say about the
Incarnation, and in the two fragments preserved by Constantine we
188'Platonism of Arius', 30; cf. 'The Thalia of Arius', 20-39.
189 Early Arianism 28.
190Ibid. 30, see above P.42.
19lIbid. II3.
192Ibid liS-lIB. quotation from 117.
The Antecedents of Arjus
can catch a brief glimpse of interest in -the Incarnation on his part. 193
Another clear gain in the treatment of the subject by Gregg and Groh
is their readiness to take early Arianism into account, and not merely
the relatively sparse utterances of Arius which have come down to us.
It is wholly unlikely that Arius was a vox clamantis in deserto. He
represents a school, probably the school of Lucian of Antioch, and the
school was to some extent independent of him. It did not look back
on him later with respect and awe as its founder. Even if we had no
hint at all of Arius' concern about a doctrine of Incarnation, we
would have to ask, what was the point of Arius' theologizing, why
did he think fit to disseminate this particular rather complex and
certainly controversial account of the relation of the Father to the
Son? Surely he must have thought that it fitted into some general
scheme of salvation. It is significant that the picture which R. D.
Williams gives of the Arian Christ seems' to be designed for some
soteriological end.
The particular reconstruction of the soteriological aims and
intentions of Arianism presented by Gregg and Groh, though it is
most important in its general approach and can be said to mark a
milestone in the study of Arianism, is open to several objections. In
the first place, we do not find any specifically Stoic terms in the
vocabulary of Arianism, whereas we do find terms taken from
Middle Platonism and Aristotelianism. If the Arians wished to
present,~ passible Christ in contrast to an impassible father, they did
not need any Stoic terms to do so, and it looks as if they did not in fact
borrow such terms. The language of the Bible was sufficient. In the
second place, though there is some evidence of the concept of a Son
who makes progress towards moral perfection in Arianism, there are
some indications to the contrary too. If God gave the Son grace in
view of his foreseen merits, what was that grace supposed to effect?
The answer is probably, sinlessness by grace, not nature. 194 But if the
Son is sinless ab initio, well before he becomes incarnate, even though
only so by grace, he cannot make any moral progress at all. The third
and most serious objection to the account of Arianism given by
Gregg and Groh is that the Son cannot give an example of human
achievement of perfection • because he is precisely not a man. The Son
assumed a soma apsychon, a body without a human mind or soul. This
1935ee above, pp.8-1O.
1945 0 , quite persuasively, Lorentz, A,ius Iudaizans? 122-127.
97
 The Origins
is one of the salient doctrines of Arianism and one which Gregg and
Groh inexplicably never mention anywhere in their book. The
Word incarnate in the Arian scheme may give some sort of example,
but certainly not that of a human being making moral progress.
We can at the end of this lengthy review of Arius' ideas conclude
with some confidence that he was eclectic in his philosophy. He fits
neatly neither into a wholly Platonic nor into a wholly Aristotelian
nor Stoic picture. though he certainly has traits taken from the first
two at least. And one of his most startling doctrines, that of the
creation of the Son out of non-existence, has no parallel in Greek
philosophy at all. He was not without influence from Origen, but
cannot seriously be called an Origenist. We can also, I believe. give
him the credit for attempting to solve: questions which were not
simply those raised by Greek philosophy. It is not just to dismiss him
as one wholly preoccupied with philosophy. The very fact of his
eclectism suggests that he has some ultimate purpose for which he is
using the tools ofphilosophy, but which itselfis not philosophical but
theological. He was in his way attempting to discover or construct a
rational Christian doctrine of God, and for this his chief source was
necessarily not the ideas of Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, but the Bible.
Even after this long examination of the background of his ideas we
afe left with a sense of incompleteness. Arius' complex and in some
respects unusual theology was meant to fulfil some purpose. What
that purpose was we shall attempt to explain in the next chapter.
4
The Rationale of Arianism
I. Sources for Arianism
Those who investigate the doctrine of the opponents of Arianism
have a comparatively large fund of material available, quite enough
for them to be able to deal with the early material first and the later
material later in the course of an account of the history of doctrine.
But the sources for our knowledge of Arianism are so sparse that we
cannot follow this method. In order to illustrate the true nature of
Arianism it will be necessary to an"ticipate extensively and to include
sources and materials which derive from periods long after Arius'
day. But if allowance is made for certain developments of the kind
that inevitably occur in the history of any doctrine, it will be possible
to show that Arianism was not, as some of its critics have claimed, a
ju~<taposition of incongruous doctrines. but a theology which
retained to the end certain characteristic ideas by which its earlier
manifestations are illuminated and made consistent. 1 The greater part
of our information about Arianism comes from writers who are
violently hosrile to Ariauism and likely to misrepresent it, but even
these, suitably treated, cannot be simply swept aside and will yield
some useful information. Directly Arian sources untainted by pro-
Nicene prejudice are rare. Some cifthem present problems of text and
integrity which can hardly yet be said to have found a solution. But
we are- not without materials. Owing to the labours of A. Mai.
corrected by C. H. Turner and R. Gryson, a number of
unimpeachable Arian documents are to hand, though they date from
the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century. We have
the invaluable Arian glosses or commentaries to the Acts of the
tMost of the material of this chapter has already appeared in a paper which I
contributed to Arianism entitled 'The Arian Doctrine of the Incarnation'. There has
been a little expansion in some places and contraction in others.
99
 The Origins
Council of Aquileia in 381, recently edited by R. Gryson, and the
account of the proceedings of that Council itself. We have a number
of Homilies of Asterius, upon which we have already drawn, 2 as well
as some other utterances of Arius' early supporters, considered
already in chapter 2. We have two Arian Commentaries on Job
dating perhaps from the middle of the fourth century, and two Arian
Homilies from about the same period edited by Fr. Liebart. We have
the Creed ofEudoxius and the Creed ofUlfilas. We have one curious
fragment from that controversial f,gure, Potamius of Lisbon. We
have the Pseudo-lgnatian Letters and the Clementine Liturgy in the
Apostolic Constitutions, to be placed in the second half of the fourth
century. And in the fifth century we have some writings of
Maximinus, and that finest and most controversial of Arian works,
the Opus Impeljectum in Matthaeum.'
2. A Reduced God
The first point to notice is that Arianism in its characteristic 'form
always assumed that revelation and redemption on the part of God
necessitated a reduction or lowering so that they had to be
undertaken by a being who, though divine, was less than fully divine.
The inferiority of the Logos to God the Father was necessary for a
communication, and particularly for an Incarnation, to take place at
all. As we have seen, this was not a new idea, but in Arianism it took a
peculiarly drastic form. Asterius said that when God desired that
created nature should come into existence he saw that nature could
not endure his dir~ct hand «(l1CpC"OU X.,p6C;) and so 'he initially makes
and created, himselfS(ile, a sole Being, and calls this Son and Word';
consequently, once this mediating Being had come into existence, the
rest could be created ..4 Asterius may even have said that the Word
learnt how to create in obedience to God who taught him as if God
was an instructor or technician. 5 An Arian Homily of about the
2See above, PP.38-41.
JI have not included here any definitely Neo-Arian or Eunomian texts, because
the doctrines of Aetius and Eunomius appear to me to represent a divagation from
original Arianism rather than an inevitable development. Nco-Arianism will be
dealt with in its Own place later in this work; see below, cap. 19.
4Frag. VIII (Bardy) from Or. con. Ar. 11.24. virtually reproduced in De Decretis 8.
SAthanasius, Or. con. Ar. 11.27: but Athanasius may have been exaggerating here;
cf. De Deeret. 7.1(6).
100
The Rationale oj Arianism
middle of the fourth century consistently contrasts the suffering,
obedient Christ with the sovereign Father, object of Christ's
worship.6 Suidas preserves an extract from Demophilus, the last
Arian bishop of Constantinople before the advent of Theo.dosius:
'The Son', he says, 'has been begotten by the will of the Father alone,
timelessly, immediately, and has become the minister of the
intentions of the Father.' God, he explains, could not come in contact
with the creation which he intended to make, for he would have been
under the necessity either of making everything gods so as to be
worthy of him, or else everything would have disintegrated by
contact with him. So the Son of God had to become a mediator
between God and the things created by him.' Julian, the very learned
and highly competent commentator onJob, not only strongly denies
that the Holy Spirit is either divine or a creator,' but he can describe
God the Father as 'incomparably greater than all. '9 He insists strongly
that it is dangerous folly to liken his production of the Son to
anything corporeal or anthropomorphic, 1 0 and carefully defines
how God can generate a Son without in any way affecting his own
ousia:
'When God generates he does not generate by pathosll or division of·
his own ousia and when he creates he does not need material or
movement nor natural nor artificial instruments, but he generates and
I!reates by will and power, for he is not dependent upon material nor
'"does he use his own ousia instead of some material (for he has no need
of anything), nor is he who is wholly independent dependent on
himself.- He is alone omnipotent and unapproachable and greater than
any cause or origin; immutable, unchangeable, he does not generate in
the same way as fathers do with us nor create in the same way as
craftsmen do with us, but as One who, is authentic and wholly
independent he generates by his authority without any intermediate
means and by his authority creates and by his authority controls his
own products.'12
6]. Liebart. Deux Homelies Anomeennes 1.11.70. Incidentally, 'Anhomoian' seems
to me a misnomer for these two little works. 'Homoian' would be a better
description.
7Philosrorgius, HE IX.J4a.
8Comm. on Job 205.14-206.3.
9Ibid. 218.7; cf. 229.IOff.
IOlbid. 270.12-19.
1\ Pathos as used by all ivth-century theologians is an almost untranslatable word;
:it means anything that necessitates change or becoming or human experience.
12Comm. on Job 270.1g--271.3.
!OI
 The Origins
There can be no doubt at all that Julian means to include the Son
among the things created by God. He has made this clear a litde
earlier in his Commentary, when he says:
'Over these visible things Oob 37:22, 23 (LXX» there is a great and
glorious and aweful Almighty One who has no one like to him nor
equal to him in being or in power. in being because he is ingenerate
(aytvl1t'o~). in power because he is the Father of the Son. There is
therefore no other Cause of the universe nor Almighty. nor any other
Mediator of the origin of these things except the Only-begotten God,
the Word who was in the· beginning ... '13
It is dear that this creation by pure will and power without
importation of ousia comprehends the Son alone. The Son creates the
Spirit and then everything else. Later, Julian calls the Son 'The
subservient (ultlJpenGall&voc;) God, the Only-begotten God who is
also the Son.'14
Latin-speaking Western Arians of the second half of the fourth
century echo this doctrine. Gryson summarizes the Arian theology
which can be reconstructed from the Arian scholia on the MS of the
Council of AquiIeia. God is incommunicable and inaccessible. 'He
does not condescend to human contacts lior human flesh'. 15 The Son
was begotten, that is made, by God. These Arians can usenasci (to be
born) of the Son, and are not happy with the use of the term 'created',
because this suggests that the Son is to be classified with other created
things. He has been produced direcdy without mediation by God,
and everything else has come into being through his mediation;
ktisma (creature) is not applied to the Son in Scripture. Secnndianus,
the other Arian bishop arraigned at Aquileia, did indeed appeal to
Proverbs 8:22 to prove that the Son was created, and Ambrose, who
was interrogating him, could only reply lamely that the text referred
to Christ's human nature. This direct creation means that the Son has
nobody like him; the Arians' favourite tit~e for the Son was unigenitus
(only-begotten,Jn 1"4, 18; 3:16). His production implies no division
nor diminution of the Father, but has been brought about to manifest
God's goodness and capacity to create. The Son originates from the
Father's will, and his production was impassible and immutable, and
lllbid.245.7ff.
14I~id. 310.19. It has been suggested that Julian is also the author of the Pseudo-
Ig~;tlan Letters and th~ Clementine Liturgy in the Apostolic Constitutions.
Ad, humana contagIa nec ad humanam carnem non descendit, a sentence from
Augustme's Collatio cum Maximino quoted by Gryson, Scolies Ariennes r84.
102
The Rationale of Arianism
has nothing whatever in common with' human generation, but was
more like the engendering of a soul from a soul. The Son was
produced before everything, before anything conceivable, but is still
not co-eternal with the Father. The Father is the origin (auctor) of
everything made, but the Son brings everything into actual
existence. He is the mediator between God and us whereby we know
the Father, and it is he who appeared in the Old Testament
epiphanies. He took a body to appear under the New Testament as
Saviour and Redeemer. The Arians dislike dividing Christ's words
and acts into those relevant to his human nature and those to his
divine nature. It was the God in Christ who died; he was that sort of
vulnerable God. Christ is our God by whom we were made. He can
and should be called 'God' and be adored, glorified and honoured. So
God has produced a God, the Creator a Creator, but there is still a
difference between them. God the Father is the God of God the Son
who can be called secundus Deus (second God); the Father is greater
than he (Tn 14:28, much used by the Arians from the beginning), and
this is shown by the fact that the Son is sent by the Father, that he does
the Father's will and exhibits obedience and subordination to the
Father, and he adores and praises the Father, not only in his earthly
ministry but in Heaven. The Son has many of the Father's attributes,
but he has received them from the Father. He is 'like according to the
Sc~iptures' (Rimini 359 and Constantinople 360). Maximinus can
even say that the Son's nature is-like the Father's, for both are spirit. 16
The Holy Spirit was called into existence by the Son as the first of
creatures; he is not begotten nor unbegotten but created. He is neither
cr~ator nor origin nor God nor Lord nor King and does not reign
wIth the Father and the Son and should not be worshipped, He is
subordinated to the Son whom he regards as his God. But his
greatness and dignity are such that angels desire to be able to
contemplate him. He is present whenever anyone is baptised and
whenever anyone invokes God. He illuminates, guides and sanctifies
the faithful. 17
The Arians always accuse the pro-Nicenes of confounding the
Persons of the Trinity and failing to recognize the individual
16Gryson, ScoI~es Ariennes 185-195. At 197 n 2 Gryson says that the Arians appear
to hav~ devoted ht~e. thought to the Incarnation. I hope that this chapter will show
that thiS statement IS mcorrect. Where the original Latin is quoted from this work,
the page number is given first and the section number ·second.
17Ibid. 195-196.
103
 The Origins
character of each. The difference, in the Arian view, does not merely
apply to their relations towards each other, but to their natures.
There is no common nature shared by Father, Son and Spirit, no
divine 'substance' which they aU possess. The Son is not ingenerate
nor eternal nor invisible nor immortal as the Father is. He does not
possess the Father's negative attributes and only possesses the positive
ones by participation. He is not 'Ie bon dieu' (p. 198); the Father is
God, the Son God; the Holy Spirit merely performs a divine work. In
the end there is only one God who is good, wise etc. We cannot
number the Three, because the Father is incomparable. The Three are
not equal, their difference ofnature entails a difference of degree. The
manner in which these Persons are One is simply in their harmony
and unanimity.18
'And indeed'. says Maximinus, 'there are many brethren but only one
Only-begotten. For the Son is the Good Shepherd and good God, but
not good Ingenerate. And 'the good man takes out of the treasure of
his heart good things' (Luke 6:45). but he is not compared with him
through whom he has been made good. So the Sori is not classified
(connumeratur) with him from whom he has received goodness along
with existence ... 'For every creature of God is good' (I Tim 4:4; cf.
Gen 1:31). Yes, but, as I think, the creature itselfis not compared with
the light by whieh it is filled, nor man with Christ, nor Christ with the
Father.'19
But it is worth noting that in his own account of what happened at
the Council of Aquileia Palladius explicitly disavows
Anhomoianism. Ambrose accused the Arians ofsaying that the Son is
'unlike' the Father. 20 Palladius replies that t/iey do not characterize
the Son as unlike (dissimilis), citing In 5:1 9, 'Or perhaps the reason
why you think that he is said to be unlike by us is because we do not
say that he is co-everlasting with the Ingenerate nor co-eternal with
that same Father.'21
The same drastic subordination and reduction of the Son appears
18lbid. 196-200.
19Scolies Ariennes, text, 234.]9. The interesting kind of Rule of Faith which
Palladius himself gives us (Scolies ] 18-320.136) makes it clear that his 'Trinitarian'
doctrine is in fact a doctrine ofone High God. one demi-god and a superior angel. so
that function alone will suffice to differentiate; the Three hardly need distinction of
Persons because the distinctions of ontological constitution differentiate them
already.
2°Scolies 264.81 (dissimiiem).
21Ibid. 264-266.82.
The Rationale oj Arianism
in the Creed which, according to Auxentius," Vlfilas, bishop of the
,Goths, uttered on his death-bed in Constantinople."
'I believe in one God the Father, alone ingenerate and invisible, and in
his only-begotten Son, our Lord and God, artificer and maker of the
whole creation. who has nobody like him (similem suum) - therefore
there is one God the Father of all who is also God of our God - and in
one Holy Spirit, the power which illuminates and sanctifies. as Christ
said after the resurrection to his apostles (quotation of Luke 24:49 and
Acts 1:8). and he (i.e. the Spirit) is not God nor our God, but the
minister of Christ ... subordinate and obedient in all things to the
Son, and the Son subordinate and obedient in all things to his God and
Father ... '24
Auxentius in his Letter gives his own account in a carefully worded
formal statement of what Ulfilas, who of course is one of his heroes,
believed. It is not an expansion of the death-bed profession ofolfllas,
but a longer, more elaborate statement, much of which is worth
quoting:
'He never hesitated to preach ... oue sole true God the Father of
Christ according to Christ's own teaching, knowing that this sole true
God is solely ingenerate, without beginning, without end, eternal.
supernal, high, exalted, the highest origin, higher than any
superiority. better than any goodness, infinite, incomprehensible.
invisible. immeasurable. immortal, indestructible, incommunicable.
inc6rporeal, uncomposite. simple, immutable, undivided, unmoving.
needing nothing. unapproachable, whole (inscissum), nQt subject to
rule, uncreated, unmade, perfect, existing uniquely (in singularitate
extantem), incomparably greater and better than everything. And
when he was alone. not to create division or reduction ofhis Godhead
but for the revelation (ostensionem) of his goodness and power. by· his
will and power alone. impassibly himself impassible, indestructibly
himself indestructible. and immovably himself unmoved he created
and begot. made and founded the Only-begotten God.
According to the tradition, and the authority of the divine
Scriptures he (UlftIas) never concealed that this second God and
22This is a Letter cif Auxentius quoted by Maximinus; this Auxentius is not the
Arian bishop of Milan unsuccessfully opposed by Hilary and. on his death in 374.
succeeded by Ambrose, but Auxentius Arian bishop of Durostorum who came as a
refugee to Milan while Ambrose was bishop there; he was welcomed by the
Emp~essJustina. widow of Valentini an I and mother of Valentini an II.
23It was in 383.
24Scolies 250.63.
105
 The Origins
originator of everything is from the Father and after the Father and
because of the Father and for the glory of the Father, but he always
showed that according to the holy Gospel he (Christ) is also the great
God and great Lord and great Mystery and great Light ... the Lord
who is the Provider and Lawgiver, Redeemer, Saviour ... the
Originator, the first Judge of living and dead, who has this God and
Father as his superior, because he (Ulfilas) despised and trampled upon
the hateful and execrable, evil and perverse creed of the Homoousians
as a devilish invention and doctrine of demons, and he himselfkn'ew
and handed down to us that if the unwearying power of the only-
begotten God is openly proclaimed as having easily made everything
heavenly and earthly, invisible and visible, and is rightly and faithfully
believed by us Christians why should the impassible power of God the
Father not be credited with having made One suitable for himself?
But ... through his sermons and his writings he (Ulfilas) showed
that there is a differt:nce of deity between the Father and the Son,
between the ingenerate and the only-begotten God, and that the
Father is the creator of the whole creator, but the Son the creator of
the whole creation, and the Father is the God of the Lord, but the Son
the God of the whole of creation. '25
3. The Inferiority and Imperfection of the Logos
The next point to 'observe, which follows logically from the first, is
that Arians taught that the weakness and limitations of the incarnate
Christ applied to the divine Word as well as to the human body;
indeed, these weaknesses and limitations were a proof of the
inferiority of the Son to the Father. Our earliest witness here is
Eustathius of Antioch, who was.probably writing in Arius' lifetime.
From his polemic we can deduce that Arian writers pointed to
Christ's having been born of a woman, his having submitted himself
to the Jewish Law, his warning to Mary Magdalene not to touch him
On 20:17), his crucifixion, as a proof that the Logos attached to the
human organism was subject to weakness, limitation and death. 26
Athanasius gives us reasonably reliable information about a host of
other instances. Jesus Christ showed fear at Gethesemane; he grew in
wisdom (Luke 2:52); he asked questions, showing that he was
25Ibid. 236-238.42-46.
26M. Spanneut, Recherches sur les &,its d'Bustache d'Antioche 18(108), 23(102),
24(102,103), 2S(IOJ)and 27(103). But Eustathius' statement that the Arians said that
Christ committed sin (S4(1 II» is almost certainly a slander.
106
The Rationale of Arianism
~gnorant; he uttered on the Cross the words of supreme weakness,
My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?' (Matt. 27:46). He
prayed to the Father, showing that he was in need; he was hungry and
thirsty, subject to the needs of the body. 27 Arians particularly stressed
Mark 13:32, 'Of that day and hour knoweth no man, neither the
angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father', which appears to
present us with a direct disavowal of knowledge by Christ.2S We
find these arguments reproduced again and again as the target of anti-
Arian writers, Epiphanius, Pseudo-Didymus De Trinitate, Gregory
of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea. 29 Gregory of Nazianzus gives us a
convenientl y condensed account of most of the arguments of
Eunomius (who here represents Arians of every complexion) in
favour of the inferiority of the Logos, both pre-existent and incarnate:
'The words "Your God and my God" Gohn 20:17); the text "Greater
(than I)" Oohn 14:28); the text "created (me the beginning of his
ways," Provo 8:22); the text "he made (him both Lord and Christ)",
(Acts 2:36); the text "whom he sanctified (and sent into the world",
John 10:J6); (Christ's being) a slave, obedient; the text "he gave (all
things into his hand)", Oohn 3=35); that he was commanded, that he
was .sent,. his inability to do or say anything of himself, or judge or
receIve gIftS, or take counsel ... his ignorance, his subordination, his
praying, his asking questions, his growth, his being perfected ... his
s~~eping, being hungry, tired, his weeping, his experiencing agony,
hIS submission. '30
Another text frequently adduced by the Arians was Matthew 10:18,
'Why do you call me good?', where Christ apparently disclaims
moral perfection; it gave the pro-Nicenes much trouble. We find
Epiphanius wrestling with it, and Pseudo-Didymus. 31 Hilary of
POI tIers In the West reproduces most of these arguments and tries to
meet them: the Arians argue for the Son's inferiority on the grounds
that honorem praeteritum reposcat (he demands back his former dignity,
270r. con. Ar. Il.26; 31.
28Ibid. III.4 2 .
29E'h' A
piP. amus, ncoratus 17.2-6, 2S, 26; 20.1-10,28; 37.1-'1, 46, 47; 38.1-8, 47-49
etc. PanarlOn 66.3S.IO(?S); 69.60.1,.2. Ps.-Didymus De Trin, 21 PG 39:900. Gregory
of Nyssa, Adversus -A.rlUm ~t Sabelilum 76,84, 8S. Basil, Bpp. 236. 1(876-877). I give
my reasons for agreemg with those scholars who deny the De Trinitate to Didymus
below, PP.6S2-'1.
:;Th.eologj~al Orations (ed. Mason) III(XXIX).18; c( IV(XXX).6 and 12.
E~lphamus, Ancoratus 18.1, 2, 26; Panarion 69.19.1-6(168,169). Ps.-Didymus,
De Trm. 1.18, 3S-43(1I4-116); IIl.IS(864).
 The Origins
perhaps a reference to Phil. 2.S-II), et mori timeotet mortuus sit (and he
feared to die and did die);32 they point to the cry of dereliction on the
Cross, and the statements33 'The Son cannot do anything of himself
(John 5=19), and 'not that Ishould do my wiJI' (John 6:37-38):34 They
allege that Christ did not raise himself from the dead, but his Fat~er
raised him." In short, Hilary says, the Arians attribute everything
that was said or done through the assumed human nature (as Hilary
sees it) to the defectiveness of his divinity.'·
A remarkable fact in this part of Arian doctrine is the stress laid on
the evidence that during his earthly ministry Jesus constantly prayed
to the Father. From this the Arians inferred, logically according to
their premises, that the Father was the God of the Son. 37 They
pointed to such texts as Ps 4S (44):8, 'God, thy God, has ~ointed
thee'.'. The pre-existent Christ who appeared to the Israelites, says
Asterius in his Homilies, is exactly the same as he who was crucified,
and the 'PuAa~6v "', KUPlB (,Protect me, Lord') of Ps 16 (IS):I (on
which Asterius is commenting) is the prayer of Christ to the Father."
In his Rule of Faith, Eudoxius'describes the pre-existent Son as 'pious
because he worships the Father'. 40 Another crucial text for the Arians
here isJohn 20:27 ('My God and your God'); it is constantly discussed
and disputed. 41 A later anonymous writer in the documents brought
to light by Mai and re-edited by Gryson says that the Son is 'God of
everything that was made later than he and through Jesus (sic) by the
providence of his God and Father, but the Father is God for the Son,
whose origin he is, as he is of all'.42 It is therefore a clear mark of
Arian origin when a prayer in the VIIth Book of the Apostolic
Constitutions describes God the Father as 'God and Father of the
32Hilary, De Trinitale VII.6(26S).
"Ibid. X.49(S03).
"Ibid. IX.43(4I9); 49(42S-426).
"Ibid. X.70(S26).
36lbid. IX.IS. It is noteworthy that Maximinus in his debate with Augustine
much later makes no reference to Christ's weakness or limitations. It seems likely
that later Arianism laid less emphasis on this point.
37We have seen this already above, p. 10S-6·
38Hilary, De Trin. XI.IO(S39).
39 Asterius, Homilies XXViII.6(2zS-ZZ6).
40Hahn Bibliothek, p. 261; the Greek is EUO'EPil SIC t"ou crEPElV t"ov TtQt"Epa.
41 E.g. Eunomiu$ (here characteristic of all Arians) in Gregory of Nyssa, Contra
Eunomjum lII(x).1(88S)·
42Cryson, Scripta Arriana Latina XVII, 25S-256 (IV Mai).
108
The Rationale oj A~ianjsm
Christ and of those who direct their worship to him (trov el<; aoltov
eol(Je~06vt"'v), 43
4. A Suffering God
We perceive the reason for this determined subordination of the Son
to the Father when we realize that it was a central part of Arian
theology that Cod suffered. We have already noticed the trenchant
sentence of Asterius: 'the Gentiles and the peoples crucified the God
of the four comers of the earth, and crucified him because he
tolerated it'.44 We have seen his remarkable analogies of the
Emperor's orders, the Emperor's breastplate and the coats of skins in
Genesis'" in short his explicit declaration that God suffered, was
crucified, was buried. But Asterius is' not alone in this striking
doctrine. We can find it in the Opus Impeifectum in Motthoeum. The
author of this work can write, 'God placed human salvation even
above his own immunity from suffering' (impossibilitotem).4. And
there is a signifIcant interchange between Palladius and Ambrose at
the Council of Aquileia, where we have Palladius' own account.
Palladiusis asked, 'Is the Son the invisible God?', and he replies that he
is not, he is the visible God (Le. the God capable of making himself
visible).47 Shortly afterwards this dialogue takes place:
,!4mbrose: Is the Son the immortal God?
'Palladius: No, he is not (i.e. he is the God who can do the dying
whereas the Father cannot; and he cites 1 Tim 1:17 and
6:16 to show that the Father alone is immortal, and
1 Cor 15:3 (,Christ died for our sins') to show that the
Son died).
Ambrose: These texts apply to Christ's flesh (i.e. not to his
Godhead).
43 Didascalia et Conslitutiones Apost%rum (Funk) Vol. I Book VII, XXXVI
(434-43 6)6.
44See above, p. 40: For a similar view from someone who was probably an exact
co~teI?porary of Anus, see the statement from the Homily edited by Tetz ('Eine
Arlamsche Homilie', 301-302) attributed by him to Athanasius of Anazarbus, 'the
Judge of the earth was judged for your sake'. This refers to the trial ofJesus. Tetz
misunderstands it as a reference to the Last Judgment.
4SS ee above, p. 39. It should b~ ~ote.d that this is precisely not Patripassianism,
first because that error refuses a dIStinctIon between the Persons, of which nobody
can accuse Arianism, and secondly because Arianism takes the most elaborate
measures to see that the Father does not suffer.
46Ll.47(1928}.
47Gryson, Scolies Arjennes 290.106.
109
 The Origins
Do you think that 'Christ' is a human title?
Palladius:
(after a pause) Both human and divine.
Ambrose:
Palladius: Then you should believe that not only the flesh
suffered, but God and man, the Son of God and the Son
of man, that is, the Lord of Glory was crucified in each
associated condition (utroque statu socio).
Palladius here trapped Ambrose nicely. If Ambrose says that 'C;:hrist'
was a purely human title Palladius can easily show from SCripture
that it is not; if he says that it is a divine title, then he conced~s
Palladius' point that the divine in the Son of God suffered. It lS
surprising that Ambrose, who had been a bishop for ~even years,
never seemed to have faced that question before. But 11 makes the
point quite clear that Palladius' creed is that of a God ,:,ho suffers.
This doctrine of a suffering God was achieved by two .deas which
might almost be said to be the characteristic m~rks of Arianism, the
acceptance of a soma apsychon and the rejection of a psi/os anthropos, or
in other words the doctrine that the incarnate Word took to himself a
body without a soul or mind and' the convicti~n that he was not. 'a
mere man', but God inhabiting a body. Durmg the. debate w.th
Ambrose at Aquileia, Palladius, according to the offic.al text o~ the
Acts of the Council, asked his interrogator about the verse My
Father is greater than I' Uohn 14:28). 'This comparison is of the Son of
God', Palladius says, 'And can flesh say "God is greater than I",
Either the flesh or the divinity is speaking. Who 10 thlS case was the
flesh?' Ambrose replies, 'Fleshcannotspeak without a soul'.4> Behmd
this interchange, as Ambrose well knew, lies an important.difference
of doctrine. Palladius believes that Christ had no human mmd or soul
to declare itselfless than God, and therefore that it is the Logos who is
speaking; Ambrose believes that the human nature, endowed with a
human soul, is speaking. For Palladius, the Word directly
experienced all the human experiences; the body was Simply a
soulless physical organism in which the Logos supphed the place of
mind or soul. . doctrine'), Seeberg (Textbook of the History of Doctrines Vol. n. 204), Sellers
This was not a new idea at the time. Simonetti indeed calls It
'widespread' .50 Eusebius of Caesa rea at one point directly denies that
48Ibid. 290, 292.107.
49Ibid. Acts of Council 360(40); in Latin the dialogue runs thus: P. Quae emm
comparatio est Filii Dei. Et caro potest dicere, 'Deus me maior est'? Caro loquebatur aut
divinitas. Qui ibi erat carD? A. Caro sine anima non loquebatur.
50Studi 142 n44; cf. Crisi SI and 469·
no
The Rationale of Arianism
the incarnate Logos had a human soul, 51 and when in his late
Commentary on Psalms he is compelled to recognize that Scripture
actually refers to the soul ofJesus Christ, he fails entirely to see the
significance of it. Marcellus of Ancyra, a theologian of a very
different stamp, seems to take no account of a human soul/mind in
the incarnate Word.' 2 That this doctrine of the somaapsychon
assumed by the Logos was a prominent point in Arian theology is
abundantly evidenced.' 3 Eustathius of Antioch early in the
controversy singles this out as an Arian trait:
'Why do they think it important'. he says, 'to demonstrate that Christ
assumed a body without a soul, in the course of thinking up
deceptions that savour of the earth? It .is in order that if they can
bamboozle some people into concluding that this is true, then because
they attach the mutable nature of passions to the divine Spirit, they
may easily persuade these people that the mutable should be begotten
from the Immutable (and therefore that the pre-existent Son was
mutable).'54
Epiphanius tells us that this doctrine that the incarnate Word had no
human soul was characteristic of Lucian of Antioch and his·
disciples. 55 As this is one of the very few statements about Lucian of
which we can be reasonably sure, and as Arius in his Letter to Eusehius
of !yicomedia refers to both of them as OU:u..OUKlaVI.CJ't'U{, we may
cohfidently assume that this doctrine was held by Arius himsel£
T~e next witness to this doctrine in point of time, if he is not
actually the earliest, is Asterius. He does not directly mention the
absence of a human soul in Christ, but he brings in its correlative idea,
that Christ was not a 'mere man'. 'If he' (Christ), he says, 'was not
51 Dem. Ell, VII.I, 23. 24; X.8, 74; Eee, Theol. 1.20, 87. Gericke Marcell von Ancyra
97-99, has noted this. See above. PP.54-5S.
52S 0 rightly Gericke, op. cit. 168.
53 Among the many scholars investigating this period who mention this doctrine
we can list. in addition to Simonetti (already mentioned) Gwatkin (SA 17). Loofs
('Arianismus' II, who in connection with it refers to the 'bankruptcy in the Logos-
(Eustathius of Antioch IS), Bardy (LUcien d'Antioche 154), Moreira (Potamius de
Lisbonne 16), Boularand (Hbesie d' Arius 79-80), Ritter ('Arianismus' 702 & 717 n 8),
Lorenz (Arius ludaizans? 211-215 particularly full references), and Wallace-HadriIl
. (Christian Antioch 118, 128). We have already observed (see above. P.9?-98) that
Gregg and Groh curiously ignore this point.
I 54Spanneut, op. cit. 15(100); cr. ibid. 'La Position theologique d'Eustache
d'Antioche', 223.
55See above, p. 80.
l
's
III
 The Origins
master of them (darkness and sun), they would not have mourned in
this way' (he is speaking of the darkness of the sun at the Crucifixion);
'if he was a mere man (Ilv9pw1to, 1jIl1..6,) they would not have
bewailed him as their master ... He who is Lord of the Sabbath is
Lord also of me and of the Day of Preparation; but a mere man
(liv9pw1to, 1jIl)'6,) is not Lord of Days'. 56 It is the heretics who refuse
to believe that Christ was not a mere man. 57 And this is followed by a
long rhetorical passage insisting that it was not a mere man who was
crucified, but God as well as man. 58
There is a revealing passage in Eudoxius' Rule of Faith which
illuminates Asterius' words. It runs thus, referring to Christ:
'he became flesh, not man, for he did no.t.take a human soul, but he
became flesh, in order that he might be called for men "God for us"
(9£0; iU.liv) by means of the flesh as by means of a veil; there were not
two natures, because he was not a complete man, but he was God in
the flesh instead of a soul: the whole was a single composite nature; he
was passible by the Incarnation (ohcovolJ.iav) for if only soul and body
suffered he could not have saved the world. Let them answer then
how this passible and mortal person could be consubstantial with God
who is beyond these things: suffering and death.'59
Here we see into. the heart of Arianism. The Arians want to. have a
God who can suffer, but they cannot attribute suffering to the High
God, and this is what (with some reason) they believed the Ho-
moousian doctrine would entail. The suggestion of Moreira"O that
the Second Creed ofSirmium of357 (called by the pro-Nicenes 'the
Blasphemy') intended such a doctrine as is sketched above in the
words eamem vel corpus id est hominem suseepisse (,took flesh and body,
that is man') is an attractive ane. Hilary sums up the Adan doctrine of
the Incarnation'; ~ot without some exaggeratian, in these words:
'God the Word as some part of the powers of God, enlarging himself
by some process of extension, dwelt in the man who began to exist
56Asterius Homilies XXXI.2(243).
"Ibid. 3(243).
"Ibid. 4-8(243-45).
s9Hahn cp. cit. 261, 262. Simcnetti (Crisi 469 and 470. n 3) is right in deciding that
this is net tce advanced to' be attributable to. Eudexius. but I do net fellow
Simcnetti in thinking that E.:doxius has borrewed this pelemic against a two-
nature theory from Apellinaris. It fellows from the logic of Arianism itself.
60Mereira op. cit. 110.
112
The Rationale of Arianism
from Mary and monitored him by the powers of divine activity, but
the man lived by the motivation and nature of (the Word's) own
soul.'61
According to Epiphanius, the Arians went so far as to say that the
divine part ofthe Logos incarnate was in need afthe human (to do. the
suffering), and therefore the divine part must be alien from and
different to God the Father, who is in need ofnothing."2 But this may
represent Epiphanius' muddled thinking rather than actual Arian
teaching. We can find this doctrine even in the small amount which
we have of Pseudo-Ignatius. In his version ofIgnatius Philadelphians
6, variaus heresies are denounced, amang them those which canfess
Christ Jesus but hold that he was 'a mere man ... not Only-begotten
God and Wisdom and Word of God, but that he consisted only of
soul and body.'·3
As we have already seen in the case of Palladius, later Western
Arianism did nat abandan this doctrine. A fragment from
Mai/Gryson says that the evangelist John at 1:I4 'blocked the mouths
of those who say that he took' a soul along with the body.'"4
¥aximinus in his argument with Augustine in fact refers to. this
favaurite Arian doctrine when he insists that the soul afthe incarnate
Christ was divine, and Augustine is careful to. emphasize that it was
,human. 65
. The author of the Apostolic Constitutions, Book VII, speaks of the
'Only-begotten' God who 'accepted death through the Cross for our
sake'; and declares that God at the end of the age sent his Son to
became man for the sake af man and 'to. receive all human
experiences' (pathi) apart from sin."" The Opus Imperfeetum in
Matthaeum, which is the most sophisticated and able work ofArian
theology known to us, commenting on Matt. 21:33 ('a man who was
a householder who hired out his vineyard'), remarks as follows:
'Ifanyone thinks that Christ must have had only a human soul (anima)
for this reason, because he is called "man". he should listen [to this text
where] God the Father is called a man [i.e. a paterfamilias]. The Son of
God. knowing beforehand that because of his being called by the
61De Trin. X.50(504).
62Panarion 69.19.7-8(169).
6JCureton, Corpus 19natianum 95.
64Gryson Frag. XX.228 (Mai XIII).
6SAugustine Collatio 9(727, 728) and 14(720.).
66Funk op. cit. XII:XLlI(448l3 and (449)4.
113
 The Origins
name of human being he would be blasphemously aIlege.d t~. be a
mere man (homo purus). called even God the Father who IS mVlSlble a
man, so that since the Father is called ':man" the Son should be free
from the blasphemies of the heretics.'67
Homo purus here obviously correspo~ds to the ~r~ek p~ilos anthropos,
meaning for the Arian not necessanly an Ebl~rute plctur~, of one
who was human and not divine, but the pro-Nlcene doctrme of the
incarnate Word possessing twO natures or elements, one of .which
was a complete man with a human mind. This model would rule out
the Arian doctrine that the divine Logos directly experienced human
emotions and experiences and was not shielded from these. as from
the middle of the fourth century onwards the pro-Nicenes tended to
claim. by a human soul or mind. Later the same author says,
'If God the Father, who is only God and not man, is yet to be called
·'man". how much more necessary was it that the Only-begotten Son
should be called "'man", eveD though he was not a mere man (homo
'68
purus). as he assumed human nat~re.
What this writer attacks is not so much a two-nature doctrine as .a
doctrine of two complete natures in which the huma~ nature .15
envisaged as supplied with a human ~oul. We have. seen Ju.st now m
Asterius and in Eudoxius' Rule of Faith that the Arlans beheved that
this idea struck at the heart of the doctrine of salvation. A mere man
who did not have the divine Logos as his mind could not save
mankind. Their argument here is the same as that of the
Apollinarians, but is not necessarily derived from them. The author
of the Opus Irnperfecturn a little later has exactly the same argument as
that of Asterius and Eudoxius. After enumeratmg several err~rs of
the pro-Nicenes, he castigates them for saying:
'A mere man (purum hominem) was crucified in soul and body. not just
God in a body. in which there was no deity ... For if a mere man
suffered, I give up. because the death of a man. not of God. does not
save US.'69
670pUS Imp! in Matt. XI(8S3).1 take the view that this is certa~n1y an A~an work
of the fifth century which has at some point suffered orthodo?, mterl:'0latlons. But
its' textual history and composition have by no mean~ been s~tlsfacton.ly se~tled ,Yet.
See Zeiller Les Origines chrhiennes 474-82; and Meshn op. Cit. Les Aflens d OCCIdent
150-82.
"Ibid. XLI(859)'.
"Ibid. XLV(889)P·
Il4
The Rationale of Arianism
This author refuses to see Christ's human nature as complete, and
therefore capable of taking the weight of human experiences off
God's impassibility. If we accept this reconstruction of Arian
doctrine, we ·need not ascribe to the author of the Apostolic
Constitutions, who has the same doctrine, Apollinarian tendencies, as
Funk conjectured.'o He is an Arian.
The Pseudo-Ignatian Letters provide us with many more
rejections of the doctrine that Christ was psi los anthropos; the writer
continually polemicizes against this view." He emphasizes equally
strongly the reality of Christ's flesh or body.72 He regularly
subordinates the Son to the Father in a manner very reminiscent of
Arianism.'3 He refers hostilely several times to people who subject
God Almighty to human experiences or who identify the Father and
the Son; this sounds like an allusion to pro-Nicene doctrine.'4 In all
of these passages he mentions alongside them those who regard
Christ as psi/os anthropos. There are one or two statements
unmistakably affirming that the incarnate Christ did not have a
human soul and that the divine Word dwelt in a body: inPhilippians6
he denounces various heresies, among them those who confess Christ
Jesus, but hold that he was a psi/on anthropon ... not Only-begotten
God and Wisdom and Word ofGod, but that he consisted of soul and
body, and these are dangerous Ebionites. 75 In the same passage he
warns that even professing correct doctrine does not emancipate you
from heresy if at the same time you approve of illicit sexual unions,
and in the category of orthodoxy he places the view that 'God the
Lord dwelt (Kat<!>K.') in a human body, being the logos in it, as a soul
7°Funk op. cit.lntrod. XX. For views on this subject. see C. H. Turner 'Notes on
the Apostolic Constitutions 1', 54--61; Meslin Les Ariens 109-10. 243. 2-44. 393.
?,lCureton op. cit. Phi/ad. 6(95); Tarsians 2(126, 127), 6(129-130); Antiochenes
5(136); PhiUpp. 3-12(149-155).
72lbid. Trallians 9(81). 10(83); Smyrnaeans 2(103): Philipp. 3(14.9). 5(153).
73lbid. Magnesians 11(69. the creed); Trallians 5(77); Philad. 4(91-2); Smyrnaeans
7(r09), 9(111); Tarsians 5(129); Hero 7(145)·
74TralIians 6(77); Tarsians 2(126, 127); Antiochenes 5(136).
75Page 95: as it is wholly unlikely that the sect of the Ebionites still existed in the
writer's day, we may take this as an abusive epithet applied to the pro-Nicenes.. On
the other hand a writer in Mai/Gryson Fragments (Gryson V. 236-237 (Mai XV»)
outlines a doctrine which is clearly that of psilos anthropos (hominem tantummodo .. .
corpus et animum non Deum) and attributes it to Photinus and his predecessors
(Marcellus, possibly also the pto-Nicenes). This is indeed a full Photinian position.
as the writer makes clear, denying [he distinct existence of Christ before the
Incarnation. For Photinus, see below, P·235-8.
lIS
 The Origins
in a body, because the dweller in it was God, but not a human soul'
(ljIUXiJ).'6
Except for one or two places which so starkly contradict the rest
that they must be interpolations,77 he gives every sign of being an
Arian, probably an Homoian Arian rather than an Eunomian.
because he does not, for instance, object to saying that the Son is
begotten, though he is careful to define what he means by this.78
That he should sometimes describe the Son as immutable (li<p£,,<o,)
is not particularly surprising. Several parallels can be found for this, in
Arius himself,79 in Eusebius of Nicomedia. 8o in Julian the Arian,
commentator onJob, 81 in the Homoian Expositio Patrieii et Aetii, 82 in
Aetius,83 twice in the Mai/Gryson Fragments, 84 in the Arian Pseudo-
Maximus of Turin,85 and in Maximinus in his Collatio with
Augustine. 86 In spite of difficulties, the evidence that the Pseudo-
Ignatian Letters was originally an Arian work remains strong. We
may tentatively extend this argument to suggest that we should now
re-examine some passages in pro-Nicene writers which have hitherto
been regarded as anti-Apollinarianand see whether they do not make
better sense if they are regarded as anti-Arian, some perhaps in
pseudo-Didymus,87 and the passage in the Tomus ad Antiochenos
which asserts emphatically the full humanity of Christ, in the
presence of apparently consenting Apollinarian representatives. 88
76Cf. Smymaeans 2(103). 6 ).6'Yo~ tv oapJCi 4)K1l0EV.
77Such as Philipp. 2(14) and 5(150).
78 Trallians 9(81).
79Letter to Alexander Opitz Urk III. No. 6.2(12); cf. Simonetti Stud; 9I.
80Letter to Paulinus ibid. No. 8.4(16).
810p. cit. 245.7-246.7 Gulian's Rule of Faith) lhpeapto~ liE Kat 6 "fEVVfJeEi~.
82See Turner EOMIA 1.668.14(1, 2) in hoc possidet invariabilem aput patrern
sirnilitudinem ... quod non imutatur bonitate.
83Syntagmation IS. so Kopecek op. cit. 124, 125. 171-2.
84Frag. XVI(250) Gryson (Mai I) hunc non profitentem in posterum sed statim
perfecturn, and Frag. XVII(2jj and 256) Gryson (Mai XVII), invertibilis (255) and
immutabilis natura (256).
BSTumer 'St Maximus of Turin contra Iudaeos' 11.295.43-50, unus genuit ...
aetemus aeternum. Turner later admitted that this was not by Maximus.
86Collatio 15(733) non perficientem sed perfectum.
B7E.g. De Trinitate III.2.xxvii(797), where the condemnation of the soma apsychon
view is more likely to be aimed against the Arians than the Apollinarians.
88PG 26:7(804). C. B. Armstrong 'Th<; Synod of Alexandria and the Schism of
Antioch', 216-17. does not seem to be aware of this possibility. For the Tomus ad
Ant. see below pp.639-53.
I16
The Rationale of Arianism
5. More Detailed Christology
Next we may look at all those passages. not many in number, where
Arian writers give more than a passing mention to the theology of
the Incarnation. Several say, as might be expected, that]esus came to
give an example of a holy life. Both Pseudo-Ignatius and the author
of the Apostolic Constitutions (who may be one and the same person)
are fond of the expression (ocr!"" "o,",,£ucrUI1£vo,) (,exhibiting a holy
Jife-style').89 The Son, says Maximinus in the Col/atio"o came to
instruct us 'that the Father is greater than the Son, and than this Son,
who is the great God.' Curiously enough that enigmatic figure,
Potamius of Lisbon. apparently an Arian converted (with or without
the lure of filthy lucre) from conventional Western orthodoxy,
whose Latin style is reminiscent in its convoluted pretentiousness of
Samuel]ohnson at his worst (or Amanda Ros at her best), has quite a
complex account of the Incarnation, preserved for us by Phoebadius
of Agen:
'the flesh and spirit of Christ fused together through Mary's blood and
combined into one body, God made open to suffering.'91
Demophilus, whom we have met already,.2 made the extraordinary
statement that 'the body of the Lord mingled with the divinity and
was reduced to vanishing-point, Jike a pint of milk thrown into the
'whole mass of the sea.'93 But. we cannot regard this view as
characteristic of Arianism. We have already seen the quite elaborate
ideas of Asterius upon the subject. 94 The Logos directly took upon
himself human experiences and suffering, inhabiting, as its soul and
89E.g. Ap. Const. VU.XLI.6(446); Ps.·Ig. Smyrnaea~ 1(163); cf. Trallians 9(81).
Eunomius has the same expression Apologeticus (PG 30:27(865».
90Coliatio B2S(139).
91Phoebadius of Agen Contra Arianos (PL20)S(16): carne et spiritu Christi coagulatis
per sanguinem Mariae et in unum corpus redactis passibilem Deum factum. For the
complicated question of whether Potamius wrote the orthodox works attributed to
him and ifhe did whether he wrote them before his adherence to Arianism or after.
and whether the extreme Luciferans who accused him of ratting to Arianism
because Constantius II bribed him by an estate are right or not, see Moreira Potamius
de Lisbonne. I do not myself think that the people of the see ofLisbon can acquit their
first known bishop of ending his days as a heretic. but I believe that the story of the
estate used as a bribe is probably false.
92See above. p. IOI.
93S0 Philostorgius HE IX:I4.
94See above. pp. 38-40.
117
 The Origins
directing mind, a 'God-filled body' ("rolla lve.ov). The Godhead
endured insult but no diminution (because, of course it was a reduced
Godhead capable of enduring such things). He speaks of 'God in the
flesh making his own the suffering and death of the flesh',"' and says
'God in the flesh was he who was crucified, and the Invisible was
insulted in the visible';"· 'the body indwelt byGod ("rolla "va.ov) was
crucified, and how could he who bore the body not be insulted?'"
The author of Book VII of the Apostolic Constitutions presents the
Incarnation as sheer paradox without qualification: 'the Impassible
was nailed to the Cross, and he who was by nature immortal died and
the Lifegiver was buried.'"' An anonymous Arian Commentary onJob
originally written in Greek but preserved in a Latin translation has a
not dissimilar view:
'When he himself, the mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ
the Son of the living God, at the time that he clothed himself with a
human body, when he put round him a corruptible form, when he
came to the Passion and the Cross, he complained, and said, "Father if
it be possible let this cup pass from me" (Matt. 26:39), that is, the
Passion, and he began to be afraid and mournful. Not because the
divinity was afraid. but because he is showing the weakness of the
flesh. So therefore the Lotd, that he might show that he was not a
spectre but had a really corruptible body, shows himself to be afraid of
the pain and suffering of the Cross. '99
Later Arianism insists upon the direct exposure of the divinity of
Christ to suffering with equal firmness but is more inclined to
emphasize that il) spite of this the divinity remained intact. The
Mai/Gryson· Fragments give us several examples. There is a long
passage in one of these which is worth quoting:
'Even in (the flesh) the impassible God the Word suffered, and the
incorruptiBle God endured corruption, in order that he might alter
our state to incorruptibility. But the Godhead of the Word himself
did not die nor endure corruption, but the gradual separation of the
95Homilies on the Psalms XXIl.3(I73); 'making his own' renders Oba;tOltOl-
TJaallSvov.
"Ibid. 11.6(6).
• 7Ibid. 11.6(174).
"Funk op. cit. VII.XII(so8)3J.
99PG XVII:iii.SIS. The author has certain points in common with Julian, but is
certainly not he. Julian is much more learned than this author and does not indulge
in the sententiousness which is the hallmark of this commentator on Job.
IIS
The Rationale of Arianism
Godhead from the body is evidenced as the corruption of the body
itself. Yet God the Word suffered nothing except injury, simply for
our sake. For if when we die our souls (animae) do not die, but the
departure of the soul (animus) from the body becomes the corruption
of the human being. much less does the divinity of the Only-begotten
God die; but when he those, at the will of the Father he died of his
own accord, that is, he departed from the body, and the separation
from it is called death.'lOO
Another fragment explains John 14:9 ('He who has seen me has seen
the Father') by saying that
'he-who has seen me has seen the works of the Son, and through the
works of the divinity he has known its power. he has seen, that is he
has known. who sent me and commissioned these works for me- (to
do) or rather he who is working through me.'lOl
Pseudo-Maximus Turinensis declares that the Son 'assumed a human
1
body that he might for a period darken his radiance through the veil
of the body and God should speak to man through the humanity as an
interpreter.'102 It is in accordance with this later doctrine, and not
inconsistent with the earlier, that Jesus should be omniscient, for he
had no human mind to limit his divine mind; later Arianism
probably modified the earlier emphasis on the limitations of the
Word. A fragmentary anonymous Commentary on Luke edited by
Mai/Gryson, speaking of the incarnate Lord, says 'the Only-begotten
God. does nothing by discovery (inventu) but acts with divine
knowledge."o,
The richest source of our knowledge of the more developed Arian
thought on the Incarnation, however, is undoubtedly the Opus
Imperfectum, whose author was highly intelligent and well educated.
He does not hesitate to speak of two natures in Christ,104 but one of
them, the human, is incomplete. It was not the part of a human being
to fast forty days and forty nights, he says; but then, it was not the part
of God to be hungry. The reasons for Christ's temptations were, first
l00Frag. XX(260), Gryson (Mai XIII). For a parallel to the curious 'except injury'
(praeter iniuriam), cf. Proposition 7 in the Sermo Arianorum (PL 42:680): Christ's
death was a contumelia to his divinity .
101 Frag. XVIIl(2S7-8) Gryson (Mai V).
102Tumer 'St Maximus of Turin Contra Iudaeos III.296.2o-2; the Latin for
'darken his tadiance' is fulgores obumbraret.
103Gryson 4.17.2II (Mai 199).
1040pUS Imp. IV(6S9)16; V(664)2.
119
 The Origins
to give us an example of fasting against temptation, and secondly to
put a limit of forty days to our fasting.!OS And later, on the Lord's
sleeping,
'The Lord does not sleep from the necessity of human weakness but of
his own free will. For although sleep does not occur in the eternal
nature of God ... yet our Lord and Saviour, in order to show the
reality of the Body which he has taken, condescends to fulfil all the
attributes of human nature even to the extent of sleep. so that he
should plainly manifest the reality of the body which he has
assumed.'106
When he faces the objection that if Christ was God he could not die,
but if he could die he could not be God, he replies by saying that
Christ overcame and absorbed death rather than being absorbed by
it.lo7 The incarnate Word was for him omniscient,108 and, as we
have seen, this was almost a necessity at least for the later Arian view
of the Incarnation. On the difficult subject of the query ofJesus about
what David was saying in Psalm IIO (109}:1 (Matt. 22.41-44), he
rejects the pro-Nicene interpretation of ' the heretics who are anxious
to invent the lie of equality', that it was the human nature which must
be called the Lord of David and envisaged as sitting at God's right
hand. Christ 'according to the flesh' is David's descendant and not his
Lord, but according to hi< divinity Christ is earlier than David and
sits at God's right hand. 109 He refuses to allow human experience to
be channelled into a complete human nature of the incarnate Word,
but he distinguishes sharply between the divine and human in Christ.
This be~omes rather clearer in a passage in which he rejects Nicene
theology, believing that it is equivalent to saying that God the Father,
God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are all one Person, and that it
implies an act of generation in the Godhead equivalent to a human act
of generation. and that it means 'a mere man was crucified in body
and in soul, pot simply God in a body', because this would remove
the effect ofour salvation. uo The same thought occurs in a passage
which we have already noticed: 'how', he asks, 'could (the evangelist)
convict the Jews of being murderers of the Son of God, ifa mere man
I05lbid. V(664)2.
·"XXIII(7S4)24.
·"XXX(788)39.
"'XXXVI(833)33·
"'XLII(87S)43.
• "XLV(899132.
120
The Rationale of Arianism
(purus homo) and not the Son of God was crucified?'"! He deals with
the tricky question of Christ's apparent disavowals ofknowledge and
goodness by saying, explicitly, not that Christ denied these attributes
because the complete human nature was lacking in knowledge arid
goodness (propter dispensationem humanam), but in order to show that
the full knowledge and full goodness which he possessed came from
the Father and not simply from himself.!12 Earlier Arianism would
probably have said that the Logos was of his own nature limited in
knowledge and goodness. But the argument of the author of the
Opus Imperfectum is no less ingenious than the ingenious evasiveness of
Athanasius and Hilary on the same subject.!!l Arid we have already
noticed the fine sentence in which this writer declared that God
placed our salvation above his impassibility.H4 Even a much less
gifted Arian theologian, the author of the two Homilies edited by
Liebart, can emphasize ib. forceful language the gennine weakness
and suffering and human experiences of Christ.! 15 Even as late as the
sixth century, Fulgentius of Ruspe in his works against the Arians
devotes a great deal of space to disproving their view that Christ had
no_human soul.
We can now perceive the rationale ofArianism. At the heart of the
Arian Gospel was a God who suffered. Their elaborate theology of
the relation of the Son to the Father which so much preoccupied their
opponents was devised in order to find a way of envisaging a
Christian doctrine of God which would make it possible to be
faithful to the Biblical witness to a God who suffers. This was to be
achieved by conceiving of a lesser God as reduced divinity who
would be ontologically capable, as the High God was not, of
enduring human experiences, including suffering and death. This
might be called an exemplarist soteriology, not in the sense that they
presented the example of a man gaining perfection by moral effort,
but in the sense that it was an example ofGod suffering as man suffers.
or at least what man suffers. in order to redeem man. Arian writers
are fully convinced of the genuine humanity of the body which the
Logos assumed. They are not tempted to suggest, as many pro-Nicene
writers do, that Christ's human nature, though genuinely human,
III XLIX(889)30.
112L(92I)26.
tl3S ee below, pp. 446-58,492-501.
1I4LI(928)47; see above, p. log .
1l5Liebatt, op. cit. 1.3.58. 60.
121
 The Origins
was not the same as OUIS because it was derived from a Virgin
without the interposition of male generation, though of course all
Arians believed in the virginal conception of Jesus. But they insist
that what this Word assumed when he became incarnate was a soma
(body) without a psyche (soul). Arianism never seems to have faced, as
Apollinarianism may be said to have faced, the question of the mind,
the nous, nor of the spirit. the pneuma, of the incarnate Son. Because
Arians were determined that the Son of God did genuinely, serious! y,
undergo human experiences, within the limits of their doctrine they
understood the scandal of the Cross much better than the pro-
Nicenes. Neither Athanasius nor Hilary nor the Cappadocians could
ever have envisaged the self-emptying of the Son as Asterius did, nor
have written etiam sui ipsius impassibilitatem praeposuit salutem
humanam (he even placed human salvation hefore his own immunity
from suffering). Here Arian thought achieved an important insight
into the witness of the New Testament denied to the pro-Nicenes of
the fourth century, who unanimously shied away from and
endeavoured to explain away the scandal of the Cross. We must give
the Arians credit for this insight. But of course they only achieved
their doctrine of the incarnation at the expense of an account of the
Christian doctrine of God which in effect taught two unequal gods, a
High God incapable of human experiences, and a lesser God who, so
to speak, did his dirty work for him. Most ofus will conclude that this
was too high a price to pay.
As· for the old contrast between cosmology or ontology and
soteriology in Arianism, we have seen good reason to believe that this
is a false problem. Arianism did not consist only of Prestige's
'glittering syllogisms' nor was it composed of two incompatible
halves (Harnack). The ontology fitted the soteriology and the
soteriology the ontology. Once we understand the true rationale of
Arianism, we· realize that the two sides fit very well together, have in
fact been devised to fit together, and that itis only by accident that we
have been given the impression that either Arius or his followers
cared only for defining the relation of the Son to the Father. They
laboured for and upheld that definition because they held a concrete
and by no means contemptible doctrine of salvation which that
definition was intended to undergird.
122
The Rationale of Arianism
6. The attitude of Arians to Arius
One of the curious facts about Arius is that nobody, Arian or anti-
Arian (with one possible exception), ever refers to or quotes any
writings of his of which we do not know already, It is true that
Constantine at one time ordered his works to be burnt and his
followers to be branded as 'Porphyrians',116 But there is no evidence
that this order was ever carried out, and the Arians are seldom called
by this epithet thereafter, though their enemies are ready to apply
many other opprobious na,mes to them,il? Late Roman Emperors
tended·to find that their most ferocious commands were not always
translated literally into action. It seems reasonable to conclude that
Arius did not leave a large mass of writings behind him, and certainly
none of his disciples, as far as we know, took the trouble to edit his
works after his death. We can even trace an inclination among some
whom their opponents called Arians to disavow discipleship of Arius.
Those who composed the First Creed of the Council of Antioch of
341 began by saying 'We are not the followers of Arius (for how
could we who are bishops follow a presbyter?),11B The Homoian
bishops at Nice in 359 swore that they were not Arians,119 Ifwe can
trust the Corpus Canonum produced, according to Dossetti. in the
time of the Arian bishop Euzoius at Antioch, apparently by Homoian
Aria;'s, then we fmd Arians using the words 'Arius who blasphemed
and said that the Son of God is a creature."20 More definite is the
refusal of Auxentius, bishop of Milan, who when taxed with
Arianism by Hilary, disowned any knowledge of Arius or
connection with him: he said that when he began his career as a
presbyter in the Church of Alexandria under the (Arian) bishop
George he knew nothing of Arius, '2' and specifically declared 'I
never knew Arius, I never set eyes on him. I do not know his
1160 pitz Urk. III. No. 33.1(67) from Gelasius HE 11.36. I.
117Gwatkin, SA 52-3.
118fU.tdC; O(lI" aK6J..ou60l 'Apdou y&j'6vaJ.l&v (n:~ yap ~1tiO"K01tOl QVU:C;
aKoAOu9tlO"O~EV n:PEcrPUt£j)4);) Hahn. BibUothek 183-4; see Simonetti Crisi 154-155.
Both Eusebius of Constantinople (Nicomedia) and Asterius were probably present
at this Council. (See pp. 284-292 below).
119S ee Gwatkin, AC 99-101.
120Dossetti, II Simbolo di Nieaea e di Constantinople, 161-'7; but this seems to me
doubtful.
121 Hilary Contra Auxentium (PL 10)8(614. 615).
12J
 The Origins
doctrine.'!22 Equally significant is the disinclination of both Palladius
and Secundianus at the Council of Aquileia in 381 to associate
themselves with Arius, in spite of the intense eagerness of their
opponents to link them with him. Ambrose at one point cut short a
protest by Palladius against the irregularity of the Council, by saying
directly to Palladius, 'You have diverged for too long, answer now,
Did Arius speak rightly when he said that only the Father is eternal?'
This was a reference to Arius' Letter to Alexander. Maximinus, who is
here giving his version of the Council's proceedings, points out that,
defeated in the argument about the regularity of the Council (which
certainly was irregular), Ambrose resorts to direct leading questions.
Palladius seems never to have heard of nor to have read the letter in
question. Reasonably, he refused.to answer.123 Maximinus later says
that none of the Arians had ever heard of the letter of Arius produced
by Ambrose, 124 and more than once Palladius remarks that Arius is
long dead. In spite of this Ambrose insisted upon leading the two
Arian bishops through the offending clauses in Arius'letter, at each of
which the pro-Nicene majority bellowed 'anathema', so that the two
arraigned bishops could not make a suitable reply.'25 During the
long wrangle about the regularity of the Council which came first in
the proceedings, Ambrose produced the outrageously unfair
argument 'Condemnation from everybody's mouth falls on him
who denies that the Son of God is eternal. Arius denied this. Palladius
follows him because he is not willing to condemn Arius.' Palladius
replied, 'I have never seen Arius nor do I know who he is.'!26 The
official Acts of the Council confIrm that because Palladius would not
debate about a document which he had no means of reading
Ambrose assumed that he had refused to condemn Arius' Letter to
Alexander, and was supported by the rest of those present at the
Council in this subterfuge, and that Palladius denied sight or
122Ibid. 14(617)' numquam sdvi Arium, non vidi oculis, non cognovi eius doctrinam.
Meslin, Les Ariens; commenting upon this encounter between Hilary and Auxentius
(291-4), thinks that Auxentius rested his case on the Second Creed ofSirmium of
357 shorn of its subordinationist clauses, and on the canonical status of the Creed of
Nice of H9. Hilary's attack on Auxentius took place c. 364.
123Grysan Scolies 208.10; 210.11.
124Ibid.276.90.
125Ibid. 284.98; it is clear from the words quae detineri non potuerunt that Palladius
did not have the text of the letter before him.
1261bid. 226.27, 28.
124
The Rationale of Arianism
knowledge. of Arius.!27 Later the following interchange takes place,
on the subject of whether the Son is powerful (potens):
Ambrose: Therefore Arius was wrong? (and he added) And on this
point you condemn Arius?
Palladius: How am I to know who he is? I am answering you for my
own opinions (pro me).128
Similarly Secundianus, the other Arian bishop, on being asked to
condemn a proposition of Arius, replied, '1 do not know who he was,
I am ignorant of what he said. You must talk to me person to
person.'129 Evidently neither Palladius nor Secundianus regarded
Arius' Letter to Alexander as a classic document of their theology, nor
looked on him with respect as a founding father of their creed. A
fragment from the Mai/Gryson documents disowns the title of
'Arian': 'we are Christians to whom the false name of"Arians" has
been attached.'13. Perhaps it is worth noting that when Eusebius of
Caesarea was writing hi.s Commenary on Psalms at a time which cannot
be earlier than 335, he makes no reference at all to the Arian
Controversy,131 even when he is dealing with the seductive text
Proverbs 8:22. And in his later Commentary on Isaiah, when he has to
handle the text Isaiah 53:8 Chis generation who shall declare?') he
shows a similar restraint.!l2 Perhaps Arianism and its alternatives did
not 1!gure as prominently in the minds of Christian theologians of
that·period as we are apt to imagine. We can even find Philostorgius
at one point 133 criticizing Arius for saying that God was composite (a
most unjust accusation, in fact), and that we cannot know God as he
is, but only as each can understand him. This of Course offended his
rigorous rationalist adherence to Neo-Arianism.
127Ibid. 338.13, 14.
128Ibid·3 1(352).
12~Ibid. 66(376). For this whole enCOUnter see Zeiller, Les Origines 227 and
Meshn, Les Ariens 302-3.
IJOGrysan VI, 23t8 (Mai VIII, 223).
1310n Psalms 88(87):1 I (LXX), at PG 23:1064, he refers to Constantine's Church
of the Anastasis in Jerusalem, which was begun in 335.
132PG 24:457, 460.
133HE X, 2. Simonetti says that the Eunomians regarded Arius as too
conser~ative, especi.ally in his Letter to Alexander (Crisi 253-4). The refusal of
EudoXlUS, Macedomus and others at the COUrt of Cons tans in 345 to condemn Arius
was prob~bly n~t becau~e of their .reverence for Anus but because of their pique at
the .way 10 w~lch their deputation, and the Creed which they carried, were
received. See Simonetti Crisi 189-90.
125
 The Origins
Generally speaking, Homoian Arianism of the type professed by
Valensand Ursacius in the West and Eudoxius in the East preferred to
take the Creed of Nice (359, confirmed at Constantinople 360) as its
doctrinal standard. So says Simonetti.'3' Meslin thinks that this was
the credal standard of Palladius also,135 and that this was the creed of
the Empress Justina. 136 Valentinian II in 385 issued a law (probably
from Milan) permitting those people to assemble for worship who
agreed with this creed. '37 Schwartz thinks that it was the norm of
faith for the Emperor Valens.'3s And Maximinus appeals to it in his
Collatio with Augustine.'" Some Arians however took the Second
Sirmian Creed of 357 as their standard; Germinius bishop ofSirmium
who made a shift from extreme to less radical trinitarian doctrine
later in his career, about 366, apparently changed from the Second
Sirmian of357 to the Third Sirmian (the 'Dated Creed') of359,140
and some Homoian Arians had always favoured this last l . '
But Arius was not completely neglected or rejected by later
Arians. There is some evidence for a preference among them for his
Letter to Alexander as a doctrinal norm. We have seen that Ambrose
tried to compel Palladius and Secundianus to accept it as a standard
document of Arianism. Athanasius quoted it as such,142 and so does
Hilary.143 Simonetti says that some Homoian Arians took it as a
standard; 144 the ev~dence for this is scanty, ifnot invisible. Boularand
is going much too far when he calls this letter the 'credo officiel de
l'heresie' .'.5 An eighth-century MS in the Cathedral Library of
Cologne of Arius' Letter to Busehius ofNicomedia in a Latin translation,
earlier than that reproduced by Cassiodorus in his Historia Tripartita
134Crisi 253-4. The text of this Creed is to be found in Theodoret HE-I1. 21 3.
135Les Ariens 300-2.
136Ibid. 44-8.
137See N. Q. King, The Emperor Theodosius and the Establishment oj Christianity
55-6 ..
138'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 168-9.
139Collatio 2 (PL 42:110). But at 13(730) Maximinus, in a way characteristic of
Arian writers, declares that he does not want to move an inch beyond the Scriptures,
140S 0 Medin, Les Ariens 294"""'9.
141Simonetti, Crisi 253-4.
1420r. con. Ar. 11.19, as Kannengiesser notes (Athanase 217). It is a fact that does
not consort well with Kannengiesser's theory that Athanasius is in this work dealing
with slogans and oral reports of the Arians rather than their literature.
143De T,initate V1.4. 5(198, 202).
144Crisi 254.
145L'Heresie d'A,ius 72.
126
The Rationale of Arianism
and different from the Greek versions of the same letter given in
Epiphanius and Theodoret, shows that Arian interest in this
document persisted; but it can hardly be called a standard document
of the Arian faith."6 Kopecek points out that Eunomius reproduces
the epithets applied to God the Father beginning with mono- by Arius
in his Letter to Alexander. "7 The short creed which Eunomius placed
at the head of his Apology was, according to Basil,"s one which had
been set out by Arius in a letter which is now lost. 149 We can hardly
take Candidus' vir acris ingenii ('a man of keen insight') in Marius
Victorinus' Letter of Candidus as an unsolicited testimonial to Arius,
because it is wholly likely that this piece of apparently Arian
propaganda was composed by Marius Victorinus himself as an
elaborate Aunt Sally.150 We have however two passages where
Arians themselves give a list of their great men of the past. One of
them comes from the Mai/Gryson Fragments, among those
recovered from a Bobbio palimpsest, and brilliantly reconstructed by
de Bruyne. 151 It mentions Athanasius of Anazarbus, Dionysius of
Alexandria, and Theognis ofNicaea, but not Arius himself 152 The
other. list occurs in Maximinus' comments on the Council of
Aquileia, just before he gives Auxentius' Letter which contains the
Creed ofUlfila and its expansion by Auxentius. This confession, says
Ma~iminus, 'is the Christian profession according to the divine
teaching of Arius, tltis also bishop Theognis (professed), thus too
Eusebius the historian and many other bishops whose professions and
names must be set down in what follows.'153
In the light of this evidence we cannot say that Arius was regarded
by those who came after him as founding a school of theology. If
146See D. de Bruyne, 'Vne ancienne version latine inedite'.
147 History of Neo·Arianism 337.
148Adversus Eunomium (PG 29) 1.212.
149This is the only reference to a specific work of Arius of which we do not have
any other knowledge.
150Marius Victorinus Candidi Epistola 11.1(49).
151See Gryson Arriana Scripta Frag. 4.235-6 (Mai XVI) and de Bruyne 'Deux
Lettres Inconnues', also PL 13: 393ff.
152ft is presumably to this fragment that Meslin is referring Les Ariens I 13-29. He
dates it, because of a reference in a later fragment to Ambrose's De Fide Book I, to
378 or later. He says that it mentions Arius and Eusebius ofNicomedia, but I cannot
find any mention of these authors in the text itself or in Gryson's Concordance to
the Bobbio Fragments.
lS3Gryson Scolies 234.40. In fact not many other bishops are mentioned in what
follows.
12 7
 The Origins

anything, he was thought of as perpetuating the school of Lucian of

Antioch. Arius was respected by later Arians, and some of his scanty
literary works sometimes quoted. But he was not usually thought of
as a great man by his followers. They would all have said that they 5
were simply carrying on the teaching of the Bible and the tradition of
the Fathers. In fact they were attempting to work out a rational
doctrine of God which would be recognizably Christian while Events Leading to Nicaea
remaining true to the Bible and to what they regarded as right reason,
as almost all theologians between 3 18 and 381 were attempting to do.
For the Arians this took the form of accepting that the Scriptures
Having surveyed Arius and Arianism, we must now tum to the
witnessed to the suffering of God, and of devising an idea of God
history· of the controversy that was roused by Arius' views.
which would make such a doctrine possible within the limits of what
the fourth century regarded as tolerable.
I. From the Outbreak of the Controversy to the Council of
Antioch 325

It is impossible to discuss the date of the beginning of the controversy

evoked by the views of Arius and of his early supporters without
taking into account many of the events which followed the outbreak
of the dispute.' Almost all the relevant documents are usefully
gathered and edited by Opitz in Urkunden III, but the question is also
invqlved with the dating of the accumulating tension between the
twoi'Emperors Constantine and Licinius, the outbreak of war
between them and the conquest of Lieinius by Constantine (321-4).

1For discussion and account of these events see Gwatkin, SA 32-8: Loofs,
'Arianismus' -12, 14 (these first two know nothing of the Council of Antioch 325);
Schwartz, Gesamm. Schrifi. 119-60; Hess, Canons oJthe Council oj Antioch 3; Meslin,
Les Ariens 29 (he sits carefully on the fence as far as deciding the date of the outbreak
is concerned); Boularand 'L'Heresie' 26-37 (a particularly good account); Grant
'Religion and Politics' 2; Tuilier 'Le Conflit entre Constantin et Licinius et les
Origines d'Arianisme' passim (his attempt to show that the Arian Controversy was
behind the conflict between the two Emperors can hardly be said to have succeeded;
on Tuilier's own premises, it would have been all in Licinius' favour to let the Arian
controversy continue because it would weaken Christianity, whereas his ban on the
meeting of synods in fact damped down the dispute; and it is doubtful if the affair
threatened public order all over the Eastern Empire); Simonetti, Crisi 26, 27ff. (with
a good bibliography); Ritter, 'Arianismus' 699; Person, The Mode oj Decision-
Making 14-16, 38-9: Kopecek, History oj Neo-Arianism 35-45; Lorentz Arius
ludaizans? 49-52; Kannengiesser, Colloquy 41 5 n 27; as well as the champions of
opposing views discussed below. Simonetti and Gwatkin and perhaps Telfer appear
to be the only scholars who do not accept that Arius returned to Alexandria after his
visit to Nicomedia and Palestine. A careful and useful introduction to the Council
has recently been provided by Colum Lubheid in his book The Council ofNicaea.
128 129
 The Origins
The traditional date for the outbreak of the dispute is the year 318.
Tillemont had called attention to a remark in Athanasius' Letter to the
Bishops ofEgypt (22) to the effect that it was now 36 years since Arians
were expelled from the church by an ecumenical synod, and claimed
that this letter must have been written in the year 356 because of a
reference to George being sent by the Arians to Alexandriajust then,
and concluded that Athanasius was referring in the first quoted
remark to the excommunication of Arius in Alexandria in 321. The
controversy therefore cannot have begun later than 321 and probably
began earlier. But it is now accepted that Athanasius' Letter to the
Bishops was written in 361, when George the Arian was about to
return to Alexandria for the second time; and the reference to the
lapse of 36 years since then must mean the excommunication ofArius
and his followers after the Council of Nicaea in 325. 2 A number of
well-established facts must be included in any survey of the question:
Arius and his followers were excommunicated at a council held in
Alexandria and presided over by Alexander. The condemned men
retreated to Nicomedia and later to Palestine. A council of bishops
inspired by Eusebius of Nicomedia met in Bithynia, and vindicated
the orthodoxy of Arius and his supporters. Another council met
afterwards in Caesarea in Palestine, chaired no doubt by Eusebius of
Caesarea, which again acquitted the accused Arians of heresy, but
urged them to submit themselves to Alexander and seek
reconciliation with him. Arius and his followers at one point returned
to Alexandria and caused considerable trouble to Alexander. The
Emperor Lidnins, as his relationship with Constantine deteriorated,
tended to bring pressure upon Christians within his Empire and at
one point imposed a total ban on meetings of bishops within its
confines. After Constantine's fmal victory over Licinius which made
him master'of the whole Roman Empire, Constantine sent a letter to
both Arius' and Alexander dismissing the controversy as trivial and
commanding them to be reconciled. This letter was carried to
Alexandria by Ossius bishop of Cordova, Constantine's chief adviser
and agent in matters concerning the Christian church, where a
council was held at which Alexander and Ossius were present. And a
council was held in Antioch very early in the year 325 mainly
consisting of those who sympathised with Alexander. During this
period several letters were written by Alexander, by Arius and by
2See Schwartz. Gesamm. Schrift. 167-8; Opitz 'Die Zeitfolge des arianischen
Streites' 143-5.
130
Events Leading tei Nicaea
others, some of which we have already had occasion to notice, and
these too must be placed in their proper context.3
The only absolutely firm date in this whole series of events is that
of the Council ofNicaea which met in May 325. Some have decided
that the extent of seven years from 318 to 325 is too long, even
allowing for a temporary cessation of councils caused by Licinius'
ban; so lengthy a period could not have elapsed before the Council of
Nicaea was called in order to solve the dispute. Schwartz regarded it
as impossible to place any part of the controversy before 3234 He
believed that the fmal encounters between Constantine and Licinius
took place in 323. The journey of Ossius to Alexandria, sent by
Constantine to settle the dispute, must have taken place after Licinius'
final defeat, and with it the anti-Arian Council in Antioch. During
the perlOd of tenSion between the Augusti, no Eastern synods were
permitted to meet by Licinius, so that between 321 and Licinius' fall
councils in Nicomedia and Caesarea and Alexandria could not have
taken place. Ifwe place these councils before 321 or thereabouts we
must postulate a long interval between the official Encyclical Letter of
Alexander announcing his excommunication of Arius and bidding
for support for his action (which was probably his response to the
council held in Palestinian Caesarea) on the one hand, and
COQstantine's Letter to Alexander and Arius on the other, an interval
dUrfIlg which the Eastern Church was undergoing pressure or even a
mmor persecution from Licinius. There is no hint of this in our
5
sources. In fact, Schwartz wanted to telescope all the opening events
of the controversy into a period of about eighteen months, from the
autumn of 323 till the early Summer of 325.
. Schwartz's theory collapsed when papyrus evidence was
d~s~o~ered which made it quite clear that Constantine's victory over
LlcmlUs took place in 324. not in 323. It became impossible to assume
that the whole affair blew up only after the fall of Licinius. Telfer,
however. in 1946 attempted a reconstruction of the events which
envisaged the controversy breaking out no earlier than July 323. and
3S~crates HE 1.5--'7. Sozomenus HE 1.15.1-16.5, Theodaret HE 1.1.1-6.10 and
Gelaslus HE I.r I. 12: 11.1-4 cover this period only superficially and the evidence for
:viII
~ast of the. events here listed b~ found ~ other sources mentioned as the subject
IS further discussed below. EPlpharuus Panarton 69.3-5 is useful but must be handled
with caution.
4Gesamm. Schrift. 167. 168.
sibid. 165, 166, 19I.
13 I
 The Origins
tried to fit all the incidents into a space of 22 months. 6 He achieved his
scheme by assuming that many of the events given by the church
historians as successive were in fact simultaneous or contemporary,
and that Licinius' ban on meetings only lasted from April to
September 324. But in order to achieve this reconstruction Telfer was
obliged to make a number of implausible assumptions, e.g. that as
soon as he had defeated Licinius Constantine relIed on EuseblUs of
Nicomedia (who had shown himself favourable to Licinius) for his
understanding of the Arian Controversy; that if the dispute had
begun in 3 I 8 Athanasius would have referred to It III hIS. De
Incarnatione, which was in 1946 widely thought to have been WrItten
about then (in fact many scholars today would place its composition
twenty years later); 7 that both Socrates and Sozomenus have given us
the order of events in the wrong order (though Socrates at least was
relying on the much earlier church historian Sabinus of Heradea
here); and that Constantine managed to gather together the CouncIl
of Nicaea in a remarkably short period between March and May of
325.8 Boularand rejects any attempt to place the origin of the affair as
late as 323, and makes quite a good case for the year 320 as the correct
date for the start of the dispute. He points out that Jerome in his
Continuation ofEu5ebiu5' Chronicle places the outbreak 2337 years after
Abraham, i.e. 320. Licinius' various measures could then be
distributed over the period of the 'cold war' between Constantine
and Licinius, 320-4, his prohibition of the assembly of bishops
coming only at the very end. After all, Alexander apparently brought
together a gathering of 100 bishops for his grand excommUnicatIOn
and appeal, and this could not have taken place very long before the
year 325.9 Boularand points out that nobody knows precisely how
the controversy began, whether by Arius criticising Alexander or
Alexander Arius. Epiphanius (Panarion 69:3) gives some details.
Sozomenus (I. I 5). here dependent on Sabinus, says that for some time
Alexander r~frained from 'condemning Arius. and acted as arbiter
between Arius and those who opposed his views. 10
6'When Did the Arian Controversy Begin?'
7Ibid. 129.
8Ibid. 138-142. Schneeme1cher ('Zur Chronologie der arianischen Streites'
394-6) has some trenchant criticism of Telfer's reconstruction. He believes that 322
is a firm date for Licinius' ban on meetings, and that 3 18 is the right date for the start
of the controversy.
9L'Heresie 21-4.
IOIbid. 26. But Sozomenus leaves us less confident about his accuracy when he
132
Events Leading to Nicaea
The chronology of this period, however, has been examined so
thoroughly and minutely by Opitz, who himself was an outstanding
expert on the Arian Controversy, and whose death early in the
Second World War was an irreparable loss to scholarship, that it is
wiser to follow his detailed reconstruction of the events.! 1 A careful
consideration of all the evidence from coins, inscriptions and
documents leads him to conclude that Licinius took measures against
the Christians between 322 and late 323; that two decisive battles
took place between Constantine and Licinius, one near Hadrianople
in ThraceJuly 3rd 324, and one at Chrysopolis in Bithynia Sept. 18th
in the same year, and that by December 16th the war was over and
Licinius was a prisoner "in Constantine's "hands. 12 By the autumn of
324 the Arian Controversy must have been well under way.I3 The
terminus post quem for the start of the controversy is uncertain; one can
only say, not before 3 15 and not long after 3'7. The nearest firm date
by which we can fix this is provided by Eusebius bishop, first of
Berytus and then ofNicomedia (and fmally, of course, much later, of
Constantinople). He was bishop of Nicomedia when Arius, driven
out of Alexandria, arrived there, and he gave Ari~s refuge and
comfort. In 314/5 a certain Eustolus was bishop ofNicomedia for he
signed the acts of the Council of Ancyra which took place in one or
ot~er of those years. But by the time that the Council of Neo-
Coesarea in Syria took place (317 at the latest) a man called Gregorius
signed as bishop of Berytus. Between 3 I 5 and 317, therefore, Eusebius
must ha ve moved to Nicomedia. It is therefore difficult to place his
championship of Arius earlier than 317 at the earliest, but more
probably Arius took refuge with him later than that. It is possible that
Licinius w'as responsible for bringing Eusebius to Nicomedia.14 It
goes on to represent Alexander as teaching that the Son is 'coeternal and
consubstantial'. It is wholly unlikely that Alexander applied homoousios to the Son
before Nicaea.
II'Die Zeitfolge des arianisches Streites von den Anfangen bis zum Jahre 328',
13 1-59.
12Ibid. 140-41.
13
14.2.
14 142- 3 . Eusebius was a friend of Constantia, Licinius' wife and Constantine's
sister. See above, p.2,]-28. He could therefore have pulled strings with either
imperial House; the expression of Sozomenus (1.15.9) (tv 'toi.; j3aalA€lol<;
't€tlJ.1T1J,!tvov) could apply to either; cf. Ammianus Marcellinus 22:9. It is however
much more likely that Licinius' court is intended; Eusebius' career lay wholly in the
Eastern Empire. Opitz, of course, agrees with Schwartz against Tillemont on the
event referred to in Athanasius' Letter to the Bishops of Egypt 22 (see op. cit. 143-5).
133
 The Origins
was in 322, Opitz thinks, that Licinius passed an Edict forbidding
Christian bishops to gather together, as this was the year in which he
nominated his own consuls without consulting his fellow-Emperor.
The pressure which he now brought to bearonthe Church can
hardly be called a persecution: it was rather a politIcal move agamst
people in the Eastern Empire who might. be. regarded as
Constantine's friends. But it resulted in the prohlbltlon of synods,
especially in Syria. All such gatherings in connection with the Arian
Controversy must therefore be dated either before 322 or after the
third quarter of 324." . .
Following Opitz, then, we can now with faIr confidence
reconstruct the order of events between the outbreak of the Arian
16
Controversy and the imposition of Licinius' ban thUS:
I. Some clergy inform Alexander of Arius' unsatisfactory doctrine
concerning the Son's relation to the Father. Epiphanius says that
MeHtius denounced him. This is not impossible, even though later
Melitians combined with Arius against Athanasius. 17
2. In order to avoid accusations of partisanship,. Alexander orders both
groups, pro-Arius and anti-Arius, to appear before him, and ex~mines
Arius' views.
3. The controversy continues, and Alexander summons a council of
bishops which results in his putting a Confession ofQrthodoxy before
Arius and requiring IUrn to sign it. He refuses to do so and he, along
with many, including bishops, who followed his example, is
excommunicated. Epiphanius says that Acius and some of his
supporters were driven out of Alexandria. 1s Alexander writes a letter
to his clergy (probably mainly of Alexandria and Mareotis) ~arning
specially 'against a presbyter Pistus and the group around him.
4. Aliius finds considerable support. Epiphanius, contradicting
himself, sllYS tha't Arius stayed in the city and founded a schismatic
church. (It seems unlikely that he now founded a separate church, but
he probably lingered in Alexandria for some time). . Gelasius· HE 11.3.3-21). This letter in fact excommunicated Pistus and his group
5. The Arians (probably including Arius) travel to other sees to WID
150pitz, op. cit. 145-6. . 16, Epiphanius Panarion 69.7, and a Latin version in Hilary De Trinitate IV.I2f. and
160pitz op. cit. 146-8, a little amended and suppl~mented III places.
17Epiphanius Panarion 69.3-5; but then, Alexander dId not, as far as we know. use
the methods employed by Athanasius in governing his see (see below, cap. 9); cf.
Sozomenus HE LIS.
18Here we place Alexander's Letter to his Clergy. Opitz Urk. III. No. 4a(6), dated
here by Optiz 318.
134
..
Events Leading to Nicaea
more episcopal support. Epiphanius says that Arius went to
Palestine. 19
6. Arius' activity achieves success; many bishops beyond Egypt join
his side, including Eusebius ofCaesarea, though others oppose him.2o
7. Alexander writes a circular letter to all bishops warning them not to
admit Arius and to reject any intervention by Eusebius ofNicomedia.
Epiphanius tells us to whom trus letter was sem, Eusebius of Caesa rea,
Macarius of Jerusalem, Asklepas of Gaza, Longinus of Aske1on,
Macrinus ofJamnia, Zenon ofTyre and some bishops ofCoele Syria
(all within much the same area of Palestine and Syria).21
8. A Council is held in Bithynia which declares Arius' views orthodox
and demands his restoration by Alexander. Acius and his friends write
a conciliatory letter to Alexander, making some concessions. This
meets with no response, and the Acians betake themselves (from
Nicomedia?) to Palestine. z2
9. A small Council takes place in Palestine in which Acius associates
with his views· the bishops of Caesarea (Eusebius), Scythopolis
(Patrophilus) and Tyre (paulinus); they again vindicate the soundness
of Arius' doctrine and demand that he shall be reinstated by
Alexander. Not long before this Council, Eusebius of Caesarea,
having had conversations with Anus, wrote to Alexander protesting
at the way in which Arius had been treated; Eusebius of Nicomedia
had written to Paulinus ofTyre urging him to exert himself on behalf
Qf Arius, and Paulinus had duly written to somebody unknown
(perhaps Alexander) a letter of protest in the same cause. 23
19Here we place Arius' Letter to Eusebius o/Nicomedia (Urk. No. 1(1-3), dated here
by Opitz 318. assuming it to have been written on the journey (to be 'found in
Epiphanius· Panaro 69.6; Theodoret HE 1.5; Latin tr. in Marius Victorinus Adv.
Arium etc.). The Letter 4 Eusebius 0/ Nicornedia to Arius (Urk. III No. 2(3), dated by
Opitz here 318) is probably the answer to this appeal (Athanasius De Syn. 17).
2°Here we place the Letter 4Eusebius o/Caesarea to Euphration o/Balanea (Urk. III
No. 3(4-6), dated by Opitz here 318, extracted from the Acta of the Second General
Council of Nicaea).
21 This is Urk. III NO.4b(6-rr), dated here by Opitz 319 (Socrates HE 1.6 and
without mentioning them. It was the intervention ofEusebius ofNicomedia which
had made this letter necessary.
22The Council is mentioned in Sozomenus HE LI5.IO (Urk. IU No. 5(12) dated
here by Opitz c. 320). The conciliatory letter is to be found in AthanasiusDe SynotJis
Vl.sf. (Urn. III No.6(I2-13 dated here c. )20).
23The letter ofEusebius of Caesarea to Alexander is Urk. III No. 7(14,15), taken
from the Acta ofNicaea II. The letter ofEusebius ofNicomedia to Paulinus ofTyre
is Urk.1II No. 8(1 5-18), to be found in Theodoret HE 1.6. I. Fragments of the letter
of Paulinus are gathered in Urk. III No. 9(16, 17), extracted from Eusebius Con.
135
 The Origins
At this point (322) the imposition of Licinius' ban on meetings of
bishops intervenes, and we can place no meetmg nor councIl
thereafter earlier than 324. and late in that year. This is the point at
which we must place the Letter of Alexander of Alexandria to Alexander
of Thessalonica 24 This describes the Arians as 'both d~molishing
Christianity publicly and striving to exhibit themselves m the law-
courts and to the best of their ability rousing persecution against us
where no persecution was' (tv ElpliVlJ)25 and as 'daily stirring up
divisions and harassment against us, both troubling the law-courts by
the pleas of disorderly females (yova"capiIDv) whom they have duped
and also discrediting Christianity by the way in which the younger
women among them immodestly frequent every public street. ~ This
no doubt describes what has been happening in Alexandria during
the period of prohibition of meetings. Constantine had spent some
time in Thessalonica in the summer of 324. preparing for his trial of
strength against Licinius. Alexander no doubt was preparing for
imperial intervention on his behalf. even though he did not gamble
26
on Constantine winning the contest against his fellow Emperor.
Arius has apparently by now returned to Alexandria and formed a
schismatic church there. It was at this time too that Alexander wrote
another letter in the same vein to some other (probably Eastern)
bishops, which has been preserved in a Syriac translation,27 and a
Letter to Silvester of RO"le. It mentioned an Alexandrian presbyter
named George who had been excommunicated for his Arian
opinions. This might be the presbyter George. fragments of whose
Marcellum 1.4. A short account of the Council in Caesarea is given in Urk. III
No. 10(18), ft:om Sozomenus I.I5.II. Opitz here dates the letters to 320 or 321 and
the Council to 321 or 322. Opitz deals with these two Councils in Bithynia and
Palestin!; in- 'Zur Zeitfolge' 148-5 0 .
24Urk.1II No. 14(19-29), to be found in Theodoret HE 1.4.1. The letter must be
addressed' to.Alexander of Thessalonica (not, as Theodoret has it, Alexander of
Byzantium, who was probably not then bishop).
25Ibid. 29, lines 9-II, 20, lines 7-10.
26But we cannot with Telfer (,When did the Arian Controversy begin?' 13 8-42)
go to the ridiculous length of crediting Alexander with prophetic powers as early as
Constantine's victory over the Sarmatian tribes (321) so that he (Alexander) should
start harrying Arius for unorthodoxy because he realized that i) Constantine would
attack Licinius. and ii) he would defeat Licinius. and iii) in that event the bishop of
Rome. Silvester, would have an enhanced say in Eastern affairs and would begin
requiring strict orthodoxy from Alexandria!
27Urk. III No. 15(29-31) here dated 324. with a retroversion into Greek by
Schwartz, originally published by Pitra, Analuta Sacra IV. 196. Opitz deals with
these lct.ters in 'Zur Zeitfolge' J 50.
Events Leading to Nicaea
two letters we have already examined. Athanasius. who quotes these
fragments. says that this George who wrote the letters was a
presbyter of Alexandria but was then living (olatpi~IDv) in Antioch
and was later bishop of Laodieea. We shall meet him later in
connection both with Eustathius of Antioch and with Eusebius of
Emesa. 28
Finally. Constantine at the end of 324 sent a Letter to Alexander and
Arius, written in the usual blustering imperial style, urging them to
be reconciled to each other, because they differed only over 'a
controversy of futile irrelevance' (4VID'I>.'-ou<; upyia<; ep.crx.'-ia).29
Ossius of Cordova, Constantine's representative, brought this letter
to Alexandria. and there a Council was held. Alexander must have
convinced Ossius that the controversy must not be dismissed as
trivial. The Council did not apparently deal with the question of
Arianism (probably no Arians were admitted to it). but it discussed
the subject of the method of determining the date of the Easter
festival. The Quartodeciman Controversy in the second century had
debated whether Easter was to be celebrated on the actual third day
after Passover, no matter what day of the week it was, or always on a
Sunday. By now it had been universally agreed that Easter must be
celebrated on a Sunday. but the method of calculating which
particular Sunday in each year was to be Easter Day differed from
pl.,e to place. and especially between Western and Eastern practice.
This Council also probably dealt with the troublesomeColluthus. an
Alexandrian presbyter who appears to have been neither a Meletian
nor an Arian, but to have produced his own peculiar difference in the
course of which he apparently ordained himself, or had himself
ordained. bishop.30 Colluthus was deposed from being a bishop but
2B A fragment of the Letter of Alexander to Silvester was quoted by Hilary (CSEL
65.91.24) and is printed in Urk. III No. 16(31). The fragments of the letters of
George comprise Urk. III Nos. 12 and 13(19), taken from De Synodis 17. We have
looked at them above, pp. 44-45; for further reference to George see below, pp. 349,
365-71,388. Opitz deals with Silvester and George 'Zur ZeitfoIge' 150.
29Urk. III No. 17()2-35) from Eusebius VC Il.64, the quotation from 33 lines ro,
I I. Opitz approves Seeck's conclusion that this was written in Nicomedia after
Constantine had driven Licinius out of that city at the end of September or the
beginning of October 324.
30See the Letter of Alexander of Alexandria to Alexander of Thessalonica (Urk. III
No. 14 (19 line II to 20 line I»). and Schwartz, Gesamm. Schrift., 154. 159-60. Opitz
deals with Constantine's Letter to Alexander and Arius in 'Zur Zeitfolge' 151. The
evidence for the Council in Alexandria in 324 attended by Alexander and Ossius
comes from Athanasius Apol. Sec. 74, 76 which quotes the Letter of the Mareotic
clergy to the Synod ofTyre in 355, and this referred to this Alexandrian Council.
IJ7
 The Origins
permitted to remain a 'presbyter and not excommunicated. He and
his survived to give Athanasius trouble in 335 but later merged with
the Melitians. Ossius then set out for Antioch.
One more point requires to be discussed before we move on to the
next section, and that is, at what point in this flow of events did Arius
produce his Thalia? It has usually been assumed that the work was
written when Arius was in Nicomedia, with its bishop Eusebius. in
320 or 321. 31 But two scholars recently have argued for an earlier
date. Kannengiesser in 1970 in an article devoted to the subject
examined the sentence in Athanasius' De Synodis 15 referring to the
Thalia and suggests that instead of saying that Arius wrote it 'when he
had been expelled and when he was staying among the circle of
Eusebius', Athanasius in fact says 'when he had been
excommunicated and was under pressure from the circle of
Eusebius',32 and this would place the composition of the work in
Alexandria in 318 or 319 before Arius left that city for Nicomedia
and Palestine. And in 1980 in Arius1udaizans? arguing from certain
expressions in the Thalia which suggest an early period of Arius'
thought on the subject of the con.troversy, expressions which he
altered in his letter written later when his thought had matured
somewhat. Lorentz came to the same conclusion about the date and
place of the writing of this work. 33 In the absence of other evidence,
we can provisionally accept this reasoning.
2. The Alexandrian Alternative Theology
When we ask, what theology was held by those who opposed Arius
and his supporters. we have very little material with which to answer.
31S 0 Harnack History lIl.JO and Grillmeier ceT 234.
J2The phrase is &!cPATl9Et~ !Cal &lm:plpEt~ trap« tOW trepi EUOEj3lO\I, which is patent
of either in.rerpretation, so Kannengiesser, 'OU et Quand Arius Composa-t-il la
Thalie?' in a'Festschrift for J. Quanen ed. by P. Grandfield and J. A.Jungman in
1970, I, 347-So.
330 p . cit. 49-S2. The chief term discussed here is &\1 Xp6VOl<; applied to the Son's
generation in the Thalia (De Syn. 1 S) whereas in his Letter to Eusebius ofNicomedia he
says that the Son was produced trpa Xp6V(!)\I Kat trpa a{wvoo\l (Urk.11I No. 1(3) line 2);
cf. the np6 Xp6voo\l a{ciwoo\l of Arius Letter to Alexander Urk. 1II No. 6(12) line 7). On
Arius' use ort!C tOU geou as a sign oflater revision of Arius' thought Lorentz is less
certain. But as far as it goes this evidence for immaturity in the thought of the Thalia
argues for the quotation in De Synodis I S being a genuine product of Arius' pen and
not a collage put together (and put together in metre!) by a later author,
138
Events Leading to Nieaea
Arius in his Letter to Busebius of Nicomedia says that all bishops agree
with him except PhiIogonius (of Antioch), Hellanicus (of Tripoli)
and Macarins (of JerusaIem).3' But of course we do not know the
views of any of them, except that Arius (Ioc. cit.) accuses them of
teaching about the Son 'some that he is an eructation (tp£uyij), some
an issue (npo~o"ij) and some that he is co-ingenerate' (cruvay.vv1]<ov).
Almost the only early opponent of Arius we know who has left any
written opinions behind him is Alexander of Alexandria. 35 It is all the
more necessary, therefore, to examine his doctrine at this point. Arius
in this Letter to the bishop ofNicomedia purports to summarize the
views of Alexander. His summary is worth recording, though it is
certainly a travesty:
'God eternal, the Son eternal, the Son precisely parallel with (uJ.1a ...
uJ.1a) the Father. the Son exists alongside the Father ingenerately,
eternally generate, ingenerate-generate (a.elY£VVtl~, a.'Y£VVTJ't'o'Y£vti~).
God does not precede, the Son in the smallest aspect or point, God
eternal. the Son eternal, the Son is from God himself (t~ au'tou tOU
8e06).36
We must treat with equal caution Theodorees statement that the
three bishops mentioned by Arius as agreeing with Alexander taught
that the Son was 'eternal and pre-aeonian and of equal honour and
cpnsubstantial with the Father'; this is language of a later age. 37 We
can similarly discount Philostorgius' story that when just before the
Council of Nicaea Alexander and Ossius met in Nicomedia they
34Urk. III No. 1.3(2). Theodoret HEI.S.6 reproduces these names as opponents of
Arius' theology.
35S0 Harnack observes in his treatment of Alexander, History IV.2I-S; but we
now have the Antiochene Council of 32S. Simonetti deals fuHy with Alexander
Studi 110-34.
36Urk. III. No. 1.2(3) lines 1-3, from EpiphaniusPanarion 69.6 and TheodoretHE
I.5. Only Theodoret has the extraordinary word o:ye\lV11to"fEVll~. Candidus' Latin
fails to tran~late it, and neither does the Cologne Cathedral's Latin version edited by
de Bruyne (see above. pp. 126-7). though this latter valiantly coins Latin terms to
correspond to those of Arius in other parts of this passage. I do not think that
Simonetti is justified in translating this term to mean 'created without having been
generated' (,creato senzaessere stato generato', Stud; I 12). It is more likely that Arius
intended it as a kind of ironical paradox - generate-in generate. But no doubt
Simonetti is correct in maintaining (op. cit. 112-14) that Arius could not distinguish
between the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son and the idea that he was
unoriginated, and that he had not rid himself entirely of associations deriving from
the analogy of human generation.
37HE 1.5.6. $0 Simonetti, Studi 113 n9, 125, 126. AJexander indeed seems to be
avoiding homoousios.
139
 The Origins
decided to declare the Son consubstantial (homoousios) with the
Father 3S Simonetti notes3 ' that Alexander in his extant utterances
never uses homoousios, though there are several places where its
application to the Son would have been apt. SO,crates tells us that
Alexander employed the term tv tp'US, ~ovaSu. ( the lvi0nad m the
Triad')40 and Simonetti observes that the term 15 remmlscent of the
thought of Dionysius of Alexandria his predecessor."
The Letter of Alexander to all Bishops i,s more concerned t~2de~o~ce
Arius and his views than to set out the Ideas of Alexander. HIS chIef
positive contribution in this letter is the ap~eal to proof-te~ts. to
discredit Arius' doctrine. Clearly Alexander thinks that the Son IS like
in ousia to the Father. 3 and unchanging in his nature, and that he
knows the Father perfectly. 44 The texts which he quotes are John l:r,
3, 18; Ps. 45(44):2; 110(109):3; Wisdom 7:26; ColoSSlans 1:15;
Hebrews 1:3 and Malachi 3:6 ('You know that I am and I do not
change' LXX) which he remarks isjust as applicable to the Son as It IS
to the Father, as well as several others.·5 We gain a much fuller
picture of Alexander's doctrine in the Letter to Alexander of
Thessalonica which he wrote when the controversy had already lasted
several years. About a third of the way through this long letter,
which may have been intended for the eyes of Constantme as well as
for those of the bishop ofThessalonica, Alexander begins to set out
his views at length. He ~elies heavily on St. John's Gospel for his
JSPhilostorgius HE 1.7. His story that Alexander under imperial pressure
subscribed to statements approving the term Stf:POUO'lOV as applied to the Son a~d
condemning homoousion is equally suspect (11.1). His statement (11·7) t~at Euse:blUs
and Theognis of Nicaea on being recalled from ex~le aft~r the Councll.ofNlcae.a
held a synod which declared Alexander deposed IS possIble ~ut not h~ely. It IS
involved with the difficult question of the career of Eustathlus of Antioch. See
below, p. l08-11. Loofs (' Arianismus', 78-9) also discounts the story of Alexander
and Ossius co~c;::octing the homoousios.
39Studi 125 n 76.
4°HE 1.5.
4tStudi II3 n II. See above P·73.
42We have seen 'above, pp. 16, Alexander's representation of Arius' doctrine set
out in twO letters.
4'U,k.1II NO.4b. 13(9)·
44Ibid. 8-15(8, 9). . ' ..
45Ibid. 14(9}. Simonetti (Studi 123 n 65) remarks on this and notes that m hiS bttle
Sermon on tile Body and the Soul and on the Passion (translated by Mai from the Syriac
into Latin PG 18:585-608) he asserts the immutability of the divinity ofChns~ at
rather greater length. In fact in this work he arrives at an unresolved paradOXical
juxtaposition of ideas on the subject (§5(S9S».
Events Leading to Nicaea
doctrine. Far from the Son being made 'out of non-existence' (a
doctrine which by now Arius and all who sympathized with him
were trying to forget), there is no interval (SlClat'l~u) between the
Son and the Father, not as much as in thought.'· The evangelist John
did not divulge how the Son was produced. He did not say that he
was ingenerate (ayevv'lto<;) for only the Father could be that. But the
'indescribable hypostasis of the only-begotten God' is beyond the
understanding of angels, much more of men. 47 In the interests of this
argument Alexander invokes Isaiah 53:8 ('his generation who shall
declare?'), a text which was destined to be constantly quoted by
people of different points of view during the controversy.'s He
points out how inconsistent it is to say that the Son was created before
times and yet to assert that there was a time when he did not exist; the
Son himself created time and times. 49 And he goes on to assert
roundly the eternal generation of the Son:
'the Father exists for ever in the presence of the Son, which is why he is
called "Father". In the eternal presence of the Son with him, the
Father exists perfectly, needing no supplement in goodness, having
.begotten (aorist tense) the only.:-begotten Son not in time nor after an
interval nor from non-existence.'50
All Alexander's arguments tend to demonstrate the Son's inalienable
a'1d natural (not adoptive) Sonship.51 When Christ said 'I and the
Father are one' (In 10:30) he did not call himself the Father nor
explain that natures which were two in hypostasis were one, and a
little later he describes Christ as 'bearing as an impression
(a1tO~U~a~Evo<;) his (the Father's) likeness in everything and being the
exact image of the Father and the impression corresponding to the
prototype' (t06 1tprotOtU1tOU ."t01to<; xapu"tTjp).52 He indignantly
repudiates the argument that in rejecting the idea that the Son was
made out of non-existence he is teaching two ultimate principles (860
ayEVV'ltu). The Son has a 'mediating only-begotten nature
46Urk. III No. 14.18(22).
47Ibid. 19(22).
48 2 1(23).
49 22, 23(23).
5°26(23).
"E.g. 30(24).
52
37 , 38(25). This is apparently the first occurrence of the term 'exact image'
(an:aptUAQI'tO~ eil«bv). It recurs in Asterius and crops up surprisingly in the
Dedication Creed of Antioch in 341.
141
 The Origins
(Ile""euouaa cpuat<; 1l0VOrev1)<;)' ,53 through which the Father made all
things,
Alexander next gives a Rule of Faith covering the doctrine of the
Son's relation to the Father some of which must be reproduced
here: 54
'A single ingenerate (ay&vvTjtOv) Father having no origin of his
existence, admitting neither increase nor reduction. giver of Law and
prophets and gospels, Lord of patriarchs and apostles and all holy
people. and one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God,
begotten not from non-existence hut from the existing Father, not in
ways resembling bodies by cutting or by issues arising from divisions,
as Sabellius and Valentinus think, but unspeakably and indescribably
[reference to lsa. 53:8] ... since his hypostasis is beyond investigation
by any mortal ('Y£vlltU) nature, just as the Father is beyond
investigation because the nature of rational beings cannot cope with
(xcopc:iv) the knowledge of the Father's divine begetting [reference to
Matt. 11:27] ... and we have learnt this Gesus Christ) to be
unchangeable and unalterable as the Father is, a Son without want and
perfect, like the Father, only inferior to (As1.1t6J.1.Svov) him in the point
ofingenerateness, for he is the precise_and exact image of the Father
(ehcrov ftKP1ProJltVTj Kai lmapaA.A.aKto<;) for it is clear that the image is
full of all the elements in which the likeness to the greater (lit. "the
greater likeness" ~ 1lE{~rov t~cptpEla) (consists) [with a quotation ofJn.
I4: 28 J.' . elsewhere to describe that of the Father (see above, p. '4,). A doctrine
There follows a long digression 55 in which Alexander makes it as
plain as he can that in refusingany time to the origin of the Son he has
no intention of declaring that the Son is ingenerate as the Father is. He
goes on to say'· that we pay proper honour to the Father in asserting
that he has no origin nor cause, and due honour to the Son 'when we
ascribe to him the I'nbeginning birth (,~viivapxov rtvv~ow) from the
Father', and we do not thereby deny his Godhead nor extend
ingenerateness to him from the Father. He ends his Rule ofFaithS7 by
referring in conve.ntional fashion, though not without side-glances at
the Arian Controversy, to One Holy Spirit who inspired the 'divine
instructors (natSeuta<; geiou<;) of the Old and New Testaments, to the
"44, 4S(26).
54 46-14(.6-8).
55 49-52(27,28). Prestige remarks upon this, '{l'ytv[v)l1'to~ and "(£v[v]l1t6~', 492-5.
56 52(28).
57 53, 54(28). To call this creed, as Boularand does (L'Heresie 46-7) 'Ie credo de
son Eglise dont la doctrine remonte aux Apotres' is unrealistic.
Events Leading to Nicaea
one holy catholic and apostolic church, indivisible, to the
resurrection of the dead (wh;re he takes the opportunity of asserting
the real humanIty of ChrISt s body and the reality of his Passion a
theme r.eite~ated in Mai's Sermon De Corpore et Anima), to his
assumptIon mto heaven and to his session on the right hand of the
Majesty. .
What impresses Simonetti 58. most about this doctrine is the debt
whicb ,it owes. to Origen. Alexander wholeheartedly endorses
Ongen s doctnne of the eternal generation of the Son. The
expression 'for there is one ingenerate (drtvVll'OV) the Father' of
Alexander" is very like Rufinus' translation ofOrigen's text at Peri
A~chon 1.2.6 nihil ingenitum, id est innatum, praeter solum deum patrem. 60
HIS statement that the Son has unbeginning birth from the Father.'
resembles Origen's statement in Peri Archon IV.4.' that the Son can
never have had an origin prior to which he would have been non-
existent; the Father has always constituted his origin. In a fragment
fron: Alexander's pen preserved in Syriac·2 he says that the Son must
be dIStInguIShed ,from the Father as the ray from the light, and so the
Father IS the Son s cause, not because the Son is part ofhim, 'but as the
caus; of the hypostasis of him whom he has generated through his
wIll. SImonettI points out that Alexander here, as elsewhere, uses
hypostaSis to express the individual reality of the Son, and can use it
of three hypostaseis would not ofitselfhave been regarded by him as
scandalous. He also uses the term physis both to mean 'nature' and to
me~n distinct .entity.63 As we have seen, Alexander reproduces
Ongen's doctrIne of the Son issuing from the Father as an act of will
issues from the. mind (Peri Archon Lz.6), but having rejected all
anthropomorphIc Images for the production of the Son he found
hImself at a loss for words to describe it, and took refuge in Isa. 53:8
58S tu di I J6-20.
S9Jbid. 19(22).
6°'there is nothing ingenerate, that is without birth, except God the Father' (Peri
Archon C & S 122).
61 Urk. III No. 14.5.2(28).
62]. E. Pitra Ana/eeta Sacra IV 199 and 433.
ii
63When he speaks of the Son's 'mediating only-begotten nature' (Urk. III
No. 14·44(26), ~ee :bove, p. 142}. But Simonetti's second example from the same l
lette~ (~8(25».ta~."t'(J 01toatuO"£lc5uo cp6a£t~J.I{avdvalis not so dear, unless Alexander
here IS. n~dulgmg In sheer tautology; Alexander must mean that Father and Son have I
two dutw.ct natures as welJ as two distinct hypostaseis. See Simonetti Studi 124 125
and especlall y n 73. ' I
'43 Ii
I,
 The Origins
and an appeal to its indescribableness. Like Origen, he did not like
using the term 'issue' (u1l6ppom) and preferred to fall back upon the
old image of the ray from the light, one whIch OrIgen had
permitted. 64 But he is so much convinced of the close union o~Father
and Son that he can use the classic text thought to establISh the
Father's superiority in order to show the closeness of their
relationship, John 14:28.65 Simonetti also observes that Alexander
does not wholly banish the subordination of the Son to the Father. He
says thatin the point ofingenerateness the Son is inferior (411t6~evov,
see above, p. 142) 66 Simonetti rightly notices that Alexander IS chary
of using the word ousia. 67 His main development of Origen's
thought was to consider the Son not only the agent of the Fathees
activity, but also the existent (to ov) in which everythmg else had Its
existence. It was perhaps in his 'attenuation of subordination' that
Alexander was innovating. 68
Alexander, then, was certainly much indebted to Origen. Did he
represent the official theology of the Alexandrian school? Ifh: did,
then Arius was reacting violently against the theolo,!pcal tradItIOn of
his own church, and can hardly have expected It to welcome hIS
views when he ventilated them. Loofs would be justifIed in seeing
Alexander as on the opp<?site wing of Origenism to Arius,69 if we
could -explain Arius wholly or mainly in terms of Origen's thought.
And it is not just to remark with Person 70 that there is very little
about the Incarnation in Alexander's writing. The Sermon surviving
in Syriac De Corpore et Anima is much occupied with this topic; and
Alexander could only attack Arius on those subjects on which Arius
had written. But it would be unwise to regard Alexander as
reproducing official Alexandrian theology. The very fact that he is so
much influenced by Origen precludes this conclusion. Neither
Dionysius sixty years before him nor Peter his predecessor but one
could have peen described as strict Origenists. It is most unlikely that
64Simonetti op. cit., 128-32.
6550 Simonetti op. cit. 128, on the passage in Urk. III No. 14.48(27) translated at
the end of the long quotation on p. 142 above. This difficult text he interprets as
meaning that the image of the Father in the Son has all those qualities which go to
make the likeness of the original greatest: they are 'due grandezze omogene'.
66Simonetti op. cit. 1]2, 133·
67 And he points out the error of Loofs CDas Nicanum' 79) in saying that
Alexander uses the term lSJ.lOlO~ Kat' oumav (Simonetti op. cit. n 112.)
68Simonetti. op. cit. 133, 134, quotation from 134·
69'Arianismus' 1 I.
7°The Mode oj Decision-Making 19.
144
L
Events Leading to Nicaea
Arius was reacting against an established official tradition of
Origenism in the see of Alexandria. We do not know, of course,
whether Alexander favoured other more unusual features of
Origen's theology, such as his doctrine of the pre-existence of souls
and his use of Christ's human soul in his account of the Incarnation.
We have no particular reason to conclude that he did. Origenism was
already in Alexander's day under attack in more than one quarter.
Alexander's leaning towards Origen was the result of his personal
choice, not a perpetuation of the tradition of his see.
Before we go on to consider the Council of Antioch that preceded
shortly that of Nicaea, it is worth while asking whether Alexander
was justifIed in branding Arius and his supporters with such violence
as dangerous heretics and excommunicating them for unorthodoxy.
If we read back later events and decisions into this early period, as
almost all our ancient sources do, then there can of course be only one
answer, and Gwatkin and Prestige and Boularand are quite content to
do this. But if we exercise historical imagination and ask if Alexander
was justified in denouncing Arianism as heretical at the time when it
first arose , the answer is much less evident. To many highly intelligent
people such as Eusebius ofNicomedia, his namesake of Cae sarea and
Asterius, Arianism seemed at the worst one extreme and drastic but
no~ unacceptable option among many. The limits of orthodoxy at
th<fbeginning of the fourth century, though more defInite than they
had been a century earlier, were still loose and unclear. The subject
brought to the fore by Arius was one upon which no consensus had
yet been reached among the Church's teachers. Each school claimed
to represent the true tradition and to know the clearest interpretation
of Scripture. No organ for defining universally accepted dogma had
yet been devised. And when it very soon was devised by the
ingenuity of Constantine, the General Council served at first only to
make darkness darker. Perhaps it was inevitable that Alexander
should have excommunicated Arius, and certainly if he could have
seen the ultimate tendency of Arius' thought he had reason to be
alarmed. But he could not see far into the future. He could not foresee
the future condemnation of his master Origen. any more than the
later development of Arianism. In the circumstances of the time
Alexander's condemnation of Arius was at least precipitate.
145
 The Origins
3. The Council of Antioch of 325
In the year 1905 the eminent German scholar Edward Schwartz
published a Syriac text with a translation of it into (an~lent) Greek
made by himself. It appeared to be an account of a Counct! whIch had
taken place at Antioch under the presiden~y of so~ebody called
Eusebius. The Council was clearly antt-Anan; the Itst of bIShops
attending it suggested that it must be placed early in the history of the
controversy, for it included names such as that of Eustathius (of
Antioch, whose name appeared immediately after that of Eusebms).
There was no mention of homoousios nor of any compound of ousta
applied to the Son in the Statement ofFaith (Eethesis Pisteos) included as
that which was endorsed by the Council, and at the end three of the
59 bishops who attended refused to accept this Statement and were
excommunicated. Their names were Theodotus of LaodIcea.
Narcissus ofNeronias and Eusebius of Palestinian Caesarea. But this
condemnation was provisionally suspended (to give them time ~o
repent) in view of the near approach of 'the great and holy synod m
Ancyra'. The whole document takes the form of a letter written in
the first person' and addressed to an Alexander. Alexand~r .of
Alexandria is mentioned in it in complimentary terms as the vIctIm
of Arian heretics and an Alexander signs quite far down the list of
episcopal signatories. A number of canons are appended which
cannot have been the original canons of the letter and Statement
because they imply a later period after the Council of Nicaea.71 A
curious historical note (not printed by Opitz) which appears at the
end of this document is manifestly a later addition, for it informs us
that this letter or its equivalent was sent to the bishops under the
Ro';:'an see and that they replied agreeing to it and enclosing some
canons for the Eastern bishops, and the note goes on to remark that it
is strange that the bishops in this Antiochene synod though clearly
71 For this Council of Antioch see Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift. 6: 134-55; Chadwick
'Ossius of Cordova and the Presidency of the Council of Antioch' passim;]. N. D.
Kelly Early Christian Creeds 208-10 (who gives an ~n~lish tr~slation of the
Statement); Simonetti Cr;si 38-40; Person Mode of DeclSlonw.Makrng. 15-~6, 34;; J.
Nyman 'The Synod of Antioch (324-325) and the CounCl! of ~lcaea p~sSl~;
Kopecek, History ojNeo~A,janjsm 42-45' The text of Schwartz ~ Synac MS, ~~th h~s
Greek translation. without the Statement or the names of the bIshops subscnbll1:g~ IS
to be found in Opitz U,k. III No. 18(36-41). The controversy over the authenticity
of this document. including a long exchange between an acrimonious Harnack a.nd
a truculent Schwartz, 1S summarized by F. 1. Cross Church Quarterly ReVIew
I28(1939)49 ff.
Events Leading to Nicaea
champions of orthodoxy and destined, most of them, to take part in
the Nicene Council, did not remember the homoousion. The author of
this note must be the redactor of the Greek collection of canons
which underlies this Syriac translation. The canons are obviously not
Western but Eastern canons sent to the West. 72
Schwartz's MS was in fact not the only surviving evidence of this
Council. His was a Paris MS (Cod. Par. Syr. 62). In '909 Nau printed
in the Revue de I'Orient chretien (XIV,I-31) the Syriac text (with
French translation) of another MS, from the Vatican (Cod. Syr. 148)
which he collated with the Paris MS. And in 1958 H. Chadwick
revealed the existence in the Mingana Collection in Selly Oak,
Birmingham, of a Syriac MS (Mingana Syr. 8) very like the Paris MS
used by Schwartz. It was a very late MS, copied ortly in 19II from a
MS which was probably of the tenth century.73
The problem of identifying the Eusebius whom the two MSS of
Paris and of the Vatican represented as being the first to sign the
Statement of Faith of this Council long troubled the world .of
scholarship. In 19' 1 a Russian scholar, A. I. BriIliantov, showed that
by altering one syllable in the Syriac word for 'Eusebius' in the MS
the name Ossius could be read, and this was enough for Opitz to print
"00-0-<0<; in italics in his text at that point. But Chadwick's discovery
of the Mingana MS solved this problem, because his MS read Ossius
iristead ofEusebius as the first name on the list. 74 The reference to the
great council due to assemble in Ancyra is explained by a letter of the
Emperor Constantine published originally in a Syriac version by
B. H. Cowper in Analeeta Nieaeana in 1857; the letter summoned the
bishops due to assemble at Ancyra to meet instead. at Nicaea. 75
Most scholars now find this cumulative evidence impossible to
resist. 76 It is surprising that no other ancient document mentions this
72Schwartz op. cit. 143, 144.
~3See Chadwick 'Ossius of Cordova' 29.,-8. This MS had in fact originally been
edIted by Schulthess, who did not, however, perceive its importance.
741n 1935 Schwartz, who had in his original article argued in his usual aggressive
style for another, wholly obscure and wholly improbable, Eusebius, accepted that
Ossius should be read here.
751t was translated into English by Cowper in Syriac Miscellanies (1861), .and
reprodoced by J. Stevenson in A New Eusebius (1957). Schwartz's discovery
confirmed the authenticity of the letter, which had been doubted. It is printed in
Syriac and Greek in Opitz Urk. III No. 20(41-2).
761n .r~cent y~ars only D: L; ~olIand seems to have argued against the
a~thentlcl.ty of thIS document In DIe Synode von Antiochien und ihre Bedeutung
fur Euseblus von Caesarea und das Konzil von Nizaa'. He tries to show that it is
'47
 The Origins
Council. But then the occurrence of a second session of the Council
of Nicaea (see below, pp. '74-8) is even more devoid of ancient
documentation, yet many scholars find themselves compelled to
believe in it. The name of Philogonius does not appear in the list of
bishops signing the Statement of Faith, but that of Eustathius does,
immediately after Ossius who signed first and who, as the Emperor
Constantine's personal represenative, clearly presided. It is likely that
Ossius went direct from Alexandria to Antioch, though he may have
visited the Emperor at Nicomedia first. Ossius must have
communicated with him somehow, because by the time the Council
of Antioch has assembled Constantine has certainly changed his mind
about the Arian Controversy. He has now called a 'great and hieratic
synod' to deal with the matter, at Ancyra. Philogonius must have
been alive and presiding over the Church of Antioch when
Alexander wrote his Letter to all Bishops excommunicating Arius,
because there is extant a Syriac MS translating parts of a Greek
document containing extracts from this letter and clearly
commended by Philogonius to some other person or persons. Opitz
(on what evidence I do not know) dates it to 324; it could equally
have been written at any point between 319 and 324.77 But there is
good evidence from John Chrysostom that Philogonius died in
December 324. 78 Eustathius then must have been very recently
elected bishop of Antioch when the Council met. It is possible that it
was due to meet in order to choose a bishop of Antioch anyway, and
that Ossius seized the opportunity to take control of the Council and
impossible to. envisage Eusebius of Caesarea in such humiliating circumstances as
this document represents him experien~ing. But Holla~d can gi~e no altemativ.e
explanation of how and why and when, If the document IS (as he thmks) a forgery, It
could have becn produced, and, far from making Eusebius' conduct at !'Jicaea
inexplicable (as Holland maintains), it throws considerable light on his behaVIour, as
wc shall see (below, pp. 158-160). Nor are his arguments against the thcories of
Lietzmann and Kelly concerning the relation (or absence of it) of N to Eusebius'
Caesarcan creed convincing.
77This document is printed in Syriac with Greek rctroversion by Opitz Urk. III
No. 15(29-31).
76At least in December; the ycar is reached by dcduction from other evidence.
Scllwartz (Gesamm. Schrift. VI.I3I) gives the reference to John Chrysostom as
Tomus 1.495d among the volumes ofMignc's text ofJohn Chrysostom in PG. But
not only does this not tell us what exact work the references came from, but thc
page~reference is wrong. It should be PG 47 (which is Tomus I of the text ofJohn
Chrysostom in this series): 747-56 (De Beato Philogonio). Sce Bamcs, Constantine and
Eusebius, 21); cf. Scllers Eustathius 21. Sce also Thcodorct HE 1.7.10.
148
Events Leading to Nicaea
ensure that it dealt with the current controversy. It is therefore wisest
to date this Council early in 325. The document represents a letter
written by Ossius to Alexander of Thessalonica telling him, as a
prominent bishop in touch with Western opinion, what had
happened at Antioch. Neither Patrophilus of Scythopolis nor
Paulinus ofTyre (who had been prominent supporters of Arius) were
present at this Council which normally should have included bishops
in their area. No doubt they realized that the sentiment of the
Council would be hostile to them.
Alexander of Alexandria was not present at this Council. Only a
very extraordinary occasion could have caused the bishop of
Alexandria to leave his see for a council held at Antioch. But the
doctrine promulgated in the Statement is very like his doctrine, and is
particularly interesting as the only anti-Arian and pre-Nicene
statement of doctrine which we possess besides the writings of
Alexander himself. The most important points in the Statement qf
Beliif are thus expressed:
'And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son, begotten not
from non-existence, but from the Father, not as made, but as genuine
product (r.vv~~a Kupiro,). and begotten unspeakably and ineffably,
because only the Father who begot and the Son who was begotten
',oknew [reference to Matt. II:27 and Luke 10:22] ... he (i.e. Christ)
, who always exists and did not formerly not exist, for we have been
taught from the holy Scriptures that he ,alone is an image, not
unbegotten (dytvvrrtOv) - clearly from the Father -, not by
appointment ... so that we believe him to be immutable and
unaltera~le, and that he has not been begotten or come into existence
by will nor by appointment (9.",,,) so that he should appear to be
from non-existence but in the way that was proper for him to be
begotten, not (an idea unholy to conceive) by resemblance or nature
or association in connection with any of the things that came into
existence through him. But, because he transcends all thought and
conception and argument, we confess that he has been begotten from
the unbegotten Father, God the Word, true Light. righteousness.Jesus
Christ, Lord of all and Saviour. For he is the image not of the will nor
of anything else except the actual hypostasis of the Father. '79
790pitz Urk. III No. 18.8-13(38, 39). The last word in Syriac Schwartz translated
1tp6csoo1tov, not 61t60"'tao"l~ but Seeberg, followed by Opitz, prefcrred 61t60"'t0.0"1~,
, after Heb. 1:3. Clearly it means 'individual existencc' not 'substance'.
~i 149
oJ
 The Origins
The reference to the Holy Spirit in this Statement is very meagre.
Anathemas were added, the first known anathemas against doctrinal
deviations in any Church Council. They were directed against those
who held that the Son is a creature or geniiton (i.e. belonging to those
things that have come into existence), or not an authentic product
(Y'vv~~a) or that there was a time when he did not exist, or that he is
immurable by his own independent free-will, or those who derive his
birth from non-existence and say that he is not by nature immutable
as the Father is. 80 That this Statement is anti-Arian is overwhelmingly
clear. But it is equally clear that it represents the. theology of
Alexander of Alexandria. The particular way in which an apophatic
approach to the generation of the Son is presented and the great
emphasis on the Son's immutability suggest this. Alexander was not
present at Antioch in body, but he was in spirit. Ossius has imbibed
his point of view. We hear at Antioch no hint of any alternative
theology to Arianism save that of Alexander. If, as Philostorgius says
(iee above, p. 139-40), Alexander and Ossius were a very short time
later to concoct a plan to introduce homoousios into the Creed, no such
thought had entered tl)eir minds at tl)is stage.
One curious little fact needs to be added in connection witl) this
Council of Antiocl) of J25. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Contra
Marcel/urn reproduces an aneodote of Marcellus in which he says that
Narcissus (of Neronias) in a letter which he wrote to Chrestus and
Euphronius and Eusebius (presumably not Eusebius of Caesarea)
narrated that 'Bishop Ossius asked him (Narcissus) i£like Eusebius of
Palestine he taught that there were two ousiai, and that he (Marcellus)
knew from his (Narcissus') writings that he answered that he
(Narciss\1s)' believed that there were three ousiai'.81 It is very likely
that this interchange took place at Antioch in 325, and it is an early
example of the confusion about terms which was to dog continually
the search for the Christian doctrine of God in the fourth century. No
doubt Narcissus meant that there were three distinct realities
(,Persons') within the Godhead, and no doubt Eusebius of Caesarea
would have used ousia for hypostasis with the same meaning, but his
"Ibid. 13(39-40).
8tEusebius, Contra Marcellum 1.4.39 and 53-4 (reproduced Opitz Vrk. III
No. 19(41»: The ascription of speakers in brackets in this passage is rendered
necessary by the fact that this is Eusebiu! reporting what Marcellus reported what
Narcissus reported what Ouius and he had said. See Simonetti Crisi 76 n 1I7. and
above. p.45.
ISO
Events Leading to Nicaea
estimate of the Holy Spirit was so low that he would not have
included him within the Godhead, and so would only recognize two
hypostases. Ossius perhaps took Eusebius to mean that there were two
substances, and Narcissus to mean that there were three, in the
Godhead. 82 This little incident not only reveals the interesting
though not surprising information that Ossius understood and
probably knew Greek, but that he came to the Council of Nicaea
already under a misapprehension about the views of those who
represented the opposite party to his.
[Several scholars, from, Newman to Stead (who dealt with the matter
in a paper given to the Tenth International Conference on Patristic
Studies held at Oxford in August 1987) have observed the close
correspondence of doctrine and vocabulary of Alexander's Letter to
all Bishops (known as henos somatos from its opening words) with the
doctrine and vocabulary of Athanasius, and its difference in some
respects from Alexander's later letter to Alexander of Thessalonica
(known as hi! phi/archos). Stead has proposed the desperate remedy of
postulating that Alexander requested Athanasius (aged 18 or 20, not
yet ordained!) to write his synodical letter for him. Others have
suggested that in place of Alexander's letter a much later letter of
At~anasius has been substituted, though the original episcopal
subscriptions were kept. Two observations may be made here: it is
more likely that Athanasius learnt from Alexander than vice versa; it is
anyway difficult to avoid concluding that Alexander was one of the
main sources of Athanasius' theology. Also it may be noticed that the
Council of Antioch of 325, if we are to trust Schwartz's retroversion,
begins its letter with precisely the same words as does henos somatos
and its opening sentence voices exactly the same sentiments as the
opening sentence of that letter.)
82R. M. Grant thinks that Eusebius and Narcissus really did mean what Ossius
probably thought that they meant ('Religion and Politics' 4). See p. 167 below for a
further discussion of this suggestion.
151

6 over and transferred it to Nicaea. But the description of the proposed
The Council oj Nicaea
I. The Calling of the Council
The Council of Nicaea ' met from May to the end of July 325· An
Edict of Constantine is dated May 23rd, from Nlcaea. Whlle the
bishops were present at the Council they were able to celebrate
Constantine's vicennalia Uuly 25th, 325), and a law of TheodoslUs
2
reveals that by July 30th Constantine was back in Nicomedia. It was
the first time that any attempt had been made to summon a gener~1
council of the whole church at which, at least in theory, the church m
every part of the Rom:mEmpire should be represented, and It was by
far the greatest number of bishops ever gathered together up to then.
The question of wh y Constantine called it has been variously a~sessed.
The Syriac version of th~ Letter of Const3U~e summonmg the
bishops to Nicaea gives his reasons for changmg the venue from
Ancyra to Nicaea. 3 It would be easier for the bishops from Italy and
the other parts ofEurope to reach Nicaea; the air was better there; and
it would be a nearer place for the Emperor to reach (from
Nicomedia). These are unexceptionable reasons. The Emperor and
the Western bishops would be saved the long trek as far as the
Anatolian highland to Ancyra (modem Ankara). Nicaea was very
convenient to Nicomedia, and (so Optiz op. cit. 42) was noted for Its
good air. But Constantine gives no hint in this letter why he
IThe Council of Nicaea is covered by the Church historians of antiquity with
varying degrees of amplitude and accuracy: Socrates HE 1.8-13; Sozomenus H~
I 17-24' Theodoret HE 1.7.1-9. 18; Gelasius HE II.5-I 1,25-35; Rufinus HE X·3 1f·,
J~rome'Djal. con. Luciferanus 20(18). 183; Opitz, Urk: III ~os. 20-26. For modem
scholars see Gwatkin AC 25-40 (grave over-slmph~cat~o~); Schwartz. ~e,samm:
Schr. VI:n.,-68; Grillmeier CeT 264-'73; Grant RebglOn a~d PolitICS 6--9,
Simonetti ensi 77-87 (very useful, as usual) as well as authors clted b710w. .
2S0 Person, The Mode of Decision-Making 40 (n 20 to p. 15) followmg OpI~.
Socrates and .Gelasius give elaborate dates to determine ~he year of the CouncIl.
lSyriac text with Greek retroversion by Schwartz, OPitz Urk. III No. 20(4 1 - 2 ).
15 2
The Council of Nieaea
summoned a Council to Ancyra in the first place. It has been
conjectured that a Council had been due to meet at Ancyra
independently of Constantine and that Constantine simply took it
Council at Ancyra by the Council of Antioch as 'the great and
hieratic Council' (see above, p. 148) suggests that those who were at
Antioch already knew that this would be no ordinary Council. We
do no.t know why Constantine originally fixed it at Ancyra. Perhaps
he first intended to see that the Council met there but did not intend
to be present himself, but later realized that he must control the
Council and took steps accordingly. It has been conjectured that the
result of the Council of Antioch made him realize that there was a
strong party determined to excommunicate and depose bishops who
showed any leaning towards the views of Arius. The
excommunication of a man so universally respected for his
scholarship as Eusebius of Caesa rea must have given him a shock. He
wanted to be in a position to see that the anti-Arian party at the
Council did not do' anything that would further exasperate the
division already existing in the Church .. but rather heal it.'
Schwartz's idea' that Const:mtine originally summoned the Council
to deal with the Melitian schism in Egypt and that the Arian dispute
was, ifan ything, subordinate to this, can be dismissed. Itis redolent of
Sch'Yartz's conviction that hard political realities governed most of
the motives of those who took part in the controversy and that
theological ideas were pretexts rather than mainsprings of action, and
suggests the Realpolitik of Bismarck rather than the mind of
Constantine. The Emperor, rightly or wrongly, thought himself
called to foster and protect the Church, and therefore to prevent as far
as he coul~ the damage that was caused by controversy and schism.
He had tried to act in this way towards the North African Church
durmg the opening years of the Donatist Controversy. By now he
had given up serious attempts to heal that particularly virulent
dispute, but perhaps he had decided that he might have succeeded had
he been able to attend to it it personally in Africa. Now he would see
personally that the Arian conflict should be allayed at a relatively
early point in its development.
It was then certainly Constantine who convoked the Council of
4S0 Chadwick 'Ossius of Cordova and the Council of Antioch' 301-4, Ritter
'Arianismus' 704.
5Gesamm. Schr. 3.2(69-70),
153
 The Origins
Nicaea. Sulpicius Severus6 says that the Council was Ossius'
suggestion (auctore iIIo confecta habebatur), which, though probably no
more than an intelligent guess, may be true. Epiphanius, 7 most
improbably, attributes it to Alexander of Alexandria. Philostorgius
in two separate fragments' alleges that Alexander and Ossius plotted
together at Nicomedia to persuade the Emperor to hold it. But this
would have entailed their making a special journey to Nicomedia
many months before even the Council was called to Ancyra. We
may regard this as the sort of gossip which Philostorgius is too prone
to retail. Religious partisanship has in the past led some scholars to
suggest that Silvester, bishop of Rome, convoked the Council of
Nicaea, but modem Roman Catholic scholars honourably dismiss
this idea. 9 The evidence weighs strongly in favour of the view that
Ossius, as the Emperor's representative. presided at Nicaea. In the
great majority of MSS the list of signatories to the Council is headed
by the name of Ossius. He had recently presided in a similar capacity
over the Council of Antioch. His name is usually followed by those
of Victor and Vincentius, presbyters representing Sylvester, bishop
of Rome. Socrates purports to give a list of those who signed. 10
beginning with Ossius and going on with Victor and Vincentius,
though his list as we have it in Greek has been drastically abridged; it
survives in a much fuller form in the version of Socrates' History
given by Theodorus Lector who compiled the Historia Tripartita in
Latin. ll Further, Athanasius, who was certainly present at Nicaea,
unmistakably witnesses to Ossius as the presiding spirit at the
Council. In the Apologia Secunda the Council is described as 'the
Gene'ral Synod ofOssius'.'2In his Historia Arianorum he actually says
611.40.5(94).
7Panarion 68.4.5. The lnterpretatio Caeciliana in the Collection oj Theodosius the
Deacon (Turner, EOMIA 1.104) also says that Alexander presided. But as this
document is probably in origin an Alexandrian one we may discount this evidence.
81.7 and 1.7a.
9Declercq Ossius oj Cordova 222. Boularand and Simonetti concur. The pro-
Roman theory derives originally fTOm Damasus in the Decree of the Council of
Rome of 372 (CCCXVIII episcopi atque ex vice sanctissimi episcopi urbis Romanae
directi. Schwartz 'Codex Veronensis LX, 19.1.20, 21), but nobody can take this
seriously.
IOHE 1.13.
11 Declercq Ossius 228-32.
12
76. iJ KOlV1'I aUvooo~ 'Oaoiou. This is a late work of Athanasius, but here he is
quoting a Letter of the Clergy of the Mareotis sent to the Council ofTyre in 335, a
mere ten years after Nicaea.
154
The Council of Nicaea
that Ossius composed the Creed ofNicaea, 13 and, though we cannot
press these words because here he is putting words into the mouths of
the Arians writing thirty years after the Council to Constantius II
they show how the general opinion about the presidency of th~
CouncIl .of Nlca~a ran. Ge1asius alleges that Ossius presided as
representmg the bIShop of Rome,14 but this is probably because an
hIStorian writing in the second half of the fifth century could not
Ima~me that a bishop of as obscure a see as Cordova could have
preslde~ over a General Council unless he was a proxy for a much
more Important ecclesiastic. In normal circumstances the
Metropolitan of the area in which the Council met would have
preSIded, and in this case it would have been Eusebius ofNicomedia.
But ~onstantine's ~epresentative, Ossius,: took precedence on this
occaSIon (as he had Just done over Eustathius at Antioch). We have
~een reason to beheve (see above, pp. 28) that Eusebius was not at that
Juncture of affairs in favour with Constantine. Eusebius of Caesarea
tells us that his namesake ofNicomedia made the opening speech of
welcome to the Emperor. 1S
.We cannot calculate the number of bishops present at the Council
WIth complete ac~u~acy, because the earliest witnesses give us only
round figures and It IS the later ones who provide factitious accuracy.
One; of the earliest witnesses must be the statement of Eustathius of
Anti<lch given to us in its original form by Theodoret, a statement to
whIch we shall return for other useful information (see below,
p. 160). Eustathms says that about 270 bishops were present, though
he could not calculate the exact numbers. I. A version of the Creed of
Ntcaea was attached to the Letter of the Council ofNicaea to the Church
of Alexandria, and a short introductory sentence to this Creed
descnbes the number of bishops present as 'nearly 300'17 Eusebius of
Caesarea in his Vita Constantini (Ill.S) says 'more than 25 0 '.
AthanaslUs m hiS Historia Arianorum 66 says 'about 300' attended,
13 42 , o~'roc; Kat 'tT}V t.v Nucuu;t x{m'IV M&'to: cf. Declercq Ossius 250-2
14HE 11.5.3; I2.r. .
15 VC 3: ~ I. ,But Sc~wartz is go~ng too far when he calls him 'the second leader' of
the Council ( Zur Klrchengeschlchte des vierten Jahrhunderts' 159 n 45)
, 16~heodoret HE 1.8.1-5· See Spanneut Recherches sur fes Eerits d~Eustache
d Antwehe 32 (104. 105). Constantine in his Letter to the Church ofAlexandria (Urk III
No. 25.5(53» puts the number at more than 300. .
17Dossetti ~imbolo 34-5: for the Letter. see Opitz Urk. III No. 23 (pp. 47-5 I )' it
can b~ found 10 some of the MSS of the documents attached to Athanasius' De
DeeretlS; Socrates HE 1.9.1; Theodoret HE 1.9.2: Gelasius HE 1I.34.2.
ISS
 The Origins
though in his later Letter to the Bishops of Africo he gives the number as
318. Hilary in his Collectio Antiariana says 'three hundred or more"8
By about 370 the conventional number of 318, the same number as
the men of Abraham's household whom he led out to rescue Lot
(Gen. 14:14), had been accepted everywhere, and this becam~
traditional. 19 Several other legends accumulated round this CouncIl
in course of time. Ambrose (loc. cit.) already calls it an 'oracle'
(oraculum). Philostorgius alleges (HE 1.9) that Eusebius ofNicomedia,
Maris ofChalcedon and Theognis ofNicaea distracted the attention
of their colleagues while they altered homoousion to homoiousion in the
version of the Creed which they signed; Sozomenus (HE 11.21) that
they were able later to efface their signatures to the Council's Creed
surreptitiously. Bardy rightly dismisses these apocryphal tales. 20 All
that we can say is that the number of bishops at the Council ofNicaea
probably fell between 250 and 300.
The Council was overwhelmingly Eastern, and only represented
the Western Church in a meagre way. Ossius of Cordova,
representing the Emperor's interest as well as, presumably, that of the
Church of Spain, the presbyters Victor and Vincentius as
representatives of the bishop of Rome, Caecilianus Catholic bishop
of Carthage, Nicasius of Gaul, Marcus of Calabria and Dornnus of
Pannonia. 21 There is no evidence that even the bishop of
Thessalonica was there. It is more likely that the great majority of
Western bishops did not know what all the fuss created by the Arian
Cont~oversy was about, and saw no strong reason to make a long
journey to a Greek-speaking city for so uncertain a purpose. Among
the supporters of the views of Arius present were, as well as Eusebius
of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea, Menophantus of Ephesus,
Patrophilus of Scythopolis, Narcissus of Neronias, Theonas of
"11.9·7(149).
19$0 Damasus (see above, n.9); Gelasius HE 11.28.11; Ambrose De Fide I.
Prologue 5(6). 18.120(5 I); and Interpretatio Caeciliana (Turner EOMIA 1.110). Even
in Athanasius'late Letter to African Bishops 2(1032) the aura.oflegend is beginning to
be visible.
2°Lucien d'Antioche 306-13.
21 So Declercq Ossius 227-8. Schwartz wished to eliminate even Marcus by
reading Salambria instead of Calabria, but this is unnecessary. We are not told what
see Marcus occupied in Calabria nor Nicasius in Gaul nor Domnus in Pannonia.
Declercq conjectures that most Westerners received their summons to the Council
too late to attend. But this is unlikely. Gaul was farther away from Nicaea than any
Italian town, yet Nicasius arrived there. There were more bishops who could have
been present in Pannonia and in the Danubian provinces than Domnus.
The Council <if Nicaea
Marmarike and Secundus of (Libyan) Ptolemais!2 and we should
mclude Theognis ofNicaea itself here also. Among Arius' opponents
there were Alexander of Alexandria, Eustathius of Antioch
Marcellus of Ancyra and Macarius of Jerusalem. Athanasius wa;
certainly present as a deacon accompanying Alexander of
Alexandria. He teHs us himself that he was present. 23 But it is equaHy
certam that he can have taken no prominent nor active part, in spite
oflater legends to this effect and the conviction of some scholars that
he was the moving spirit in the Council. 24 A deacon would never
have been permitted by the bishops to playa prominent part on such
an occasion, and though he came with Alexander he was then by no
means Alexander's natural and clearly designated successor. Rufinus
(HE 1.1) says that Arius was commanded by the Emperor to be
present at Nlcaea, and Epiphanius (Panarion 69.4) that Asterius and
the Antiochene presbyter Leontius (much later to be Arian bishop of
AntIOch) were there. They may have been lurking in the wings.
They were certainly not there officiaHy. The proceedings did not take
the form of a trial of Arius nor of anyone else. 25 The presence of the
Emper?r ~onstantine was inevitable. He was not baptized: it is
doubtful If he was even a Christian catechumen. But he had
summoned the Council, had paid aH its expenses. He was a highly
Interes,ted spectator. The bishops could not have kept him out.
2. The Proceedings of the Council
We cannot reconstruct with any confidence the Course which the
Council ofNicaea took, because no account, official or otherwise, of
22T he<:,doret HE 1.7.13. Rufinus (HE X.5) says that seventeen of the bishops
present dIssented from the homoousion, of whom eleven later signed the Creed (but
In ~act only two refuse~ t,:, sign). Sozomenus (1.20.1) says that seventeen backed
Ar~~s ofwho~ the majorIty eventua~ly signed. Cf. Gelasius HE 11.7.43.
De Decretts 3; Apol. Sec. 6; c£ HIlary Coil. AntiaT. B2 II.6 (CSEL 154) and
Socrates HE 1.8. .
24~.g. Gwat~n ,A.C ~5-4?; Lucifer ofCalaris De Athanasio I.XXVII(46) can say
even In Athanasll~s hfetIme when by God's power he (Athanasius) frustrated these
very pe?pl7 at NI~aea long ago'. L<:,ofs ('Das Nidinum' 69) and Klein (Constantius
32-3) dIsmiSS the l~ea that AthanasIUs could have been active at the Council. The
only.ear!y suggestIon that ~e was so is made by the synod of Egyptian clergy
~eetmg m 338 to protestagamst Athanasius' exile reported in Apol. Sec. 6. and theirs
IS a very ex parte statement.
2sDeclercq, Ossius 252, dismisses the idea that Arius was present.
157
 The Origins
the whole affair has come down to us. Perhaps, as this was the ·first
General Council, without precedents, no Acta were ever drawn up.
The ancient church historians clearly have no consecutlve account at
their disposal, and consequently tend to fall back on trivialities. All
we have is a numb~r of descriptions by individuals of some events
which happened at it, but we do not know their order and scholars
have differed widely about their significance. We have. the. Creed
which the Council produced and the twenty canons which It drew
Up,26 but no more. We also know of some of the business which it
transacted besides its main task ofattempting to settle the controversy
about the nature of God. It made some decisions about settliog
regularly each year the date ofEaster, and itlaid down the terms upon
which the Melitian schism was to be healed (terms whIch neIther
Athanasius nor the Melitians were ultimately to regard as
satisfactory). . cr~ation, begotten from the Father before all ages, through whom all
We can obtain some information about the course of proceedmgs
at Nicaea from Eusebius' Life of Constantine, though this is mainly
concerned with the appearance of the Emperor and is couched in such
vague terms as to make it oflittle use, and mor~ from the letter whI~h
he wrote immediately after the CouncIl to hIS flock at Caesarea m
order to justify his having signed the Creed which the Council had
drawn up. We have an account of some of the events of the CouncIl
in an extract from Eustathius of Antioch preserved by Theodoret,
and we have some brief references to the Council made by
Athanasius in the course of his writings. But, useful though they are,
these testimonies cannot be put together to reconstruct the order of
business transacted at Nicaea.
Eusebiu; in his Life of Constantine 27 gives the speech which
Constantine delivered at the beginning of the Council. He tells us
that the Emperor spoke in Latin which an interpreter rendered into
26The canons are set out in Greek by F. Lauchert (1896) Die Kanones der
wichtigsten Altkirchlichen Concilien. 37-43,.as wen.as anywhere els~. A little earlier
W. Bright had published the Greek text With Enghsh commentary 10 The Canons of
the First Four General Councils (1892) IX-XV (text) and 1-89 (Commentary). In
those happy days it was assumed that aU theological students c~ul~ re.ad Greek and
would need no translation. See Gelasius HE 11.32.1-22; Chad"Wlck FaJth and Order
at the Council ofNicaea' passim; H. Hess The Canons ofthe Council ofSardica 49-55.
Hess shows that from about 350 to 500 in the West the Latin version of these Can,:,ns
of Serdica was thought to be those of Nicaea, in spite of the eclajrcisse,!,e~t which
took place between 418 and 421 in Africa ove~ the case of Aplanus. The
arrangement about the Mditians was not included 10 the canons.
27VC 111.12.
The Council of Nicaea
Greek (though, Eusebius says, Constantine could speak Greek and
did so in private conversations);28 it was during the course of the
Council that the Emperor celebrated the twentieth year of his reign,
29
hIS vicennalia. Otherwise Eusebius' biography of Constantine gives
us no information about the Council; at no point does he even hint at
what was the subject of the controversy. In his Letter to the Church of
Caesarea, Eusebius. writing immediately after the Council,30 gives
first the Creed which he says that he presented to the Council in the
presence of the Emperor; it ran thus:31
'We believe in one God, Father, Almighty, maker of all things seen
and unseen;
And in one LordJesus Christ the Word of God, God from God, Light
from Light, Life from Life, only-begotten Son, first-born of all
thIngs have come into being, who was incarnate for our salvation; and
spent his life (1tOA1'tEuaO:IlEvov) among men, and suffered and rose the
third day and went up to the Father and will come again in glory to
judge the living and the dead;
And we believe in one Holy Spirit.
We believe that each of these is and exists (&lval Kai 61tO:PXElV), the
Fa~h.er truly Father ~nd Son truly Son and Holy Spirit truly Holy
SPlrlt, as our Lord saId when he sent his disciples to preach, "Go and
ma~e disciples of all nations, baptising them into the Name of the
Fatller and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". We are deeply
conVInced (Blapepaloulle9a) that these things are so and that this is our
belief and has long been so and that we hold by this faith until death,
anathematizing all atheist heresy. We bear witness that we have
always believed this with heart and soul, ever since we have been
conscious of ourselves (e~ 061tEP iO"J..lEv tao'tou<;). and that we now
believe and truly proclaim God Almighty and the Lord Jesus Christ,
and are ready to demonstrate by arguments and to persuade you that
we have always so believed and so preached in times past.'
The obsessive repeated asseveration of this statement is easily
understood. Eusebius was the most learned and one of the best-
known of the 300-ddd bishops present. He had written more books
than anyone else. He had recently been accused ofheresy at a synod of
28III.rz, 13.
29
111.15.
300pitz Urk. III. NO.22(42-'1), from the dossier attached to Athanasius' De
Deeretis; Socrates HE 1.8; Theodoret HE 1.2I.I; Gelasius HE 11.35.1.
"Ibid. 4-6(43).
159
 The Origins
the great church of Antioch and had been provisionally condemned
and excommunicated. He must now, in the presence of the Emperor
and of his fellow-bishops, at all costs exculpate himself from the
charge of heresy. And certainly his profession of faith, though It
avoids all the controversial points raised by the Anan Controversy,
was of a blameless orthodoxy according to the standards of 32 5.
Eusebius goes on to say, 'When this statement offaith was laid before
us there was no loophole for opposition, but our blessed
(9~oCP1M"tato<;) Emperor himself was the first to witness that it was
entirely orthodox'.32 Eusebius then goes on to deal WIth the Creed of
Nicaea itself and this will be discussed presently. He does not say at
what stage in the proceedings he brought forward his Creed. He
gives the impression throughout this letter that Constantme took the
initiative in all the matters that the letter deals with, apparently
regarding himself as qualified to deal with any discussion about the
profound questions raISed by the Chnstlan doctrme of God. . . approbation - which would be absurd.'· Again~ as we have already
Eustathius of Antioch, in an extract given by Theodoret m hIS
Church History, written within a very few years of the Council,
between 325 and 330,33 relates:
'when ... the greatest council gathered at Nicaea ... as the form. of the
faith was being discussed, the blasphemous docume?t ofEusebIus, ~n
being put forward, (c;:onstituted) a clear condemnatIOn. It was read ~
the presence of everybody and immediately produced among ::ts
audience a restless sensation of shock (owupopav cicrtaO,..:r],t'ov tTJe;
tKtponile; EV&1Ca) and earned indelible shame for its au~hor. B~t ,when
the cabal (.pyacrt~plov) of Eusebius' party (trov a~cpl tOV EU".~IOV)
was openly exposed, the transgressing document was torn up before
the eyes 'of aU, then some, by a deliberate plot, using. the cause of
reconciliation <ts a pretext, reduced to silence those WIth orthodox
views (tOUe; liplOta llyElV dm06tae;) and the fanatical followers of
Arius (' ApElO/laVtta<;), afraid of being excommu.n~cated by so great an
assembled synod, were foremost in anathemauzmg the condem?ed
dqctrine, and attached their signatures to the agreed statements.
This is a valuable account, even though it is violently partisan and
couched in Eustathius' usual style of pompous wordiness,
reminiscient of that of Mr. Sapsea in Edwin Drood. Scholars have
debated about which Eusebius Eustathius was here referring to.
"Ibid. 7(43-44). . .
33 HE 1.8.1-3. See R. P. C. Hanson 'The Fate of Eustathius of Antloch .
160
The Council oj Nicaea
Spanneut,34 Ritter 35 and Chadwick 36 take it to mean Eusebius of
Caesarea; Stead 37 and Simonetti'· favour Eusebius of Nicomedia.
But there can in fact be little doubt that Eustathius is here referring to
Eusebius ofNicomedia. His expression 'the party ofEusebius' Occurs
again and again in Athanasius' works and elsewhere (e.g. Sozomenus
HE II.P.7), in a slightly different form, to denote the party of the
bishop ofNicomedia. Further, if we think Eusebius of Caesarea to be
meant here, we must either conclude that the document which
callsed such an uproar when it was read out and which was torn up by
universal consent was the Creed which Eusebius of Caesarea (as we
have just seen) alleges to have received unanimous approval (in
which case either he or Eustathius is indulging in unscrupulous
mendacity), or assume that Eusebius of Caesarea submitted two
documents to the Council, one of which occasioned a widespread
demonstration ag;linst it and the other was met with universal
seen, Ambrose in De Fide tells us that a letter of Eusebius of
Nicomedia was read to the Council of Nicaea, in which he
discouraged the view that the Son was uncreated and apparently
mentioned homoousios as a reductio ad absurdum. Ambrose says 'When
this letter was read at the Council of Nicaea, the Fathers placed this
(i.e. t~e term homoousios) in the Statement of Faith, because they saw
that It caused alarm to their opponents. '40 It is possible, perhaps even
probable, that this was the document which, according to Eustathius,
caused such a violent reaction in the Council. It should be noted that
Eustathius says nothing of any intervention by Constantine in the
debates. He also hints that his party Could have said more but did not;
he may m'ean that the Nicene Creed was not extreme enough a
document to exclude the possibility of the supporters of Arius
signing it.
34Recherches 104-5.
35'Arianismus' 705.
36'The Fall of Eustathius of Antioch'.
37'Eusebius and the Council of Nicaea' Silo-lOO.
38Crisi 81. Loofs had done so earlier, in 'Das Nicaenum' 79-80.
39See Hanson, 'The Fate ofEustathius of Antioch', 171-4. Stead (op. cit.) suggests
that the document which caused so much alarm and despondency was Eusebius'
Letter to Paulinus of Tyre (see above, PP.30-31); but if this were so then either
Ambrose's account would be totally untrue Or this Eusebius would have read two
letters to the Council - quod esset absurdum.
40De Fide III. I 5(125); see Opitz Urk. III No. 21(42), and above, p. 3 I.
161
 The Origins
Athanasius says that when the party which he regarded as
orthodox at Nicaea wanted to declare the Son to be 'like' (6~0.ov) the
Father, and 'exacdy as the Father in all things (d1tUpU).).UKTOV KUTa
1tUVTa Tq, 1tUTpl) and immutable (uTpe1tTOv) and always in the Father,
the Arians present winked and muttered to each other that they could
accept these epithets because they could fmd parallel expressions to all
these applied in the Scripture to creatures and not God (and therefore
that they could, while accepting these, continue to regard the Son as a
creature). and that this is why the term homoousion was inserted in the
Creed of Nicaea, and he goes on to quote the anathemas of Nicaea,
though he modifies the most controversial and confusing phrase in
them. 41 In the Letter to the Bishops of Africa he has much the same
account, but he here includes the term 'from God' (ilK TOU aeou) which
he said, as it was acceptable to the Arians, was rejected in favour of
'from the substance' (of the Father, ilK Tiie; o~<rlue;) and of homoousios,
and lets us infer that the expression 'eternal image and unalterable
power and wisdom', (e!KIDv diS.oe; Kui d1tUpU).).UKTOe; S\ivu~.e; Kui
ao<pia) was rejected for similar reasons. This at least informs us that
the Creed produced by the Council was carefully and thoroughly
debated, and not merely imposed by Constantine. It also suggests that
the anti-Arian party had the upper hand, throwing the supporters of
Arius on the defensive, an impression which we gain from the
account of Eustathius, but not from Eusebius.
This is all that we can glean about the proceedings of this Council,
apart from its most important result, the production afits Creed, and
this is little enough. We can only guess as to the order of proceedings,
because, apart from the opening speeches of a formal and non-
dogmatic coloilr by Constantine and Eusebius of Nicomedia, we are
given no clue as to the shape of the agenda. Eusebius' Creed was
accepted, and therefore his orthodoxy presumably vindicated and
excommunication lifted; a conciliar Creed was discussed and agreed
upon and all bishops present required to sign it; an agreement about
the determining the date of Easter was reached; an arrangement
about ending the Melitian schism was fixed; twelve canons were
passed, certainly after debate, because some of the picturesque stories
told about them by the ancient Church Historians imply a debate.
Two bishops who refused to sign the Creed, Secundus of Ptolemais
41De Decretis 20:1(16), 2(16, 17), 3(17) and 5(17); caps. 18-20 deal with the
Council, but very uninformatively.
162
The Council of Nicaea
and Theonas of Marmarike, were deposed by the Council and exiled
by the Emperor. Arius himself was exiled. But we do not know in
what order these things happened.
3· The Creed of Nicaea
The Creed which was drawn up at the Council ofNicaea (and which
wdl henceforth by referred to as N) ran, as reconstructed by Dossetti,
as follows:
'We believe in one God Father Almighty Maker of all things, seen and
unseen:
And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only-
begotten of the Father, that is of the substance (ousia) of the Father,
God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not
~ade, ~onsubstantial with the Father, through whom all things came
mto eXIstence, both things in heaven and things on earth; who for us
men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and became
man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens,
is coming to judge the living and the dead:
And in the Holy Spirit.
Bll,t those who say, "there was a time when he did not exist"
aq'd "Before being begotten he did not exist", and that he cam~ into
be~n~ from non-existence, or who allege that the Son of God is
of another hypostasis or ousia, or is alterable or changeable,
these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns. '42
. Eusebius of Caesa rea, in his Letter to the Church ofCae sarea, gives the
ImpressIon that N was no more than his own Creed which he
. 42For the Greek of the original, see the Appendix I of this work, and Dossetti
Simbolo 226-4I. I have translated Dossetti's Greek text here. I have left the terms
Ilypostasis and ousia in the a?at.hema untranslated because they are so equivocal (see
below, p. 1,81--90) .. For a printing of the Greek text ofN with apparatus criticus see
Schwartz ?as Nlcaenum und das Constantinopolitanum auf der Synode von
Chalkedon 78. For the copy in Athanasius' collection of documents see De Deeretis
37 (~6, 37) (for an earlier ~ersion than this see Dossetti op. cit. 34-5). For Hilary's
verSion ofN, see Coil. Anttar. B 11.10(150). For the version of Lucifer ofCalaris see
De Non ~arcendo in Deum Deliquentibus XVIII(229). For that of Gregory ofEl~ira,
see n,e. FIde Orthodoxa 1(221). For the Creed in the early Latin canons of lnterpretatio
C~ecrltana see Turner EOMIA 1.106-g. For N in Latin texts generally see Dossetti
Simbolo 91-3· For the ~ld Latin text of N, see A. H. Bum JThS 2(05)(1901 ),
I02-IO. See also AthanaslUs Letter 10 Emperor jovian 3 (PG 26:817); Basil Epp Il5.2
and Socrates HE 1.8·9 for early examples of the Greek text of N.
 The Origins
transcribes in his letter, with the single addition of the homoousion 43
This has led several scholars in the past to conclude that N is the local
baptismal creed of Caesarea, with certain anti-Arian insertions
deliberately placed in it.44 But this theory cannot be sustained.
Eusehius' own transcriptions ofN immediately afterwards makes it
quite plain that the Creeds are not identical. even when the anti-
Arian matter has been removed from N. What Eusebius is really
saying is that the Council and Emperor approved of his own Creed,
and then went on to produce another similar in content except for the
word homoousion. It cannot he stated too often that the ancients did
not suffer from the same passion for exact accuracy which modern
scholarship displays. What concerned them in comparing two
documents was not verbal identity but similarity of content. What
Eusehius is comparing here are not in fact two baptismal creeds hut
ultimately two Rules of Faith, which, though based in their structure
on the baptismal creed, arc more fluid and variable in form. 45 Careful
examination of Eusebius' Creed and N by experts 46 has shown that
the two creeds, not least in their least important and least
controversial features, are quite different. Lietzmann and Kelly
conjectured that the basis of N was one of the Jerusalem family of
creeds, but they concluded that no more detailed identification of it
could be made. Person, in a useful review of the subject,47 is inclined
to revert to the theory to which Harnack finally subscribed: the
'Jerusalem family' of creeds is an hypothetical entity, all of whose
alleged examples occur well after the production ofN and may have
been influenced by N; N itself may be the product of a number of
different cieeds put together for the occasion. At least we can
conclude that its p.articular vocabulary gives us no clear clue as to its
origin nor first author n~r proposer.
We have already seen 48 that according to Athanasius N was
constructed as a deliberately anti-Arian document. Indeed. we do not
need Athanasius to tell us so. Its consciously anti-Arian tone is
"U,k. III No. 22.[, 2(4" 43), 7(44).
44E.g. Gwatkin AC 44 and Loofs 'Das Nidinum', passim, Burn and Hort;
Harnack, for most of his career, subscribed to this view, and Seeberg (History of
Doctritles 217).
45For the Rule of Faith, see R. P. C. Hanson Tradition in the Early Church, cap. 3.
75-129·
46Lietzmann 'Symbolstudien XIII' and Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 217-26.
47 Mode of Decision-Making 84-91.
48Above, p. 162.
The Council of Nicaea
unmistakeable. All the more obnoxious doctrines of Arius and his
~ollowe.rs are struck at in N in the most impressive way. But it is
mterestmg to observe how Eusebius, who cannot have found the
Creed's doctrine congenial. explains to his flock his reasons for-
signing N. One would, in reading his letter, hardly believe that N
was designedly anti-Arian did not one have the Creed before one's
·eyes. He alleges that the Emperor himself qualified the addition of
'consubstantial' by saying that:
'the S?n is not to be said c~nsubstantial in the sense of any corporeal
expenences, nor does he eXIst as a result of division or any subtraction
from the Father; for the immaterial and spiritual and incorporeal
nature cannot undergo any corporeal experience, and that it is right to
hold such views about divine and recondite (anoppirrOlC;;) subjects of
thought'.49
After ~etting out the Creed N, Eusebius goes on to· explain
carefully In what sense he accepts each of the anti-Arian terms in N.
'Consubstantial' and 'of the substance' mean that the Son is from the
Father, but n~t a part of him nor a part of his ousia. Only thus could
EuseblUs, WIth obvious reluctance, bring himself to accept
homoousz'on, for the sake of peace. 50 He accepted 'begotten not made'
b~<:,ause 'made' applies to the other creatures which were made
through the Son and is not fit to apply to the 'superior ousia' of the
Son, for he has been begotten in an indescribable and unsearchable
way by the Father.51 One suspects that Eusebius is reserving the right
to des~nbe the Son as a creature but not as something made,
follOWing the example of his master Origen. He defends his
acceptance. of homoousion on the grounds already stated but also
because 'it establishes that the Son of God bears no likeness to
creatures w?ic.h have :ome into existence (7tp6~ to. yevrrra KtioJlu'tu).
but that he.'s likened In all things only to the Father who begot him
and that he IS ofno other hypostasis and ousia but only of the Father'. 52
Euse.bius also explains how he could approve of the anathemas added
at the end of N. They were, he says, a condemnation of the use of
49Urk. III No; 22.7(44).
50Ibid. 9, IO(45).
51
11(45).
52.13 (45-4 6) E.usebius adds that 'some famous bishops and writers' in the past
apphed homoouslOS to the Son. One would like to know who they were. One
:vonders too whether Eusebius deliberate1y says 'of no other hypostasis and ousia'
lnstcad of N's 'hypostasis or ousia'.
16S
 The Origins
terms which are non-Scriptural, such as 'from non-existence' and
'there was a time when he did not exist', and which he himself has
never used in his works. 53 This is a strange admission from a man
who has just signed a creed containing the terms 'substance' and
'consubstantial'! Eusebius l)ext defends the condemnation of 'before
he was begotten he did not exist' (which is all but an affirmation of the
eternal generation of the Son) on the grounds that everybody admits
that the Son existed before the Incarnation, and ends his explanation
by saying that the Emperor iu his speech (sv trp 1-oyrp autoii)
maintained that the Son existed eternally before he was begotten
'since before he was begotten in act (tV£P'YEU~) he was in the Father
potentially (~Uva~.,) ingeneratdy (ay.vv~t<»<;) for the Father has
always been Fatherjust as he has been King and Saviour eternally; he is
everything potentially (ouvulua) and remains just so exactly the same
for ever.'54
Opitz thinks that Eusebius could never have written the last
sentiment of his own accord and therefore must be quoting from
some official account of the Emperor's explanation of the Creed. 55
But we have already seen Asterius voicing a rather similar opinion, 56
and it would not therefore be a doctriue altogether alien from
Eusebius' thought; it certainly is the explanation of one who wishes
to avoid a doctrine of the Son's eternal generation. We have no
evidence as to whether Constantine either favoured or opposed this
doctrine, or even ifhe understood it. Eusebius however enables us to
see how somebody who was by no means an opponent of Arius'
views could have persuaded himself to accept N. What was needed
was a good deal of disingenuousness without the necessity of direct
mendacity. His yvhole account confirms the impression that in the
doctrinal discussions the opponents of Arius took the lead from the
beginning and held it a1l the way through.
To say that the Son was 'of the substance' (SK t~, ollaia,)of the
Father, and that he was 'consubstantial' with him were certainly
startling innovations. Nothing comparable to this had been said in
"Ibid. 14. 15(46).
54 1 6(4 6 ).
55Marginal note in loc.
56See above, pp.]J, 35 (frag. IV). Note the remarkable "resemblance to the
statement of Asterius in Frag. XX (P.35) in Eusebius' insistence in his own
Statement of Faith to the Council, 'the Father truly Father and the Son truly Son
and the Holy Spirit truly Holy Spirit'.
166
The Council of Nicaea
any creed or profession of faith before. Neither Alexander nor the
recent Council of Antioch had described the Son's relation to the
Father by introducing ousia or its cognates. The key-word homoousion
will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter. For the
moment it is enough to say that it probably had a looser and less
specific meaniug than scholars till recently have attributed to it, but
that nobody could pretend that it was Scriptural, and much the most
satisfactory explanation of why it was put there is that it was certainly
a word, quite apart from any philosophical or historical associations.
which serious and wholehearted Arians could not stomach; Arius in
his Thalia had specifica1ly rejected it, and, in his letter to Eusebius of
Nicomedia, had attacked the idea that the Son is a 'consubstantial
part' (meros homoousion) of the Father. Eusebius is clearly anxious that
nobody shall conclude that the adoption of this term means that the
Council has succumbed to the idea pilloried by Arius.
The other really remarkable point about N is the condemnation in
the anathemas at the end of the view that the Son is 'of another
hypostasis or ousia' from the Father. This can only have been a highly
ambiguous and extremely confusing statement. By the standard of
later orthodoxy, as achieved in the Creed of Constantinople of 381, it
IS a rahkly heretical (i.e. Sabellian) proposition, because the Son must
be 6fa different hypostasis (i.e. 'Person') from the Father. And in fact
there were present at the Council people, such as Marcellus of
Ancyra, who were quite ready to maintain that there is only one
hypostasis in the Godhead, and who were later to be deposed for
heresy because they believed this. It also seems possible that Ossius at
least believed in only one hypostasis, judging by the question about
two o.usiai"which he put to Narcissus of Neronias at Antioch (see
above, P·150), and by the letter which he wrote along with
Protogenes ofSerdica after the Council ofSardica in 342 (see below,
PP·3 01 -3). which roundly rejected three hypostaseis." But it is
difficult to imagine that Eastern bishops would have permitted what
was to them a rankly Sabellian statement to appear in the Creedofthe
first General Council. Alexander of Alexandria himself uses the
57S ee the expose of ass ius, manifesdy Sabellian ideas in G. S. M. Walker 'Ossius
of Cordova and the Nicene Faith' 3 16--19. The statement in the doctrinal manifesto
of the recent Council of Antioch that the Son is the image of the hypostasis of the
Father ~o7s not necessarily commit its framers to the view that there is only one
"ypostaSlS In the Godhead. and anyway. the word is not quite certain. See above,
p.149·
 The Origins
expression 'the natures which-were two in hypostases' 58 in his Letter to
Alexander of Thessalonica. He cannot possibly have used the word
hypostasis to mean both 'substance' and 'Person' in the course of the
same letter. It is much more likely that· to the Easterners this highly
equivocal expression meant that the Son came from the Father's
'Person' because it was as Father that he begets the Son but also that
J represented at the Council (if anyone did) was largely dependent
the Son was not of a different nature (to use Alexander's term) or
subsrance from the Father. They could not have intended to deny the
existence of three distinct hypostases. Only by such an interpretation
can this anathema be exculpated from manifest heresy. But, however
interpreted. it was and was for long to remain a fruitful source of
misunderstanding. It might be taken to mean that hypostasis and ousia
were different words for the same thing, i.e. substance. But the word
'or' does not favour this view; the Creed had already used the word
ousia for •substance' without producing hypostasis as a synonym for it.
However we regard it, the Creed produced by the Council ofNicaea
was a mine of potential confusion and consequently most unlikely to
be a means of ending the Arian Controversy. It is significant that
when Athanasius comes much later to quote N in his polemical
writing, he slurs over this equivocal expression. 59 Gregory of Elvira
does not reproduce the term exactly and several early Latin
translations render it as substatltia vel essentia, which evades the
difficulty.-o Not many who have written upon the subject of the
Creed of Nicaea have observed this serious difficulty presented by
it. 61
S8See above, p. 141.
S9See above, p. 162.
60Gregory. De Fide 'Orth. 1(221). For the early Latin texts see Schwartz, 'Das
Nicaenum' 54; but some preserve the distinction carefully reading ex alia subsistentia
vel substantia, ibid. 50;- 56, 57.
61Gwatkin is silent about it, and so is Seeberg (History of Doctrines 217), who
blandly translates it as meaning 'from another person or being'. Prestige CPT 177 in
a rather ambiguous statement appears to assume that here
ousia = hypostasis = 'person', but does not seem to realize what confusion such an
identification must create in N. Boularand evades the difficulty by assuming that
here hypostasis means 'substance', and adds the unlikely theory that when Arius
spoke of three hypostases he meant three dissimilar ousia; (substances), L' Heresie 76.
Loafs 'Arianismus' (17) sees the ambiguity and notes it. Stead. who discusses the
subject in Divine Substance 239-42, concludes that the anathema was not intended to
deny the existence of three hypostases (which he thinks' almost everybody
recognized) nor to establish the equality of the Son's hypostasis, but to' reinforce the
asseveration of ek tes ousias and homoousion that the Son's source was not from
outside the Father, but he does not comment upon the inevitable confusion arising
from the anathema. Simonetti (Stud; 42.166, 168 and Crisi 136 n 6) fu11y recognizes
168
The Council of Nicaea
The debate upon the policy and purpose behind the doctrinal
decisions of Nicaea, has, however, been lively, and in particular the
question of who proposed the term homoousion. The view that it was
Ossius who was responsible for introducing homoousion into N has
long been popular. The Western theological tradition which Ossius
upon Tertullian. Tertullian had certainly taught a doctrine in which
Father, Son and Holy Spirit shared a common substance (in fact a
kind of divine thinking invisible gas called pneuma or spiritus), and the
. Father and the Son could therefore be described as unius substantiae,
'of one substance'. Though we can detect no Greek-speaking writer
before Nicaea who unreservedly supports homoousion as applied to
the Son, and none of the main Eastern participants in the Council had
hitherto shown any inclination to use the term, it could· well be
regarded as a Greek translation of or counterpart to TertulIian's 'of
one substance' (unius substantiae). The theory runs that Ossius realized
that .i~ this word were inserted in the Creed at Nicaea any Western
SUSPICIOns of Eastern theology would be allayed and Arianism firmly
rejected, and that a large school of thought in the East, variously
deSCrIbed as 'moderate Origenists' (Stead) and' Asiatics' (Simonetti)
ac~~pted the term in exchange for the Westerners accepting the
do~trme of the eternal generation of the Son, which is implicit in
N.62
The theory that N can be accounted for as the result of a victory of
Western theology has been considerably damaged by recent studies
of the subject. In the first place, the Latin documents which contain N
the ambiguity of the anathema and the disastrous confusion which it created. Person
Mode of Decision-Making 102-4 wen acknowledges the ambiguity in the anathema.
Even as. late as 376 or after, Epiphanius (Panarion 69.57.1(204» can treat hypostaSis
and OUsla as synonymous terms. .
62Neither Stead nor Simonetti can be numbered among the favourers of this
the~ry, t~ough they supply the terms to describe the Easterners who allied with
OSSIUS to Ihtroduce h.omoousi~n on th~s ::iew. ,Its chief,fav~:>u:ers are Harnack (History
of Dogma IV 5<>--9); Loofs (Das Nlcanum 80-1; Anamsmus' 14-15); Schwarz
(~esamm. Schr .. III.7(182» and, ~ith a di~erence, Kraft (,OMOOYl:IOI' 9-13). Kraft
thmks that O~SlUs was representmg the blShop of Rome, a theory which renders the
prese~ce of~mcentius and Victor at the Council superfluous, and for which there is
very ltttl~ eVidence. He also believes. on the authority of the Oralio ad Sanctos, that
Constantme w~s welJ versed in theology and philosophy and that he knew exactly
what he was. dOing when he sup~o.rted Ossius in insistin? on homoousion. Quite apart
from t~e difficulty o~ ~etermtnmg where Constantine might have gained his
theologIcal educatIOn, It IS by no means certain that the Oratio ad Sanctos is from his
hand.
169
 The Origins
or parts of it do not for the most part translate homoousion by unius
substantiae nor by consubstantialis, but usually leave the Greek terms
transliterated into Latin. Then, the evidence for strong Western
influence is lacking. Very few Western bishops took the trouble to
attend the Council. The Eastern Church was always the pioneer and
leader in theological movements in the early Church. It is well
known that Hilary, for instance, never really understood the Arian
Controversy till he reached the East as a result of being exiled. The
Westerners at the Council represented a tiny minority, and Ossius
can hardly have been a theological agmen in ipso. He represented the
policy of Constantine and he had been educated in the West, but he
did not necessarily represent Western theology. His strength lay in
the fact that he had been a confessor in the Diocletian persecution,
and he was known to be supported by the Emperor. Recent studies
on the word homoousios have tended to show, not that it can be
reduced to two meanings, one identifying two ousiai as one, and the
other conveying a 'generic' sense of'God-stu1f (Loofs), but that it
was of a much looser, more flexible, indeed less specific and therefore
less controversial significance. 63 Etisebius can hardly be completely
wrong when he says that Constantine ensured that the word should
be glossed (so as to make it less offensive to Arians).64 Eusebius.
though he does not like it, finds it a less bitter pill to swallow than the
doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, which he simply
sidesteps. It is a fact which has often been remarked upon that for
nearly twenty years after Nicaea nobody mentions homoousios. not
even Athanasius. This may be because it was much less significant
than either later historians of the ancient Chui:ch or modem scholars
thought that it was. Person says of it:
'As it stands, the homoousios can be read either as an affirmation of the
divine unity or as an affirmation of the equal deity of the Son, and it is
6JForthese ideas, see Stead' "Homoousios" dans!a Pensee d'Athanasius' (PTAA,
23]-47) and Divine Substance Cap. VIII, 190-221, and passim; Simonetti, Crisi
88-95; Person, Mode of Decision-Making 58-115; Ritter, 'Arianism us' 705-6 and 717
n 10 and Frauke Dinsen, Homoousios. Ritter puts forward the interesting theory that
it was deliberately Sabellian, intending to recognize only one hypostasiS (= 'Person')
in God. and thac this was the doctrine ofOssius and of Constantine. But we must
envisage an overwhelming abandonment of traditional positions in the face of
imperial pressure to picture this state of affairs, and there is no need to do trus.
64See above. p. 165.
170
The Council of Nicaea
difficult in th~ light o~ theological discussions which took place prior
to the Council to believe that the ambiguity was accidental. '65
The role of the Emperor Constantine in the Council has been
variously interp~eted. If v.:e are to take Eusebius' words au pied de la
lettre, Constantme dommated all the proceedings, and indeed
Schwartz represented him as playing off one school of opinion
agamst another to gam the maxImum politiCal advantage for the
Emperor, a Bismarck at the making of the Treaty of Berlin. As we
have. seen, Kr~ft tho~ght of him as a well-educated theologian
gUldmg the phIlosophICa~ deliberations to where he knew the ground
would be safest. Certamly Constantine played some part, and
perhaps at one or two ~ntlcal ~oments a decisive part, intervening to
support some suggestion which he thought likely to bring about
re~onctlatl?n among the contending parties. But it is going too far to
thmk of hIm as dominating the debates of the Council, either for
polItIcal ~r for theological ends. He had not shown himself a great
dlplom~tlst In the affaIr of the Donatist Controversy, where at least
all_ ~artles .were s~eaking his native language. It is unrealistic to
e~vISage him at N~~aea as a kind of Talleyrand at the Congress of
:'I~nna. SImonetti estImates the Nicene Council as a temporary
allIance for the defeat of Arianism between the tradition of
Alexandria led by Alexander and 'Asiatic' circles (i.e. Eustathius,
Marcellus) ,:,h?se thought was at the opposite pole to that of Arius.
The OngemstlC school, he thinks, had split up, the radicals joining
the An.ns, the moderates opposing them; and the moderates had the
support of Ossius. This coalition was temporarily highly successful,
capable ofovercommg the reluctance of the influential Eusebius of
Caesarea (who ab iniuo was in a vulnerable position), and completely
crushIng Arius. The 'Asiatics' were rootedly opposed to the thought
of Ongen, and were able to mclude m N a hint of opposition to the
three hypostases theory. It was a short-lived victory, allowed by
Alexander who accepted VIrtual Sabellianism in order to ensure the
defeat of ~namsm, but the price which he paid was too high. It was a
PyrrhIC vIctory.
h 65 ~ode of Deci7ion-Making 105· Chadwick ('Council ofNicaea' 175 n II) believes
t at was ambIguous, but n?t intentionally so. But Schwartz is (as too often)
extravagant when he charactenzes homoousion as 'ein unverstandenes urn nicht zu
sag~, unverstandlic~es ScW.agwort' (Gesamm. Schr. I1I.8.2I6): the h;moousion was
not SImply a Greek tnvocatlon to call fools into a circle
66Crisi 94-5. .
171
 The Origins
The evidence available does not admit of our forming ingenious.
elaborate and highly nuanced theories about the Council ofNicaea.
Reconstructing the course of the Council is/an interesting but ~ather
futile pastime. It is improbable that all the people who had prevlOusly
seen nothing offensive in the doctrines of Arius should have
surrendered tamely to an openly Sabellian creed. It is improbable that
the heirs of any side of Origen's thought should have abandoned a
doctrine of three hypostases. As N does not openly mention the
eternal generation of the Son, so it does not openly declare that there
is only one hypostasis in the Godhead. The homoousion was probably
not a flag to be nailed to the masthead, a word round which self-
conscious theological schools of thought could rally. But it was an
apotropaic formula for resisting Arianism. It is obvious that the result
was intended to condemn the views of Arius. It is likely that at one
point at least Constantine intervened <;lecisively. It is going too far to
say that N is a clearly SabeIlian document. It is anti-Arian but
(perhaps owing to the intervention of Constantine) not e1iminatingly
so. Eustathius appears to think that it did not go far enough in an anti-
Arian direction. It is exceeding the evidence to represent the Council
as a total victory for the anti-Origenist opponents of the doctrine of
three hypostases. It was more like a drawn battle.
4. The Immediate Repercussions of the Council
Secundus ofPtolemais and Theonas ofMarmarike, both Libyan sees,
refused to sign N, \Vere deposed by the Council and exiled by
Constantine. Arianism was strong in Libya. 67 Philostorgius says that
they bitterly reproached Eusebius of Nicomedia as they left the
Council. 68 They were both restored to their sees by Constantine at
some time impossible to fix accurately but before 335. 69 Sozomenus
says that the party ofEusebius ofNicomedia and Theognis ofNicaea
at some time after Nicaea issued and circulated a statement explaining
'in black and white' (tlti p~tai<; tpJ.l~v.{a,<;) in what sense they
accepted the terms ofN.70 Eusebius of Caesarea was not apparently
67See Chadwick 'Faith and Order at the Council of Nicaea' 175-9, 189-91,
192-5·
'68HE 1.10.
69Philostorgius HE 1.10; Athanasius Apol. Sec. 84. They attended the dedication
ceremonies at Jerusalem in 33S.
70Sozomenus HE 11.32.7, 8; cf. Chadwick op. cit. 173.
172
The Council of Nicaea
the only former favourer of Arius to do this. Arius too was banished
by Constantine, probably to IIIyria. Shortly after the Council
(Philostorgius (/.10) says three months), Eusebius ofNicomedia and
Theognis of Nicaea were also banished by Constantine. Sozomenus
says that this was because they signed N but would not agree to the
sentence on Arius,71 but (as we shall see) Constantine (who ought to
know) declares that their fault was to have received and
communicated with some Arian presbyters in Nicomedia.
Constantine wrote several extant letters directly after the CoUncil
ofNicaea, one to the Church of Alexandria (Opitz, Urk.1II No. 25),
one to all the churches about fixing the date of Easter (Urk. III
No. 26), and one to the Church of Nicomedia (Urk. III
NO.27(5 8-62». This last letter tells us of the fate of Eusebius of
Nicomedia and Theognis ofNicaea. The letter begins with a series of
theological commonplaces couched in language so cloudy and vague
that it must have given the people ofNicomedia considerable trouble
to understand it.72 The Emperor next launches into a violent attack
on Eusebius of Nicomedia, which we have already had occasion to
73
notice. Finally Constantine reveals what is the immediate cause of
his wrath. Eusebius and Theognis have recently received and shown
hospitality and friendship to some Alexandrians of the Arian
allegiance. The two bishops have in consequence been banished.7.
71 HE .1.21.3, 4· Schwartz thought that Arius was not immediately exiled to IIlyna
but detamed by the Emperor in Nicomedia. Sozomenus also says that the Council
forbade Arius to return to Alexandria. But could any ecclesiastica1 Council at this
stage ~xercise suc~ power? Phi~ostorgius (1.10, according to Nicetas the Treasurer,
see Bldez p . .J lIme 16) mentIons Illyna as the place of Arius' exile. No other
historian giv~s the place. See Simonetti Crisi 87 n 29. Philostorgius' statement (HE
1.8) that Eusebius ofNicomedia and Theognis ofNicaea accepted the homoousion in
t~e sense of homoiousion (of like ousia) on the advice of Constantia, Constantine's
Sister, W.1S accepted by Loofs ('Ananismus' IS). But is it even sure that Constantia
was alive by then?
72 1 - 5 (S8-g); but the language does not amount to an endorsement of
Sabellianism. .
736--8(59); see above p. 28.
74 r 5, 16(62). Opitz thought that Arius was among them, and followed Schwartz
in concluding that Arius (and presumabJy the friends ofhis who had been welcomed
by the two bishops). were detained by the Emperor for some time in Nicomedia
(~ote in Ioc.). But Philostorgius says that Anus was exiled to Illyria (HE 1.9), and it is
dl~.cult ~o see what purpose Constantine would have had in detaining Arius while
exdmg hiS supporters. Besides, Constantine has just mentioned Anus in the letter in
another c?ntext (~3(6I», and surely would have said so had Anus been among the
AlexandrIans receIved by the two bishops. Philostorgius says that they were sent to
Gaul (HE II.I). At about the same time Constantine wrote a short and brutal letter
173
 The Origins
The Council of Nicaea

There is also extant a Letter from the Council of Nicaea to the ~hurch ~f
Alexandria informing them of what had been transacte at t e
troubling the churches from that time forward (i.e. from Alexander's
death). The Index to the Festal Letters ofAthanasius dates the death of
Council: the production ofN; J:he arrangements about ~~h:e~!t~I~~
f the Melitians' the decisions about the calculatIOn 0
Alexander firmly to April 27th, 328. S1 Theodoret repeats this
~aster.'5 It is in;eresting to note that this letter ass~7'es t~ Nt;a: statement that Alexander died five months after the Council of
Nicaea. 82 There is a curious statement in Eust;bius of Caesarea's Life of
condemned the view that 'the Son of God IS capa e 0 a m l m
. own. Wl'11' , 76 presuma Constantine which is relevant to this topic. The fact that even after the
either evil or goodness by hiS . , bl y an1
inter retation of the anathema against behevmg. that he IS alterab e Council ofNicaea strife continued in Egypt disturbed the Emperor,
he says, but it did not anger him. Then:
or ctan eable'. The arrangements for the reception of the .Mehtlans
are campg 1·teate d an d would obviously demand difficult declSlons
N' m a 'For instance he surrounded the Fathers (of the Council). or rather the
large number of different cases." Melitius had been present ~t. lca~a prophets of God, with every honour and called them a second time
and had there handed Alexander a memorandum contammg t e (oell't'epov tKtlA.£l) and again (mIA-tV) acted patiently as a mediator to
names 0 f 5ome Melitian bishop5 and presbyters; they consututed a the same people and agaio distinguished them by gifts, and he offered
considerable number.'s .h h b· t ('O~AOU) board and lodging in a letter and confirmed and put his seal
to the decisions of the synod. '83
Though the Melitian dispute was ~ot concer:ned Wl,t t e su ~e~
of the Arian controversy, nor with any doctn~al ~o~n~ at a1I'e 1::~ Gelasius says that when Alexander died he had been bishop of
involved with one topic which must be const . ere . e ore w Alexandria for 16 years, that is before the Council of Nicaea 9 years
finished with the immediate results of the CounClI ofNlcaea, a~d ~hat and one month and during the Council three years and 6 months and
is whether a second session of this Council ever took plac~. . t ~rs~ aft~rthe Council three years and five months. s, On any reckoning
si~ht this seems a fantastic suggestion, because no ec~ eSlast~a Gelasius' date for the death of Alexander must be mistaken, but it is
historian in the ancient world mentions such an e~ent an no ot e: surprising to find him calculating the length of the duration ofNicaea
document directly refers to it as such. But the eVidence for such as\three years; he might be referring to the interval between the first
theory is stronger than appears at first glance.'9 Atha~aS1~ ~ t he and the second assembly of the Council. There is a Letter from two
A 010 ia Secunda 59.1--6(139, 140) recounts how t e. e ltlans bishops who are not named but whom Socrates and Sozomenns
b:co~e involved in the Arian Controversy. When the Anan heresy identify as Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea. S5 It is a
arose, the Council of Nic~ea took ~lace:. the Anans were .very humble epistle. The bishops do not complain either of their
excommunicated but the Melitlans reconciled. FIve months had not condemnation nor of their exile, but say (2(65)) that they did not
et assed and the blessed Alexander died',s. and he goes on to say object to the homoousion, but to the anathemas, simply because they
ihat the Melitians, like dogs unable to forget their vomit, were did 'not think that Arius deserved them, since they had had
h'1m n at to
conversations with him and had corresponded with him. They accept
to Theodotus of Laodlcea . .
warmng . himitate(U
thek policy
III Noof28(63».
Eusebius and
docilely the judgment of the Council of Nicaea, but they wish to
' f . . the same PUnts ment ,. .
Theognis
7sOpitzon pam
Urk. Incurrmg ) Sacra tes HE I.
III0 NO.2](47-51; 9.1-14'
. ' Theodoret HE 1.9.2- 1 3. clear themselves of the charge of heresy (3(65). If Arius has been
3 8 allowed back in order to explain himself, they think that they should
76 (47-4 ). hoesu
77Forthew I b·~ecto fth eMelitian
. Controversy
. I
from this point onward see
Barnard 'Athanasius and the MeJerlan Schism. . be given the same opportunity (4(65)). The letter is not written to
78Athanasius Apol. Sec. 71-2, and see Barnard, op. cl~i ~f3-~ atkin SA 70' Constantine but to some unnamed bishops, who are asked to petition
79Several useful statements of the ~r~l~t~ ~~iea~~i~fo~~e' 7
6--9;' Barnard Constantine for their recall. Sozomenus (HE II. 16.7) says that after
~~~~~~~iu~:~~~~~ J.~~;~i~!IS8;~~~.2:~;~4; kopecek 5
History of Neo-Arianism 57-{). 81S c hwartz Gesamm. Schr. III.7.189; Barnard op. cit.
821.26.1.
3- 4.
18 18
Fullest and best of all i~ Simone!tl, em, I Il-Z4. i""~ 'AAt~av5po~ t&tEA.EUK£V, 83VC IIl.23.
800 l51tOO yap Jttvu: JlllWC; 1tuPl1A90v, K<lt )lUKap .'1
84HE III.I5.7.
59.3(139)·
8sOpitz Urk. III No. 31(65-6); Socrates·HE 1.14.2; Sozomenus HE II.16.3.
174
'75
 The Origins
this they were recalled and replaced in their sees. There is abo extant a
letter of Arius and Euzoius from exile to Constantme petltlonmg for
their return and submitting a quite innocuous creed whic~ touches
upon none of the points of the controversy. 86 An~ there IS a sh~rt
letter of Constantine to Arius full of sweetness and hght summonmg
him to court so that, reconciled to the Emperor, he may return to ~IS
native country.87 There are extracts from a letter fro~ Cons.tantme
to Alexander informing him that Arius has come to him at hIS court
and satisfied him about his orthodoxy and his acceptance of the
decisions of the Council of Nicaea. 88 And finally there is evidence
from a letter which Constantine sent to Arius several years later,
which can be securely dated to the year 333. 89 In this Arius, who has
written a letter to the Emperor parts of which Constantine quotes in
his letter, uses expressions which can only make sense if we assume
that he has been vindicated or restored some time ago by some
ecclesiastical authority, that he is living in or near Alexandria, but
that he has been refused re-admission to communion by the bishop of
Alexandria.9o All this evidence provides a strong cumulative case for
concluding that either a second session of the Council of Nicaea took
place or some other official council at which Arius, on subscribing to
the creed N, was formally re-communicated and reconciled (though
not by the see of Alexandria), and that this council or councils took
place at latest by p8. There could have been one council to restore
Arius and a later one to reconcile EuseblUs and Theogms. That the
Council of Nicaea continued in continuous session from 325 to 328 is
of course out of the question. The evidence from Athanasius alone
can be explained awa y by assuming that the process of reconciling the
Melitians took a long time, from 325 to 327, and It was not qUIte five
months after the end of this process that Alexander died. But the rest
of the evidence (even if we assume that Theodoret is dependent on
Athanasius) presents a formidable difficulty. To assume that for
Athanasius the reconciliation of the Melitians and the end of the
86Urk. III No. 30(64). Socrates 1.2.6.2..
87Urk. III No. 29(63): Socrates HE 1.25.7. . . . had become reconciled to the Arians, out offear of the Emperor's displeasure but
88Urk. III NO.32(66); Gelasius HE III.IS.I. The reClple~t of this .co~ld be
Alexander of Byzantium/Constantinople, but this seems unlikely. OPitz In loco
refers it to the bishop of Alexandria.
89Urk. III No. 34(69-75); in the dossier attached to Athanasius' De Decretis, and
Gelasius HE 1II.19.Iff. Schwartz is mistaken in saying (Gessamm. Schr. 111.3(75,7 6)
that Socrates and Sozomenus quote this letter.
"5(69), 9, 10, II (70).
The Council oj Nicaea
Nicene Council were two distinct events separated by years is a large
assumption. Theodoret either assumed that they were the same
event, or had separate information to the effect that Alexander died
(in 328) five months after the Council of Nicaea. Philostorgius says
that after three years in exile Eusebius ofNicomedia and Theognis of
N Icaea were recalled by Constantine and a council was held at
Nicomedia which declared Alexander of Alexandria deposed (and
also Eustathms of AntIoch). 9. Philostorgius is a more than usually
u?rehable hlstonan, preserved only in selections made by those who
vIOlendy repudiated his views. But his council of Nicomedia may
have taken place.
The question has divided scholars. Schwartz, of course, and Opitz
accepted ~ha~ a second session of the Council of Nicaea took place,
a?d on thIS Side can be mustered the names of Seeck, Stein, Caspar,
d Ales and Amann. But Bardy himself rejected it at the cost of
regarding as inauthentic the humble letter ofEusebi~s ofNicomedia
and Theognis. 92 In 1974 Martin could declare that almost nobody
behev~s ,m a se~on~ ~ession o.f Nicaea. 93 Grillmeier thought that
Eusebms word agam ("'IAlV) 10 the passage in his Life oJConstantine
could be taken as referring to a re-convening of a council ofEgyptian
b,l~hops. 94 Barnes In 1981 thought that a 'reconvening' of the
Ciluncil ofNlcaea was an actual council held in Nicomedia in 327.9S
S"lrnonettl'96 cannot ag.ree that the Council ofNicaea was in any sense
re-assembled. He beheves that another General Council was not
necessary to rehabilitate Arius, Eusebius ofNicomedia and Theognis.
The doctrine adopted at Nicaea was not abandoned, but what took
place was a readmission of individuals on their making fairly easy
doctrmal declarations, and this required no more than a minor local
council of a few bishops, perhaps at Nicaea or Nicomedia. The
H.7. Earlier ~H.r) Phik~storgius had made the extraordinary statement that after
91
,
N lcaea Constantine had exiled the adherents ofEusebius ofNicomedia because they
had si~ned N with their tongue in their cheek, had recalled Secundus and his friends
had clrcula~ed documents everywhere attacking the homoousion and commendin~
the heterouslon (!); that Alexander of Alexandria had accepted these documents and
lat~r ?ad r.etu.med t? his former views and again broke with Arius and his p~rty.
ThiS IS qUIte IncredIble.
2
9 S 0 Bardy Lucien d'Antioche 306- 13.
93< Athanase et Ies Melitiens' in PTAA 37, n 13.
4
9 CCT 255.
s
9 Constantine and Eusebius 229.
96Crisj 120-4.
177
 The Origins

authenticity of the humble letter of the two bishops need not be

impugned. In dealing with D,onatists Constantine had previously
exiled bishops and afterwards recalled them for a parley. Arius
therefore was recalled on the quiet and reinstated in his former
position by a kind of motu proprio of Constantine (though presumably
he was never admitted to communion by the see of Alexandria).
PART II
Simonetti therefore reconstructs the succession of events thus:
327-328 Constantine recalls Acius from exile (probably to Period of Confusion
Nicomedia) by means of a small council of bishops
brought together at Nicaea or Nicomedia, near the court.
Arius had made an innocuous profession of faith, hut his
recall did not invalidate the conderruiation of his doctrine
at Nicaea in 325. Eusebius and Theognis on hearing of this
press their case with the bishops who had readmitted
Acius.
328 They are recalled from exile and reinstated in their sees.
Constantine now writes to Alexander requiring him to
readmit Acius. Alexander's death precludes his answering.
When Athanasius succeeds, Constantine instigates
Eusebius of Nicaea to request Alexandria for Arius'
acceptance, with no result.
This, though not certain, is the most plausible reconstruction. It is
highly likely that Constantine spent the years immediately after the
Council of Nicaea trying to patch things up. The exile of Eusebius
and Theognis is certain. It is equally certain that by about 328
Eusebius was back in Nicomedia, ready to take charge of a party
which accepted the Creed of Nicaea but wished to limit its
significance as far as possible. As far as outward appearances went, the
Arian Controversy was over. But the search for the Christian
doctrine of God was by no means finished.
 7
Semantic Confusion

I. Hypostasis and Ousia

We have already had occasion to note that considerable confusion

existed about the use of the terms hypostasis and ousia at the period
when the Arian Controversy broke out. The surprise of Ossius at the
news that not only did Eusebius of Cae sarea believe in two ousiai, but
that Narcissus of Neronias believed in three,l and the ambiguous
anathema in N against those who believe that the· Son is 'from
another hypostasis or ousia than the Father'2 are examples of this
unfortunate semantic misunderstanding. The search for the Christian
doctrine of God in the fourth century was in fact complicated and
exasperated by semantic confusion, so that people holding different
views were using the same words as those who opposed them, but,
unawares, giving them different meanings from those applied to
them by those opponents. It was also prolonged and entangled by the
involvement in the dispute of issues concerning ecclesiastical
jurisdiction and ecclesiastical law which had no intrinsic connection
with the orjginal and really important subject of the dispute. This last
we shall begin to look at in the next chapter but one. But here we shall
examine some examples of the semantic muddle, that is, unrealized
ambiguity in the use of words.
It has already been made clear that for many people at the
beginning of the fourth century the word hypostasis and the word
ousia had pretty well the same meaning. They did not mean, and
should not be translated, 'person' and 'substance', as they were !,sed
when at last the confusion was cleared up and these two distinct
meanings were permanently attached to these words in theology
which dealt with the doctrine of God. In fact for most (but not all)

I See above. pp. ISO-I.

2See above, pp. 167-8.

lSI
 Period of Confusion
writers in Greek at the beginning of the controversy and for a long
time after it had begun, there was no single agreed word available and
widely used for what God is as Three in distinction fro~ what he i~ as
One. All pre-Nicenes, Sellers tells us, found. difficulty m express~g
the Son's personality.3 The word hypostasis IS virtually unknown m
Classical Greek in its philosophical sense. It first emerges prommently
in a philosophical sense with the Stoic Posidonius (ob. 50 B.C.), and
later became a key-word in Platonism. It meant on the whole
'realization turning into appearance', but with this distinction that to
Stoics each thing counted as non-existent before its realization,
whereas to the Platonists (that is the neo-Platonists), the ground of
the existence of each thing before its realization is 'more than
existing'.4 The word occurs five times in the New Testament, at
2 Cor. 9:4 and II:I7, where it means 'confidence' (i.e. psychological
support), at Hebrews 1:3, where it denotes God's being (NEB) or
nature (RSV,JB), 3:14, where it again means 'confidence', and II:I
where it means the assurance (RSV, 'what gives substance to' NEB,
'guarantee' JB) of what we hope for, again with the idea of ' support'
prominent. The only strictly theological use is that of Hebrews 1:3,
where the Son is described as 'the impression of the nature' of God.
The word also occurs twenty times in the LXX, but only one of them
can be regarded as theologically significant, even though several
Christian writers of the fourth century tried to make out that they all
were so. At Wisdom 16:21 the writer speaks of God's hypostasis,
meaning his nature; and no doubt this is why Hebrews uses the term
'impression of his nature' (xapmm'tp tii~ 6ltoO"tao"EQ)~ aotoii). 5 Prestige
points out that a double meaning of hypostasis can be found according
as its significance is derived from the middle voice of the cognate
verb, hyphistemi, or from the active voice of the verb. In the former
case it means that which underlies (which could suggest 'substance'),
and in the latter that which gives support (which would suggest
JEustatlJius of Antioch, 30. . 6GPT 162; .th~ whole pas~age. 162-,]6, is informative on the subject. See also
4'Mehr als seiend', Ritter' Arianismus·. 694. to whom this account of hypostasis In
late Greek philosophy is due. But see also H. Dorrie lm6O"taO'1.C; Wort- un,d
Bedeutungsgeschiehte (Gottingen 1955). See below, p. 862 n 170 for a comment on thiS
work.
5The other passages in the O.T. are Deut 1:12; 1I:6;jud 6:4; Ruth 1:12; I Sam
. 1):21,23; 14:4; job 22:20; Ps 39(38): 6(5); 69(68): 3(2); 89(88): 48(47); 139(138): 15;
Jer 10:17; 23:22; Ezek 19:5; 26:11; 43:1 I and Nahum 2:8(7). Dorrie has examined the
use of this word in the LXX, op. cit. 45--6.
Semantic Confusion
individual entity). 6 He thinks that the second sense is the normal one
in the theological discourse of Our period, so that the emphasis came
to be laid not on content but on individuality, whereas 'ousia means a
single object of which the individuality is disclosed by means of
internal analysis'. 7 But we must remember that for at least the first
halfofthe period 318-381, and in some cases considerably later, ousia
and hypostasis are used as virtual synonyms, not in one sense only but
m two. Prestige is always apt, in his eagerness to see a continuous
inviolate tradition of Trinitarian orthodoxy, to read later meanings,
~nd later harmonizations, into earlier texts. Stead notes that hypostasis
IS used by some writers who appear deliberately to avoid the word
ousia, though they would regard the words as synonymous (for
mstance Alexander o~ Alexandria and Cyril of Jerusalem), because
ousla does not occur m the Bible, whereas hypostasis does.8
Stead has devoted a comprehensive treatise to the concept of
'substance' (ousia) in his book, Divine Substance. The word has a wide
variety of meanings: existence, category or status, substance stuff or
material, form, definition, truth. 9 The expression 'beyo~d ousia'
(tltEKElVa t~~ oOO"ia<;) is found often, but in several different meanings,
when apphed to God, beyond material substance, beyond created
(and . ~nge~oc) substance, beyond intelligible substance, beyond
defimtlon. Some wnters do of course find it necessary or
convem~nt I ~o describe God as ousia, among them Origen and
AthanaslUs. Later m the fourth century It became conventional to
distinguish God's substance, ousia, what he is in himself and his
'energies', that is God as we experience and meet him, and to hold
that the first is unknowable to us, but not, of course the second. This
was the alternative taken when the practice of distinguishing the
Logos or Son as that whIch can experience multiplicity and change in
the Godhead from the simple immutable Father was seen to be
unsatisfactory.12 It was also thought possible to distinguish the
Lamp,e A Patnst" Greek ~exlCon sub Voe., and especially D4(145 8).
'IbId. 168, 169, qu.atattan from 168. Prestige (ibid. Intrad. XXIX) rejects the
theory orHamack (HIStory o/Dogma IV.83) that hypostasis was ever used to express a
~ense mIdway between "person" and "attribute". inclining to the former'. and this
Idea seems today to be generally discarded.
8 Divine Substance 160-1 .
'Ibid. 133-56.
1°161.
 T
Period of Confusion
substance of-God, in the Aristotelian tradition, from his propertie~,
which are distinct from the substance but invariable, and from hIS
accidents which are distinct and variable, though some (e.g.
Athanasi~s and many Arians as weill believed chac God's substance
was without accidents. 13 Terrullian at the turn of the second to the
third centuries had already used the Latin word substantia (substance)
of God and used it in the most direct and literal way. For hIm God
consist~ of spirit (spiritus), a kind of thinking gas. God therefore had
a body and indeed was located at the o~ter ?oundanes of spa~e. He IS
apparently immeasurable but not mfimte. It w.a~ possI.ble f~r
Tertullian to think of Father, Son, and Holy Spmt shanng thIS
substance, so that the-relationship of the Three is, in a highly r.efmed
sense, corporeal. His metaphysic (if that is the right word for It) v.: as
borrowed directly from Stoicism. 14 He can use the expressIon UnlUS
substantiae ('of one substance'). This has led some scholars to see
Tertullian as an exponent of Nicene orthodoxy before NIcaea, and
even to claim that the West, represented by TertullIan, Novattan and
Dionysius of Rome, had alway~ upheld the consu~sta?tiality ofthe
Son. But this is a far from plausIble theory. Tertulhan s matertahsm
is, when seen at all closely, a totally different thing from any Ideas of
ousia or homoousios canvassed during the fourth century. HIS
conception of substance would have struck most Eastern theolo~I~s
as possessing precisely those faults whIch made many of them reCOIl
from the use of the word homoousios. It Imphed a corporeal
conception of God. Tertullian may well h.ave supplied the West w~th
its Trinitarian vocabulary; he certamly dId not supply the East WIth
its Trinitarian theology. IS
The state of affairs as regards the use of hypostasis and ousia at the
outset of the search for the doctrine of God occasioned by the Arian
Controversy can therefore be stated thus: several alternative ways of
treating these terms were prevalent. They could be regarded as
synonymous and used either to describe what God is as, Three what0;
he is 'as One; or hypostasis could be used to descrtbe the Pers.ons of the
Godhead and ousia either ignored or rejected; or hypostasIs could be
used for 'distinct existence' and ousia for 'nature'; or a general state of
13 164--6.
175-80.
14 . "Opi'z Urk.1II No. 22 .. 13(46) (Theodore, HE 1.12.13). See above pp. 165-6. For
15Neither Bethune-Baker (The Meaning of Homoousios, 15-23). nor P~est1ge
(CPT 220-1) appreciate this. They are both preoccupied with the relatlOn of
Tertullian's vocabulary to Roman legal terms.
IS
Semantic Confusion
indecision and uncertainty as to how either of them should be used
could exist in a writer's mind. We can fmd examples of all these
alternatives. Origen certainly did not apply the word homoousios to
the Son and did not teach that the Son is 'from the ousia' of the
Father. 10 He used hypostasis and ousia freely as interchangeable terms
to describe the Son's distinct reality within the Godhead,I7 but he did
not usually employ ousia to describe the substance of God. He taught
that there were three hypostases within the Godhead. Ritter indeed
thinks that Origen must have contributed to the doctrine found in
Plotinus of three hypostases flowing from the Godhead without
diminishingit. I8 Ifwe are to believe Athanasius, Dionysius of Rome
writing in Greek against Sabellianism said that it is wrong to divide
the divine monarchy 'into three sorts of potentiality and separated
hypostases and three Godheads'; people who hold this in effect
produce three gods and 'three hypostases alien to each other entirely
separated'.lo Gregory Thaumaturgus could describe the Godhead as
'three in aspect but one in substance' (hypostasis).2o Pierius had
apparently referred to the Father and the Son as two ousiai rather than
two hypostases. 21
Eusebius of Caesarea appears to accept the equation of hypostasis
and ousia in the anathema ofN quite readily in his explanation of why
he accepted that creed. 22 He uses ousia to mean substance several
times in the course of the same explanation, and, as we have seen, was,
at least before the Council ofNicaea, accustomed to regard the Son as
the ei~n (mirror) or osme (perfume) of the Father's ousia. Eusebius of
Nicomedia, as quoted by Marcellus (who is being quoted by Eusebius
of Caesarea) said, concerning the relation of the Son to the Father,
'the image and that of which it is the image are not of course thought
of as one and the same thing; but there are two ousiai and two facts (or
16S ee above, p. 68. See also Simonetti Crisi 91 for a useful treatment of this point.
t7See above, pp.66-67. Further examples in Bethune-Baker, The Meaning of
Homoousios 77-8.
ls<Arianismus' 697.
19De Decretis 26.1-'7 (21-23), quotation from 2 and 3(23).
20t1ttv611~ ).tEv tpeir;. tmoo'tao£l at EV, (if they indeed be Gregory's words).' Basil
Epp 210.5.
215ee above, P.79. Photius Bibliotheca II9; cf. Prestige CPT 192.
examples of Eusebius both equating hypostasis and ousia and using ousia to mean
nature, see Hanson 'Did Origen apply the word Homoousios to the Son?' in Studies
in Christian Antiquity, 53-'70.
 Period of Confusion
"things", ltpaY/lata) and two powyrs, just as there are so many
different names for them'. 23 Alexander of Alexandria is no less
ambiguous in his use of terms than others. He does not use the word
ousia, but instead uses hypostasis for both 'Person' and 'substance', or,
to be more accurate, he does not make a distinction between
hypostasis = 'Person' and hypostasis= 'substance'. When he quotes
Hebrews 1:3, 'impression of the hypostasis' (nature, substance), he
cannot think that the Son is an impression of the Father as Father. 24
He can also say that the Lord 'does not reveal that natures which are
two in hypostasis are one', 25 and on several occasions he uses hypostasis
to mean the (distinct) existence of the Son.26 We have already seen
that Arius is violently opposed to using homoousios, and spoke readily
of the hypostases of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 27 He did not object
to using the word ousia of God, however. In Constantine's Letter to
Arius of 333 he quotes Arius as saying that there is 'One God .. .' and
'an unbeginning and unending Logos of his ousia'.28 Athanasius
describes him as teaching that 'the Logos is alien and unlike in all
respects to the Father's ousia and propriety' (llhot1]tOC;).29 And in De
Synodis 15 Athanasius quotes Arius as saying that 'the Father is alien in
ousia to the Son' and that the Son does not know his own ousia, as well
as asserting that the Son 'has nothing in the structure (hypostasis) of his
propriety (i.e. that wnich is peculiar to him) that is peculiar (iOlOV) to
God' and that the hypostases of Father and Son are 'incommunicable'
(aVElt(/lt1CtOl taUt01C;). Boularand accuses Arius of confusing
'substance' and 'Person'30 and of teaching three dissimilar ousiai
23Eusehius of Caesarea Contra Marcellum 1.4.26(72). This use of pragmata to
denote whatlater theology was to call the 'Persons' of the Trinity can be found
elsewhere; cc. Origen Contra Celsum 8.12 6Vta a60 t'ij tmOataaEl 1tpaYIlUtU, and
Alexander of Alexandria Urk. III No. 14. IS(22). dx61pl<na "pdy~ata ouo, toV
1tat£pa. )Cai tOY u{o" and Opitz note in loco
240pitz Vrk.III No. 14.28(24), 48(27), It seems to me that Simonetti is going too
far when he takes this as referring to the 'Person' of the Father (Studj 124. 125).
"Ibid. 38(2S); see above, p. 141.
2·lbid. 16, 18, 19(22),20(23),29(24). It is possible that the word translated (from
the Syriac) persona in Latin in the, fragment of Alexander's Homily in Pitra, Analecta
Sacra IV. 196-200 (Syriac) and 432-3 (Latin) in the expression Pater est . .. tanquam
causa persollae eius quamgenuit voluntate sua (p. 433) witnesses to an original hypostasis.
i7See above, p.7.
2'Opitz Urk. 111 NO.l4.14(7I). It should be noted that Arius is probably not
referring here to the Son. but to the immanent Logos par excellence.
290r. con. Ar. 1.6. Cf. Lorentz Arius ludaizans 86-92; Person Mode oj Decision
Making 94-101, 102-5.
3°L'Hbesie 68.
Semantic Confusion
when he said that the hypostases were incommunicable. 31 Ifhe did, he
was certainly not alone in this error. But in fact it seems likely that
he was one of the few during this period who did not confuse the
two. No doubt he believed that the Father and the Son were of unlike
substance, but he did not say so directly. He said instead that their
hypostases, distinct individual realities, were different in kind and in
rank. Asterius certainly taught that the Father and the Son were
distinct and different in their hypostases,32 that the Son is not Son
'because of the peculiarity of the ousia' (iOlOv tfjc; ouainc;);33 he equates
ousia and physis (nature);34 he said that there were three hypostases. 3s
But he also described the Son as 'the exact image of the ousia and
counsel and glory and power' of the Father. 36 Once again we find a
writer who clearly did not confuse ousia and hypostasis even though
he thought that the resemblance of the Son to the Father was closer
than Arius conceived. We can see therefore that the statement of
Bethune-Baker that it was not till the Council of Alexandria in 362
that anyone regularly regarded hypostasis as anything more than a
synonym for ousia is not borne out by the facts. 37
It is however likely that when Narcissus ofNeronias at the Council
of Antioch in 325 declared to Ossius that he believed in three ousiai he
was equating ousia with hypostasis. 38 If we can trust the translation,
the doctrinal statement of the Council of Antioch of 325 said that the
Son was the image of the Father as Father. 39 It in fact is an echo of
Heb, 1:3 wh&e the Son is described as the impression (character) of
the Father's hypostasis and this must mean his nature. 40 Ossius, who
was one of those responsible for this doctrinal manifesto, must have
been sorely puzzled by the intricacies of Greek theological terms. He
L "Ibid. 76.
"Bardy, Lucien frags. XXVlI(352), XXVI1l(3S2), XXX(3S2); cf. Kopecek
History 56.
"Frag. IX(l4S).
34Frag. XI(l4S).
3SFrag. XXIX(3S2).
'·Frag. XXI(349).
37The Meaning oj Homoousios 78-g. Prestige realized this (CPT 187), but it is
doubtful whether he was correct in saying that to speak of three ousiai always
sounded unnatural (ibid. 188).
38See above, pp. ISO-I.
39S ee above. p. 149. Even if the original word was prosopon, this is a remarkable
statement.
4°Opitz Urk. III No. 18. I I (39). Kel1y in his translation or'the doctrinal statement
takes the word to mean 'substance' and so translates it (Early Christian Creeds
20!i-IO).
 Period of Confusion
was evidently surprised and shocked at hearing that Eusebius of
Caesarea believed in two, and Narcissus in three, ousiai, which
suggests that he thought that ousia should mean 'substance' or
'nature'. At Antioch he subscribed to a manifesto which uses
hypostasis to mean 'substance' or 'nature'; hewas shortly to subscrib~
to N, which apparently (but not qUite certamly) Identifies hypostas~s
and ousia; and, as we shall see'" he was eighteen years later to put his
signature to a document which proclaimed that there was only one
hypostasis in God. . .
The Creed of Nicaea itself made three statements mvolvmg the
word ousia. It declared that the Son was 'from the ousia' (eK 'ii,
ouain,) of the Father. It said that he was homoousios with the Father,
and it condemned those who taught that the Son was 'of a different
hypostasis or ousia from the Father'. The subject of homoousios will be
dealt with a little later. 42 The claim that the Son was eK 'ii,
ouain,
(from the ousia) of the Father is an interesting one. Origen had
rejected it.43 According to Athanasius (De Deeret 25) Theognostus
had used this expression of the Son. Eusebius of Caesarea can say that
the Son is 'from the Father's ingenerate nature and inexpressible
ousia', but he very soon qualifies this statement, warning against
materializing interpretations. 44 Eusebius ofNicomedia in his Letter to
Paulinus of Tyre had apparently rejected the expression 'from the
ousia', denying that the Son had any connection with the Father's
ousia. For him ousia means 'nature or 'rank' or 'metaphysical
status'.45 Stead thinks however that in N the expression 'from the
ousia' was meant more to determine that the Son was not from any
external source, but from God, and did not necessarily denote equal
status. On' the anathema in N, Stead argues that it too was not
intended to establish equality of status between Father and Son, but
once again to ensure that the Son was not derived from some source
other than the Father. He produces evidence from Tertullian,
Irenaeus, Theognostus and Methodius that they recognised three
alternative possibilities for the origin of the Son, from non-existence,
from some external source and from the Father. He concludes from
4tSee below, p.301. cr. Declercq Ossius 26.3--6·
42See below, pp. 190--202.
43The subject is admirably discussed in Stead Divine Substance 226-J2. I follow
him here.
44DE V.LIS, 20.
45Eusebius Con. Marcellum 1.4; see Stead Divine Substance 226f.
188
Semantic Confusion
this that this anathema did not in effect do away with a doctrine of
three hypostases. 46 It may be noted that the only way in which such an
argument can be supported is the assumption that in this anathema
hypostasis and ousia were regarded as synonymous, and that it was
meant to condemn the view that the Son did not derive from the
Father's nature or substance (ousia). Prestige seems to take this view
when he says that in this anathema ousia means 'individual objective
source',47 though this last expression is itself a rather ambiguous one.
Finally we may note that Ossius was not the only person confused by
the ambiguity of these terms. The Emperor Constantine appears to
have been so also. In his Letter to Arius of 333 he says of Arius and
himself:
'You think it is right to subordinate the 'alien hypostasis', and indeed
your belief is mistaken. But I recoguize that the fulness of that power
which is supreme and which runs through everything is the single
ousia of the Father and the Son. If then you deprive him from whom
nothing at all can be removed, not even in the thought of those who
are not serious, and imagine additional properties and in short define
far-fetched marks of recognition (yvOlp(a~n,a ~1],i)aEOlv) for him to
whom (God) has granted entire eternity from himself, and
incorruptible intellect (or thought, EVVOia) and has allotted belief in
his immo,tality both through himself and through the Church -'
the Emperor breaks off in disgust. 48 The translation can only be
approximate because of the clumsiness and vagueness of
Constantine's language. If it means anything it means that there is
only hypostasis (= ousia) in the Godhead, and indeed the anathema in
N would fit well with this view. Some have seen in this a coherent
theology, 3kin to that of Marcellus of Ancyra (who was soon to be
deposed for holding this type of doctrine). But it is more likely that
Constantine, who is writing in Greek, a language with which he was
not well acquainted, and who cannot amid all his preoccupations
have had opportunity to make any profound study of theology or
46Stead, op. cit. 233-42; Tertullian Adversus Hermogenem 2.1; Irenaeus Adv.
Haereses 2.10.1 (not 2.10.4 as Stead) (VOJ.1.274); Methodius De Autexousio ii.9.
Theognostus, quoted by Athanasius De Deeret. 25.
47GPT 177. In this passage Prestige is speaking only of the word ousia in the
anathema: but if hypostasis here does not stand simply as a synonym of ousia, but
means 'distinct individual reality', then the Creed N is rankly Sabellian, and it is
most unlikely that Prestige would have allowed that.
"Opitz U,k. III No. 34.14, 15(71).
180
 Period of Confosion
f
philosophy, is simply floundering in water too d~ep for him. Like
Ossius, his agent, he was defeated by the seman~lc con~uslOn. .
Even those who distinguished hypostasis, meamng dlstmct reahty,
from ousia, meaning 'nature' or even 'substance', must no~ be
thought to have anticipated the later meanings of those terms given
to them in the second half of the century by the great Cappadoclan
theologians. The concept of what each Person of the Trinity is in hIs
existence and proper form distinct from the others had not yet been
distinguished from the concept of what all of them were as full and
equal (or even as partial and unequal) sharers of the Godhead. Later
theology would not have said that the Son was a mirror of the Person
(hypostasis) of the Father, i.e. of the Father qua Father. Not only had
no universally accepted term been achIeved for the concept of what
we would now call the 'Persons' of the Trinity (unsatisfactory
though that word in certain respects is), but the concept itself had
barely dawned on the consciousness of theologians. A. more
authentically Trinitarian theology had to be found, as It was
eventually found by Athanasius and the Cappa~oclans, before the
idea of 'Person' in this sense could reach matunty.
2. Homoousios
Much scholarly effort has been expended upon the meaning of the
word homoousios. 49 It was a word occasionally used by pagan writers.
In Christian use, until the second half of the third century no
examples of the word were Trinitarian in context, a,;,d the word was
employed in a very fluid and diverse .way from whIch ~o partIcular
conclusions can be drawn. 50 Tertuillan, wrltmg 10 Latm, nowhere
uses any term corresponding to homoousios (una substantia, 'one
substance', which is quite common with him, does not mean
'consubstantial'). He uses the epithet consubstantialis once (Adv.
Hermogenem 44.3), of matter being hypothetically consubstantial
with God, and here it does not mean 'of the same stuff', but 'equal in
rank', and he may be quoting or translating the Gnostic Hermogenes;
'OSee Zahn Marcellus von Ancyra, 8-32; Gwatkin AC 25-37; SA 46. 47; Loofs,
'Das Nidinu~' 69"'"71; Bethune-Ba,ker The MeanIng of. !l0~oousjos; Borchardt,
Hilary of PoWers 139-160; Kraft OMOOYl:IOt; TUlher Le sens du ter~e
6J.1.00UG10C;; Simonetti Studi 125--'7; Stead Divine Su~s~an,e cap: VIII; 'Homo0.usloS
dans la Pensee d' Athanase'j Person Mode of DeclSton Maktng 94-109; Dmsen
Homoousios .
.50See Stead Divine Substance 190-202. Liddell and Scott and Jones are no use here.
TOO
Semantic Corifusion
and he uses consubstantivus once, probably taking it from the Gnostic
Valentinus (Adv. Valentinianos 12.5; 37.2).51 Hippolytus quotes
Gnostics as using the word homoousios, none of them suggesting
Identity, nor even equality. 52 Clement of Alexandria also uses the
word in quotations of Gnostic authors, as does Irenaeus, and in these
contexts it means approximately, 'belonging to the same order of
being': 53 Origen similarly uses the word only when he is quoting
GnostIc heretlcs. 54 The term, as Ricken remarks, by the middle of
the third century had a suspiciously Gnostic smell about it. According
to hi~ it me~t 'sim~arity of nature of being' (,Gleichgeartetheit des
Sems), denotmg thmgs belongmg to the same sort of being or
substance of being (,Seinstufe').'5 Kraft agrees that the word had
Gnostic overtones, and believes that it meant generally 'of the same
kind'.'-
In the interchange which took place between Dionysius of Rome
and DionYfius of Alexandria a little after the middle of the third
century, the word homoousios certainly figured. But it is difficult to
determine who used it first, and though there is little doubt that
D~onysius of Alexandria was accused of rejecting, or at least of not
usmg, the term, and that he later accepted it, we cannot be sure who.
~ade the accusation, whether the people in Egypt against whom the
bIshop o.f Alexandria had originally written complaining about him
to the b,sh?p of Rome, or Dionysius of Rome himself or a synod
called by h~m. ~than.aslU~ devoted a whole book to the interchange,
De Sententta Dtonysit. DlOnysius of Alexandria wrote a treatise To
Euphranor ~nd Ammonius against a type of doctrine prevailing in Libya
of a S~be.lhan cast. D~onyslUs of Rome wrote a work both against
Sabell'~msru and agamst a heresy like Arianism (i.e. the views of
~lonyslUs of Alexandria) at the request of some people who were
d,sturbe~ by the t~eatise of the bishop of Alexandria, people whom
AthanaslUs, 10 retatling the story, regarded as themselves of unsound
views. Dionysius of Rome sent his work, with a letter, to Dionysius
51 Stead op. cit. 202":"4.
"Ibid. 204-{).
53lb'd
• 1 • 206-9. Kraft (OMOOYIIOI: 3) caIls attention to one remarkable passage
In Clement (Strom. 11.16.74 and IV:'J.I9) which brings IlSpo<; and 6~oo6(JIO<; into
cIo:: prOXImIty. though not applymg the adjective to the noun.
E.g. Comm.}ohn XIII.2S; XX.20 and 24. For the use of the term by Plotinus and
Porphyry, see Stead op. cit. 214-16.
5S<Nikaia als Krisis' 335--6.
56'OMOOYIIOI:' 3.
 Period of Confosion
of Alexandria, and the latter defended himself .in a work called
Vindication and Defence from which AthanaslUs quotes some
passages. 57 In his Vindication and Defence Dionysius said that he had
not used homoousios because it was an unScripturai term, but he -:vas m
fact ready enough to accept it, and it is cl~ar that h.e acce~ted It m a
general sense, meaning 'of similar nature (61l0cpu'1.<;) .or of sImIl!~
kind' (61l0'YEVi]<;). In his other references to thIS mterchange
Athanasius throws no more light on the subject of who first
introduced homoousios into the dispute, though in his Letter to the
Bishops of Africa he says, somewhat disingenuously, that both the
bishops of Rome and of Alexandria approved of the word
s was not Dionysius of Rome who first used the word homoousios in the
homoousios. Basil of Caesarea in his reference to the affau • does not
reveal who first used the term, but his account is more plauSl?le than
that of Athanasius, because he frankly acknowledges that DlOnyslUs
of Alexandria used language which was definitely unsound by the
standard of Basil's day, and that he sometim~s rejecte~ homoousios
because Sabellius used it incorrectly in rejectmg the dIS~mc~lOn of
hypostases, but sometimes accepted it, in his defe~ce of hIS VI~WS to
Dionysius of Rome. If we can trust Basil here, '~ '~ mterestIng to
observe that Sabellius had apparently used homoouslOs In a TrInItarIan
context early in the third century. Scholarly opinion about who used
the word first, and whether Dionysius of Rome used It, has varIed.
Loofs who agrees that the meaning of homoousios was so flUId that we
cannot, determine its meaning from . 'm N aIone, 60 h as
ItS appearance
an elaborate theory that there existed from Tertullian onward and
even perhaps in some form before him the idea that bef~re the
creation the Son emerged from the Father and the Holy SpIrIt from
the Father 'and the Son, and that at the end of history this Trinity
would resolve itself back into a unity, so that the substance of the
Godhead can be extended or retracted. Dionysius of Rome therefore
logically, accepting this theory, found homoousios acceptable but
6
could not tolerate a division of the Godhead into three hypostases. •
57S ee especially De Sent. Dion. 13.1-3. and above, pp. ~2-'76, .
58De Synodis 43.1. 2, 4~ 44.1, 2; De Decretis 25; Letter to Bishops of AftlCa 23·6 (PG
26:1040 ); Theodoret HE 1.8.14-17). At no point does Athanasius actually say that
Dionysius of Rome used the term.
5 9Epp.9.3· 1- 18 •
60'Da5 Nicanum' 69'""?I. . ' .
61 Ibid. 7 1 -'7 8. Loafs proof-texts are inter alia De Trlnuate 31.192 (ed.
NOVatl3n
Loi) , and Dionysius of Alexandria's remarks about the Monad and the Dyad (Feitce
Letters and Otller Remains 177. 178. 180 and 193)·
Semantic Confusion
He well might welcome homoousios if Sabellius was the first to use it
in a Trinitiarian context, because on this view his doctrine could only
with difficulty be distinguished from that of Sabellius! Kraft also
thinks that Dionysius of Rome used homoousios, indeed that a synod
in Rome ma y have censured the bishop of Alexandria for not using it
and have condemned the doctrine of three hypostases as tritheism. 62
. Stead, on the other hand, believes that the bishop of Rome did not
use homoousios. The word in Greek translation of Tertullian's una
substantia would not be the word homoousios but mia hypostasis (one
hypostasis); it was the people in Libya criticized by Dionysius of
Alexandria who had introduced the term. 63 Simonetti agrees that it
interchange. He thinks that Dionysius of Alexandria had 'rejected it
because for him it implied that the Father and the Son had the same
hypostasis, i\e. individual existence, and that he only accepted it in the
generic sense of meaning that both had the same kind of nature. On
the whole it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, whoever may
have been the first to use the word homoousios in this affair, Dionysius
of Rome at least took up or championed it. But we need not
therefore assume that he used it in Loofs' sense or that he meant by it
more than that both Father and Son shared the same kind of divinity.
We can be quite certain that Dionysius of Alexandria disliked it and
only adopted it with reluctance.
The role played by the word homoousios in the condemnation alid
deposition of Paul of Samosata between 264 and 272 is even more
obscure. Athanasius in his De Synodis has to meet the objection to the
use of the word that the fathers of the Council of Antioch which had
condemned Paul of Samosata had also condemned homoousios. This
particular objection was according to Epiphanius raised by George of
Laodicea, speaking for the Homoiousian group of bishops, led by
Basil of Ancyra, who had met at Sirmium in 358.64 Athanasius is
embarrassed by this argument. He does not wish to appear to criticize
the people who condemned Paul at Antioch but he cannot deny that
62'OMOOYLJOI:' 4-6.
63S tea d discusses the affair in Divine Substance 250--8.
64£piphanius Panarion 73.12.3 (where the condemnation is implied rather-than
stated)~ Sozomenus HE IV. I 5.1,2; see Simonetti Crisi 242 n 68. Sozomenus says that
these blShops persuaded the impressionable Liberius into renouncing the homoousion
and ~ccepting their alternative slogan Of(5J.1010~ KUt' oiluiav Kat'Ct 1tavta. According
to HIlary De Syn. 80 (534) the objection had been raised by Unacius and Valens at
Sirmium in 357.
 Period of Confusion
they danmed the epithet homoousios as applied to the Son. His way of
resolving the difficulty is to argue that Paul and th~ up.holders of the
Nicene formula in Athanasius' day used the word m different senses.
The almost insoluble difficulty is to determine in what sense Paul used
homoousios. Athanasius represents him as describing the word as
unsuitable in a kind of reductio ad absurdum; he quotes one sentence
from Paul himself:
'[fChrist did not derive from man, he is therefore homoousios with the
father and there must be three ousiai, one chief and the other two
deriving from it. '65
A few years later Hilary attempts to meet the same argument against
the use of homoousios, that 'our fathers, when Paul of Samosata was
declared a heretic, even repudiated homoousion', but the reason which
he gives for this repudiation is that the word to them spelt
Sabellianism. He clearly believes that Paul himself approved of
homoousios. 66 Some years after Hilary, Basil of Caesarea, writing a
letter on the subject of the adoption of the homoousion in N, says that
those who repudiated this term are blameworthy because they are
rejecting sound tradition, but that they can be a little excused because
others also (he implies) of sound views had rejected it also. And then:
'Those who met over the case of Paul of Samosata accused the
expression of being unsuitable. for these people said that the word
homoousios presented the idea of a (generic) substance and things
deriving from it, so that divided substance provides the name
homoousios ('of similar substance') to the parts into which it has been
divided.'
Basil meets this objection very reasonably by saying that this
particular analysis does not apply to God who has no parts and is not
composite, and therefore the word is not liable in its use in N to this
construction. 67
6'De Synodi' 43. 45 (quotation from 45.4(23 0)).
66Hilary De Synodis 81, 86, 87. 88: his reason is quia per hane unius essentiae
nuncupationem solittJrium et uHilum sib; esse patrern et filium praedicabat. which,
presumably means 'because through this epithet of "of one substance" he was
teaching that the Father and Son were a singl~ and sole individual', (81).
67 Epp.52.1 One could imagine that the fathers of ~tioch ~68 ml~ht have seen
this point if it is a valid one, but Basil does not enter mto thiS question. I do not
understand how Bethune-Baker (Meaning of Homoousios 27. 28), in discussing
IJomoousios in the affair of Paul of Samosata, can say that Basil suggests that Paul
objected to homoousios. Basil says nothing about Paul's attitude to the word.
Semantic Confusion
It is impossible to determine in what sense Paul of Samosata used
the word, whether he adopted it and so caused his opponents to
condemn it, or whether he used it as an example of what one would
be driven to if one opposed his views, and his opponents in
condemning .the word repudiated this argument and explained that
they did not feel driven to use homoousios. 68 The one point which is
quite clear in this obscure affair is that those who condemned Paul
also condemned the use of the word homoousios in a Trinitarian
context. thereby causing considerable embarrassment to those
theologians who wanted to defend its inclusion in an official doctrinal
statement in the next century. It is significant that the victorious party
at the Antiochene Council which condemned Paul were in all
probability supporters of the views of Origen and were therefore
most unlikely to have condemned homoousios had Origen, who had
only died ~ little over ten years before. himself used it. Though the
exploration of this incident has thrown no light on the meaning
attached to the word by either Paul or his opponents, it has suggested
that homoousios before it was placed in N must have been regarded as a
term which carried with it heretical, or at least unsound, overtones to
theologians in the Eastern church. and emphasizes the resolution of
those who were ready to include it in the creed of the first General
Council, and provides one more reason why that creed was
vulnerable to criticism.
Methodius uses the word homoousios when he purports to quote a
fragment ofOrigen saying that the heavenly firmament is composed
of material 'consubstantial with the angels'.69 The Dialogue of
Adamantius, a work written in Greek either during or a little before
the perseciJtion of Diocletian. and later translated into Latin by
Rufinus, who thought that Origen was its author, uses the word
homoousios three times, once in a non-Trinitarian context but twice in
a Trinitarian. One of these last two is certainly an interpolation. and it
is highly likely that the other is also. It is interesting to note that the
author does not apparently distinguish sharply between ousia and
hypostasis. Evil, he says, is neither according to physis nor ousia nor
68The difficulty, which Stead acknowledges (Divine Substance 216--7) has not of
course prevented scholars attempting to solve the problem; see Gwatkin SA 47;
Loofs·'Arianismus"9-IO and "Das Nidinum' 75-'7; Kraft 'OMOOYl:lo:r 6; Stead
hims~lf 'Homoousios dans la Pensee' 233-42; Simonetti Crisi 92-3.
6'De Resurrectione II.XXX (387); fragment III (521) from Mai Script. Vet. Nova
Coil. IX (619) referring to a consubstantial Trinity is of course spurious.
 Period of Confusion
hypostasis. 70 Though Eusebius of Caesarea never spontaneously uses
homoousios of the Son, and though his explanation of why he accepted
it at Nicaea involved his watering down its meaning considerably, 71
he uses it once in discussing the ideas of Plato.72
Our investigation of the use of homoousios before it was inserted in
N, then, should have suggested strongly that it would be unwise to
give the word a strictly defined or single meaning. Ever since the idea
occurred to scholars to appeal to the Aristotelian distinction between
'first ousia', i.e. concrete, individual being, and 'second ousia', i.e.
generic, shared being, and to pronounce that at Nicaea homoousios
was used to mean 'identity of being', ousia being employed as
hypostasis = individual reality, the tendency set in to assume that
homoousios before Nicaea and at Nicaea meant 'identity', but that
later it was enlarged to mean 'generic being' (cf. 'possessing ousia
identically', 61'0il ooc:rlav ~J(rov', Marius Victorinus Adv. Arium IV: 10
and (scathingly) tautouc:rto<; ('of identical being') Ancyra 358). On
this view in N and before N homoousios referred to first ousia but later
among the Cappadocians to second ousia. 73 We have seen enough of
the word to realize that it certainly did not refer to identity of being
before 325. Its sense was far looser than that. It is not even enough to
say that homoousios was before 325 used in a 'generic' sense of shared
being, as Loofs and Prestige claim. 74 The word cannot be confined to
7°The three passages are in the GCS text III. VI p. 122 (836) where the use is non-
Trinitarian; V, p. 240 (871), and I. p. 4 (804). The GCS editor regards the last two as
interpolations due to are-working ofehe text which took place 330-337. Rufinus'
Latin seems to reflect the original, not the re-worked, text; at I P.4 (804) his
translation renders homoousios as consubstantivum which suggests that the word was
in the origiRal. But if it was and if Rufinus was anxious, when translating
Pamphilus' Defence ojOrigen, to claim that Origen had used the word homoousios of
the Son, why did he not mention also this passage, which would for him have been
an example ofOrigen using the word of the Son? It is possible that Rufinus! Latin is
also interpolated. Stead, Divine Substance 219, accepts this example as genuine.
Adamantius' remark about evil.occurs at III p. 158 (846). Rufinus translates neque
'secundum naturam , neque secundum substantiam, indiscriminately.
7ISee above, p. 165.
72PE XI.2I.6.
73S0 Ritter, Konzil von Konstantinopel 270-4. Tuilier 'Le sens du terme
6J.100U<JlOC;' 421-30 wishes to explain Arianism by this distinction offirst and second
ousia. His article is further marred by the assumption that a 'school of Antioch'
existed as early as Paul of Samosata and was continued by t.he Arians, through
Lucian of Antioch and later by the Homoiousians. It is remarkable how a title or
classification, once coined, assumes a life ofits own and out of airy nothing takes a
local habitation and a name.
74Loofs 'Das Nidinum' 71-8; Prestige GPT 209-1 I. Loofs also held that Western
TO~
Semantic Confusion
a meaning even as relatively wide as this. It had a good deal more than
two uses and was not necessarily derived from the thought of
Aristotle. 7S
Why then was homoousios put into the Creed of Nicaea? Arius
certainly disliked it. In his Letter to Alexander of Alexandria he had
thrice rejected the view that the Son was a 'consubstantial part' of the
Father, in the first reference branding it as Manichaean. 76 The same
idea appears to recur in the words of Arius quoted by Constantine in
his letter of333, 'whatever you take from him, you diminish him by
that amount', i.e. if the Son is homoousios with the Father then by
being distinct he deprives the Father of so much ousia. 77 Arius also in
his Thalia objected to the application of homoousios to the Son on the
ground that it represented the Son as equal to the Father, to whom in
fact notlijng can be equal. 78 The same objection may be echoed in the
fragment of Eusebius of Nicomedia preserved by Ambrose which
argues that if you call the Son homoousios then you are in effect calling
him ingenerate (which is probably what increalum means).79
Williams points out that the objection based on the Manichean
tendency of the word assumed that it implied that the Son was a
component or extension of God, thus representing God as composite,
perhaps as material, and suggesting that there is a kind of common
'God-stuff' shared by Father and Son. Iamblichus, he points out, in
his De Mysteriis, had used homoousios of a case where 'different
elements combine to produce a unified reality'. But such processes
cannot apply to transcendental realities which must be simple,
the~logians, especially Dionysius of Rome, were up to 325, and at the Council,
relYIng on .the equation of Tertullian's unius substantiae with homoousios
(,Arianismus' 8). But even if this were so, it remains to be shown that Ossius who
was the main, almost the sale, Western representative at Nicaea made the'same
equation. '
75S 0 Stead 'Homoousios dans la pensee' 232, 247. Kraft 'OMOOYLIOI:' 6--7
agrees that homoousios did not derive from a philosophical background but from
religi?us philos~phieal sp~culation. His statement however that it is usually
translated by umus substantiae rather than consubstantialis(-ivus) and therefore was
presumably equated with Tertullian's account of the relation of the Son to the
Father should be qualified by the fact that the earliest Latin renderings of the word in
N usually do not translate it at all but simply transcribe it.
. 7~O.pitz Vrk III No., 6.3\12) and 5(13); cf. Epiphanius Ancoratus 48.1.57 for a not
dISSImIlar account of Mamcheeism.
17Urk III. No. 34.73(29).
78Athanasius De Synodis 15.
,
"
79Urk. III, No. 21(42); see above, pp. 31,161, and Rieken 'Nikaia als Krisis' 337
Stead Divine Substance 243-5. '
 Period of Confusion
unmixed. If the word were applied to God it would mean that Father
and Son together made up a third, greater substance - and a material
one at that! 80 Later Arians repeated these objections and added
others: that the word was not to be found in Scripture;81 that it
involves the assumption that there is in God's ousia something
contingent (crul1~E~l1K6~) or foreign or hidden, or that there is
something necessary to complete his ousia. 82 Hilary's work reflects a
few more objections: that the fathers of Antioch who condemned
Paul of Samosata a century before also condemned homoousios as
applied to the Son (an argument that we have heard before),
apparently because it meant that Father and Son became identical in
the Godhead;83 that since it implies this identity, and therefore that
the Son is only an extension of the Godhead into the womb of the
Virgin, therefore the name Son was only assumed with the body. 84
To insert the word homoousios into N, therefore, would certainly be
to construct an obstacle which doctrinaire Arians could not
overcome.
There is no reason to believe that Alexander of Alexandria
particularly favoured homoousios. Two writers on the subject at least
believe that before Nicaea he deliberately avoided it.85 He was ready
to use 'like in ousia' ()110to~ Kat' oocriav) of the Son,86 but was as
anxious as Arius to avoid materializing descriptions of the relation of
the Father to the Son. 87 Kraft indeed thinks that in this last passage
Alexander is deliberately repudiating the 'Western' Trinitarian
theology based on Tertullian, and perpetuated presumably by
Novatian, Dionysius of Rome and Ossius. 88
It is time now to come to terms with the theory which in the past
has been supported by scholars of great weight, that Ossius at Nicaea
represented a 'Western' point of view anxious to impose Tertullian's
'of one substance' on the East. B9 Very little is in fact known about
BO'The Logic of Arianism' 63-5. quotation from 64.
81 Athanasius De Deeretis 21.2(18).
8'Ibid. 22.1(18); cf. 2P-5(l!r20).
"De Synodis 80 (534).
84De Trinitate IV.4(103); cf. VI.12(208-IO).
"Kraft, 'OMOOYl:Im:' 8, 9; Simonetti Studi 125~.
8·0 pitz Urk. III No. 4b 7(7).
87Ibid. No. 14.46(27).
sSOp. cit. 9.
89The chief champions of this view were Harnack History IV.5D--9. and Loafs
•Arianismus' 14-15 and 'Das Nidinum' (published quarter of a century later) 78-9.
Prestige (GPT 219) agreed; and Bethune-Baker (The Meaning ofHomoousios 13) can
Semantic Confusion
Ossius' career before he appears on the scene in Alexandria at the end
of 324. V. C. Declercq in 1954 published a full-length book on him
called Ossius of Cordova. He established, one hopes finally, that the
proper name of the bishop of Cordova is Ossius, and none of the
several alternatives which the evidence from antiquity offers.90
Ossius was already an old man by 324; Declercq estimates that he
must have been born about 256. 91 He had been a confessor in the
persecution of Diocletian, presumably in Cordova or its vicinity. It
has been widely assumed that he was the same person as the Ossius to
whom Calcidius dedicated his translation into Latin (with a
commentary) of Plato's Timaeus. Declercq, with many others,
assumes that he was. 92 If this assumption were true it would make a
consider~ble difference to our estimate of Ossius' contribution to the
Council and Creed of Nicaea, because we could with some
. confidence conclude that the issues debated by Eastern theologians
would not have been strange to Calcidius' Ossius, who was certainly
a Christian, quite possibly a cleric, and most probably a learned one,
and even that Ossius was competent to initiate Constantine into quite
advanced theology. But in fact we cannot make this assumption with
any aSSUrance. The latest editor of Calcidius' translation of the
Timaeus,]. H. Waszink, lends the immense weight of his learning to
the conclusion that Ossius bishop of Cordova could not have been
the person to whom Calcidius dedicated his work. Isidore of Seville,
who is well aware of other learned Spaniards of the fourth century
and who is not likely to have omitted any notable Spanish scholar of
the past, says nothing of a Spanish Ossius of this or any other century.
And internal evidence from the work itself suggests a date of
composition considerably later than the lifetime of even long-lived
Ossius. Waszink places the work about the year 400 'and in Italy."'
Ossius attended as bishop the Council of Elvira in Spain which
probably took place before Diocletian's persecution broke out, i.e.
also be placed in this list. Declercq Ossius. of Cordova 250-66 joins their number, but
takes a less doctrinaire view of Ossius' action. He introduced the word because it
would exclude Arianism, not because it derived from Tertullian, though he knew
the Western theological tradition.
90Declercq op. cil 44-8.
91lbid. 50-2.
§, '2Ibid.63·6!r75.
, 9.3]. H. Waszin.k Timaeus a Calcidio transJatus Commentarioque instructus (Plato
Latrnus ed. R. Khbansky, Vol. IV, London and Leiden, 1975) Praefatio ix-xv' see
aJso art. 'CaJcidius' in TRE 7, 546-50, by G. F. Kerferd. '
 Period oj Confusion
about 300. It is uncertain whether he met Constantine in Gaul
31I-3I2 or in Rome 312-313."4 He was probably in Rome for the
Council summoned by Miltiades, bishop of Rome, in 313, at
Constantine's request because he' certainly visited Africa
Proconsularis to examine the Donatist a/fair on behalf of Constantine
a little before that Council. He did not attend the Council of Aries in
314; it is likely that he was at that time in Trier and the Balkans with
Constantine."s It was to Ossius that Constantine addressed his edict
of 32 1 enabling slaves to be emancipated in the presence of a Christian
bishop without further legal requirements. 96 Declercq concludes
that Ossius was probably with Constantine during all the period 313
to 324."' He does not speculate as to what can have been happening
to Ossius' see of Cordova during his prolonged absence. The rest of
Ossius' movements up to the end of the Council of Nicaea we have
already had occasion to follow. He visited Alexandria and became
acquainted with its bishop Alexander at the end of 324. He presided
over the Council of Antioch in the early days of 325, and over the
Council of Nicaea in the early summer of the same year.
Can we envisage Ossius as a man of considerable learning, one
whose theological opinions Eastern theologians would respect, who
was competent to find his way through the maze of semantic
confusion presented by the dispute which he hoped to end? Declercq
is ready to do so, relying both on the assumption tliat he is the Ossius
of Calcidius' dedication and on the statement of Socrates (HE 1:7)
that when Ossius was in Alexandria in 324 'he made an investigation
into ousia and hypostasis, and this investigation in its turn became a
cause of strife'''· and he is ready to take seriously (as few other
scholars are) Philostorgius' story that Alexander and Ossius agreed
together to introduce the word homoousios just before the Council of
Nicaea, and he suggests that they had planned this tactic the year
before in Alexandria."9 But we cannot conclude that Ossius was the
recipient of Calcidius' dedication, far less that Constantine became
under Ossius' tutelage quite a competent theologian. Ossius' obvious.
bewilderment at the statements about the number of ousiai envisaged
94Dedercq op. cit. 85-102, 123-36, 148-55.
95Ibid. 161-')5.
96Ibid. I7!r-80.
97Ibid. 181-J.
98Declercq ibid. 69-75; 202-4.
99Ibid. 20J; Philostorgiu5 HE 1.7.8-9.
200
Semantic Confusion
by Eusebius and by Narcissus does not at all suggest one who wa,
versed in Greek philosophy (even in translation) nor somebody who
had recently devoted time to making a thorough study of hypostasiJ
and ousia. The theory that Ossius was a well-informed and conscious
representative of the Western theological tradition capable of
persuading Easterners who knew little or nothing of it to enshrine its
doctrine in a creed lacks solid foundation.
To these arguments we may add those of Stead. He points out that
the only credible ancient authority who attributes the introduction of
homoousios into N to Ossius is Philostorgius, and he is writing (as
indeed was Socrates) at least a hundred years later. We have no
independent evidence for the views of Ossius at this period; the
doctri,\al statement of the Council of Antioch of 325 is redolent of the
thought of Alexander, and throws no clear light on that of Ossius.
Eusebius of Cae sa rea did not like homoousios, and cannot have relished
the decisions of the Council of Antioch of 325, but he goes out of his
way to commend Ossius in his Life of Constantine.'OO Even if Ossius
did support homoousios he may not have done so as a representative of
Western theology, but because he thought it a counter to the doctrine
of three ousiai which was strange to him. The word homoousios is not
an exact reproduction of una substantia (,one substance') and we have
no satisfactory evidence that it was a term at home in Western
theology. The Western Council of Serdica of 343 produced a
document, written by Protogenes ofSerdica and Ossius, which opted
clearly for Una substantia meaning one hypostasis. It is probable that the
bishops on the extreme opposite wing to the Arians thought that
homoousios was not rigorous, not definitive, enough. Hilary, we must
recollect, said (De Syn. 91) that he had not heard the term till he was
abo~t to go into exile. Rome and the West can hardly have regarded
the msertlOn of the word into N as a triumph.,ol
St~ad suggests persuasively that the anathema in N against
denvmg the Son from another hypostasis or ousia was not directly
aimed at Arianism, but was intended to deny the doctrine that the
Son originated from a source outside God. I 02 It is possible that
lOove II.6J.
101S~ Stea?_ Divine Substance 250--8. Person, Mode o/Decision Making 94-J02,in a
useful dIScussIon of the subject also concludes that we cannot father homoousios either
on ~estem theology or on Ossius. For the doctrinal statement afthe Westerners at
Serdlca see below. p. 301.
10.2 Divine Substance 233-42. There is an interesting passage in JuHan's C;ommentary
 Period of Confusion
homoousios was meant· to support this intention, and perhaps not
designed to do very much more. Stead observes that Eusebius of
Caesarea in his explanation of why he signed N takes this point of
view, and does not apparently regard it as dangerously imperiling the
distinction between Father and Son, though he does want to
avoid the idea that it suggests material or corporeal rel~tions between
the two. It looks as if Constantine did not allow the Eustathians
(extreme anti-Arians) at Nicaea to interpret homoliusios in such a way
as would fatally upset the Eastern Origenists.'03
We can therefore be pretty sure that homoousios was not intended
to express the numerical identity of the Father and the Son. '04 If the
fathers of Nicaea had meant this, says Person, why could they not
have said SO?'05 It was not an importation from Western theology. It
was intended to have a looser, more ambiguous sense than has in the
past history of scholarship been attached to it. '06 It was indeed a term
which Arius had repudiated and which his followers found
distasteful, but not the drastic and final word which it has been made
out to be. It is not probable that Constantine originated the term; we
do not know who did so. But once he discovered that the Eustathians
were in favour ofit, and that, when he had insisted that it did not have
the objectionable meaning which Arius and Eusebius of Nicomedia
had attached to it, the favourers of Arius in the Council could accept
it, he pressed for its inclusion. It solved the problem for the time, but
left a dangerous legacy of confusion for the future.' 07
3. Other Terms
A pair of expressions which caused no little confusion during the first
on Job (not commented on by Stead) which confirms Stead's view that, faced with
the question of where the Son came from, the Arians opted for 'non-existence'. and
their opponents for his origin from the Father, but both wanted to reject the idea
that he came from some source external to the Father. 'Nothing existing', says
Julian, 'must be attributed to the God of all existing things, for everything must be
attributed to his will according to which he created them' (16.17.5-'7). i.e. God does
not make things out of his own being but only by his will.
1·'Ibid. 258-60; see Opitz Urk III No. 22.13, 16(46).
104As Zahn and Harnack suggested, thinking that it implied Aristotle's prole
ousia, and so Kraft.
losMode 102.
l06lbid. 105.
l07Simonetti observes this Crisi 89; Rieken, 'Nikaia als Krisis' 337-8, comes to
much the same conclusion.
202
Semantic Confusion
half of the Aria.n Controversy has attracted the attention of several
scholars. These are yev(v)'lT6C; (gen(n)etos) and its form with the alpha
privative, uytV(V)'lTOC; (agen(n)etos). Genetos and its privative are
almost untranslatable into English. The positive form means 'having
come into existence'. with the nuance of 'mortar 'transient'
'mutable', and the privative of it does not mean 'that which has neve;
existed' but 'that which has never not existed'; that which has never
had a beginning because it has eternally existed, and therefore that
which is incorruptible and immutable. Gennetos, on the other hand
means 'generated' or 'begotten' and the privative of it 'ingenerate',
'unbegotten', again not in the sense of non-existent but of eternally
existent. Dillon gives us some information about the use of some of
these ~erms in Middle Platonism. Calvenus Taurus of Berytus (fl.
125-165 A.D.) gives four different possible applications of the
cognate verb gegonen of genetos. Two are relevant to this study: that
which is always in process of generation, like the sublunary world
which is always changing, and that which is dependent on something
else for its existence.'os Apuleius was able to apply genetos to the
world because, though it has always existed, 'its substance and nature
are constituted from elements which have the characteristic of
createdness',o9. Hippolytus' Platonic source (which was perhaps a
kind of handbook) describes matter as coeval (synchronos) with God,
and therefore agennetos and indestructible. But in as far as it is a body
and composite it can be called genetos, because though it exists
eternally it is periodically renewed in all its parts, as a wagon (or a
cricket bad) could be. " 0 Kopecek, in the course of giving a careful
history of the word agennetos in Plato, Philo, Justin Martyr,
Athenagoias and Clement of Alexandria, says that they all regard
God as ingenerate (though Plato in the Timaeus does not actually use
the term), but all except Philo and Ignatius of Antioch hesitate about
applying the epithet to the Logos, or they actually deny it to him.
Origen in at least two places applies agennetos to the Son, though in a
great many others he applies it to the Father. Kopecek thinks that
Origen may just have begun to distinguish between agennetos and
108 The Middle Platonists 243.
109Ibid. 3 1 5.
~ 10Ibid. 41 I. Athanasius, De Decretis 28.2(24) says that some respectable
philosophers were able to conceive that some things (such as nous and psyche) were
ag~neta, though derived from something else. Opitz (note in loc) says that the
phIlosophers meant Plate;> Phaedrus 24SCD and Timaeus 52A.
203
 Period of Confosion
agenetos, 111 and Prestige in a similar survey"2 agrees with him. If so,
it was a long time before any such distinction was definitely reached,
and we have already seen one example of Origen using the two
words as synonymous. 1I3
Both Lebreton and Prestige have written useful articles upon this
pair of terms and their privatives. Agennetos al!d agenetos were from
an early period in the history of Christian literature confused, or
rather regarded as synonymous} 14 Robertson and Lightfoot were
mistaken in assuming that there always was a distinction between
gennetos and genetos and their privatives in the minds of those who
took part in the Arian controversy. liS In either form a-gen(n)etos is a
synonym for 'indestructible' (c\.vro:\.tepo~) and 'incorruptible'
(li<peap~o~) in contradistinction to that which becomes or has an
origin. For most authors being begotten and becoming are
indistinguishable (a parent is a maker (factor) says Tertullian)}16 For
Christians and Jews, God alone is agenetos, except that some would
apply this to the soul also; but none apply it to the world. 117 Its Latin
equivalents are quod non oritur, sine ortu, infectus, non natus, ingenitus;
these can be applied to any of the three Persons, and are not, before
the fourth century, a particular attribute of God the Father}18
At the outset of the controversy, Eusebius of Caesarea 'did not
really distinguish agenetos from agennetos, and shares his difficulty, but
not his conclusions, with Arius'."9 He can confuse gennetos and
genetos when they are applied to things, but in a Trinitarian context
gennema can only be applied to Christ. 12o No Arian ever
distinguished between agenetos and agennetos, though it was only later
in the controversy that the subject of'ingenerateness' (agennesia) took
the centre of the stage. Arians, starting with Arius, are particularly
111 Kopecek History 242-66. Ignatius has that remarkable sentence 'there is one
physician. fleshly and spiritual. genetos and agenetos, God in man, true life in death,
. both from Mary and from God' (Ephesians 7.2). quoted by Athanasius De Syn.
47.1(271,272); cf. Ignatius Polycarp 3.2.
112Prestige CPT 37-52; perhaps it would be fairer to say that Kopecek agrees
with Prestige; cr. Harnack History IV.I2-I4.
tlJS ee above, p.63.
114Lebreton 'ArENNHTOl: dans la Tradition' 434-8.
IISPrestige 'uytv(v)nto<; and yev(v)nt6<;', 495-6.
116Lebreton op. cit. 434-8.
t 17 lbid. 439.
II 'Ibid. 443.
119Prestige op. cit. 488.
l2olbid. 488-9.
204
Semantic Confosion
sensitive to the danger of finding their doctrine of God in such a state
that they are in effect recognizing 'two ultimate principles' (oue
c\.'YtvvlJ~a, two agenneta). We have seen Arius' view on this.l2l
Eusebius of Nicomedia in his Letter to Paulinus of Tyre explicitly
mentions this danger. 122 Alexander of Alexandria knows that the
Arians accuse him of teaching two agenneta, and emphatically denie!
this charge. 123 Asterius taught that Christ is 'the chief of the
geneta',124 and that 'that which is not made but exists eternally i!
ageneton', 12S and that the Son 'is a creature and one ofthegeneta' .'26 i1
is particularly interesting to find Athanasius in one of his earliesl
works reproducing precisely the confusion which we have seen
illustrated here. He is attempting to meet the argument thai
adhe~ence to the pre-Nicene doctrine results in two agenneta: if the
Son is not unbegotten (agenneton), as he clearly is not then there musl
have been a time when he did not exist. Athanasius first points OUI
that agennetos is not a term found in the Bible, and then reminds hi!
opponents that there are three different meanings of ageneton (with
one nul; it can mean something which could come into existence bUI
has not done so; it can mean something which has not come intc
existence and never could do so, like a four-sided triangle or an even
odd number; and it can mean that which exists but does not have an
origin nor a father. 127 Inasmuch as the Son is eternal he is according
to Asterius' criterion agenetos, but in that he has a Father, the Fathel
alone is agenetos. But Athanasius denies that this means that the Son i,
genetos: he is a product (gennema) who is the image of the Ingenerate
. (agenetos) whereas on the Arian premises he must be a genetos who i!
the image of the agenetos, and this is absurd. 12 • This account would
have been less confusing had Athanasius been able then (as he wa,
later) to distinguish between (a)genetos and (a)gennetos.
This confusion between genetos and gennetos and their privative,
might have been tolerable had not an important party in the
121See above, p. 8.
1220pitz Urk. III No. 8.3. 4(16). See Simonetti Stud; 172, 173.
'23Urk. III No. 14.44.45(26); cf. Prestige op. cit. 492-3.
'24Bardy, Lucien frag. 111(343).
12'lbid. frag VII(344).
1261bid. frag IX(345).
1270rationes con. Ar. 1.30; here he quotes the sentence from Asterius which
appears as Bardy's VII (see note US above).
128Ibid. 1.31. Prestige op. cit. 496 recognizes that an alteration in Athanasius'
vocabulary took place later.
20 5
 Period of Confusion Semantic Confusion

controversy embraced Origen's doctrine of the eternal generation of the Godhead. Prestige does not mention this use of prosopon. But if it
the Son. As long as this confusion existed those who wished to was possible for Eusebius to write of one hypostasis speaking in three
maintain this doctrine were compelled to say that the Son was both, names, then nobody could have identified hypostasis and prosopon.
as eternal, agen(n)etos, and, as begotten of the Father, gen(n)etos. On The word was unsatisfactory for Trinitarian discourse, and was on
this point a clarification of vocabulary was badly needed. the whole recognised as such.
The word 1tp6cromov (prosopon) does not figure prominently in the The same may apply to the use of the word persona (,person') by
Arian Controversy. It might at first sight be thought that, had it been Latin-speaking theologians. As there are virtually nO Latin-speaking
used consistently from the beginning to denote that which God is as theologians evident at the beginning of the controversy, this subject
Three in distinction to what he is as One, the word might have been will be dealt with later. 132 Tertullian had indeed used persona boldly
helpful in avoiding misunderstandings. But the ancients probably to mean the 'Persons' of the Trinity. But Sabellius had appeared on
had good reasons for being wary of this word. It could of course be the scene later than Tertullian; it is possible that persona as a translation
used for the mask which actors in tragedy or comedy wore, and in the of prosoponl 33 had acquired in Western ears a Sabellian ring. That
past scholars have conjectured that this use of it, suggesting a mere ther<\ is an astonishingly small occurrence of persona in Trinitarian
appearance not necessarily corresponding to reality, was what made contexts in the fourth century, and in one case a positive repudiation
theologians avoid it. Eusebius of Caesarea accuses Marcellus of of it, will become clear later.
believing in 'one hypostasis with three prosopa, just as he has three
names',129 i.e. a God who has no distinctions within his being but
only three appearances. In a note on the word prosopon Prestige says
'there does not seem to be any evidence whatever for the view that
the term prosopon was ever discredited in orthodox circles at any
period of theological development', and adds that it hardly ever
means 'mask'."o To this one is inclined to reply, Yes and No. The
theologians of the ancient Church were not great theatre-goers, and
to them the use of the term prosopon would not normally conjure up
this image. But on the other hand, prosopon had been used extensively
since the time ofJustin to mean 'character speaking in Scripture', e.g.
in some of the Psalms where the ancient theologians were
accustomed to distinguish parts to be attributed to the character of
God, parts to the character of Christ and parts to that of the Church,
as well as some to the character of the author of the Psalms, David. 131
This was the normal theological meaning of the word, and one can see
why theological writers who wanted to avoid Sabellianism would
not have been willing to use prosopon to distinguish the 'Persons' of
129J.1.iav ()1t60''t'ao"lV tplO'1tp60'(J)1tov OOO'1t£p Kai tptcrWVUJ,l.0v, Eee, Theol. 111.16(164).
Asterius. however, quite often uses prosopon as a synonym of hypostasis.
130GPT 157-62, quotation from 162; earlier (p. II3) he has said that no ancient
father till Basil uses the word in the sense of'mask'; normally it means an individual.
131 A useful note on this use of prosopon in Origen will be found in Marguerite
Harl's edition of the Philocalia 1-20 (Paris 1983. SC ser. no. 302), 324 n I and 330-4. .llSee below, pp. 480, 486-7.
Sieben in PTAA 201-2 has a note on Athanasius' use of prosopon in this sense. It is 1331n fact prosopon appears in Hippolytus as a translation of persona; so Bethune-
mainly. but not exclusively, to the Psalms that this term is applied. Baker, in a useful note on persona/prosopon, The Meaning of Homoousios, 70-4.

206 207

8 also drove out of Antioch a number of influential people who
Eustathius and Marcellus
I. Eustathius of Antioch
We must now consider two theologians who enter prominently into
the story of the search for the Christian doctrine of God soon after the
Council of Nicaea and whose writings illustrate a school of thought
which we have not yet had much occasion to notice. They are
Eustathius of Antioch 1 and Marcellus of Ancyra. Some parts of the
career of Eustathius can be reconstructed with some confidence. He
had been a confessor in the persecution of Diocletian and had been
bishop of Beroea. 2 We have already seen how he succeeded
Philogonius as bishop of Antioch late in 324 or very early in J2 5 and
was present at the Council of Antioch in 325. 3 Theodoret gives us a
useful extract from one of his works bearing upon what was done at
the Council ofNicaea, which he of course attended. 4 He was clearly a
vigorous opponent of Arius and Arianism and thought that the point
of view of own his party had not been given sufficient expression at
the Council. During his period as bishop of Antioch he was influen-
tial enougl) to acquire a strong following of people devoted to his
doctrine who continued to form a separate group for fifty or sixty
1 For Eustathius see M. Spanneut Recherches sur les ecrits d'Eustache d' Antioche, and
'La Position theologiqued'Eustache d' Antioche'; R. V. Sellers, Eustathius of Antioch;
E. Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte des viertenJahrhunderts' ISg-60 and Gesamm.
Schrift. 111.7.170-5; F. Loafs, 'Arianismus' 17. 'Das Nidnum' 20; H. Chadwick,
'The Fan of Eustathius of Antioch' and 'Faith and Order at the Council of Nicaea';
Grillmeier CeT 296-301; Simonetti Studi 45-8, 51; Crisi 71-5; L. W. Barnard
'Church-State Relations A.D. 313-3 I'; R. P. C. Hanson 'The Fate of Eustathius of
Antioch'; T. A. Kopecek History 53-4.
2Previously bishop of Beroea, Socrates HE 1.24, Jerome De Vir. Ill.
LXXXV(44); confessor, Athanasius Apo/. de Fuga ), Hist. Arion. 4. Cf. Sellers,
EustatlJius 24.
3See above p. 148.
4Theodoret HE I.8.I-5~ see above. p. 160.
208
Eustathius and Marcellus
years afterwards and to refuse to recognize any bishop of Antioch
who did not agree with their ideas; these (as we shall have to refer to
them frequently in future) we shall call 'continuing Eustathians'. He
disagreed with his views, many of whom later became bishops,
among them George (later) of Laodicea, Stephen (later) of Antioch,
Eudoxius (later) of Germanicia, Antioch and Constantinople, and
Eustathius (later) ofSebaste.' He was certainly deposed from the see
of Antioch by a council and exiled by Constantine, but when and on
what charge has been much debated. It was conventional for long to
regard the date of his deposition as 330 or 33 1. 6 The date cannot have
been I~ter than 331, because Eutropius of Adrianople was deposed at
the same time as he as the result of a grudge borne against him by
Basilina, sister-in-law of Constantine. 7 Basilina died a few months
after giving birth to Julian , later to be Emperor, in 331.8 However H.
Chadwick in 1948 produced the startling theory that Eustathius was
deposed as early as 326. 9 It is a complicated theory, based on a
number of details and conjectures: on the assumption that the
Eusebius mentioned by Eustathius in connection with the Council of
Nicaea was the bishop of Caesarea, not the bishop ofNicomedia; on a
calculation of 17 years back from the Council ofSerdica 343 (though
Chadwick placed it in 342); on the assumption that the Empress
Helena, Constantine's mother, made in 325 or 326 a pilgrimage to the
Holy Land in reparation for the guilt incurred by the reigning
dynasty from the recent affair of Crispus and Fausta, and on several
other details. The case was well argued and convinced many people.
But a careful examination of this theory shows that it is based on so
many implausible assumptions that it is impossible to accept'O If
Eustathius was only bishop of Antioch from early 325 till some time
in 326, he could hardly have had time to build up a strong party
supporting his views in Antioch, and little to encounter the enmity of
5 Athanasius Hist. Arian. 4.
6S 0 • for instance Bardy Lucien 323-4. Gericke Marcellus 8, Boularand L'Heresie
152; Sellers Eustathius 46ft".
7 Athanasius Hist. Ar. 4.5; Apol de Fuga 3.
8The calculation of date is that of Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift 111.8 (224--6).
Declercq. however. for some reason places Eustathius' deposition in 333 (Ossius
293-4).
9'The Fall of Eustathius of Antioch'.
lOThe whole question is examined in decail in R. P. C, Hanson 'The Face of
Eustathius of Antioch',
 Period of Confusion
several people of opposite views whom he expelled. We can only
assume that the Eusebius mentioned in Eustathius' account ofNicaea
was the bishop of Caesarea if we are ready to believe that this
Eusebius submitted two doctrinal statements to the Council, one of
which was angrily rejected and torn up, the other warmly approved
by everybody including the Emperor." But if Eustathius was
referring to the Eusebius bishop of Nicomedia (as, it is obvious, he
was) then Eustathius must have been writing his account in or after
328, for Eusebius was exiled very shortly after the Council and did
not return to take charge of his see and of the anti-Nicene cause till
328; and Eustathius is manifestly writing his account ofNicaea and of
Eusebius of Nicomedia's behaviour at it while he (Eustathius) is still
bishop of Antioch and Eusebius bishop of Nicomedia. 12 Therefore
Eustathius must have been still bishop of Antioch in 328, and we
should revert to the usual dating of his deposition, in 330 or 331.13
That Constantine would have allowed his mother to make a much
publicized pilgrimage of reparation after the disastrous deaths of
Crispus and Fausta, thereby multiplying the very bad publicity
already gained for the imperial house, instead of trying to hush the
whole thing up, is unlikely in the extreme. 14 The immediate reason
or reasons for Eustathius' deposition are difficult to determine, for the
ancient authorities differ here. The real motive was of course his
lIThat the same document is described by Eustathius as provoking a furious
dissent and by Eusebius as being approved by everybody I refuse to believe, especially
as Eusebius actually gives us the (quite innocuous) contents aCthe document which
was approved.
12A surprising number of people have failed to see this point and have assumed
that Eustathips was referring to Eusebius of Caesarea, e.g. Harnack apparently,
Sellers (Bustathius 27-30, 73) and Ritter 'Arianismus' 704, 705· On the other hand
Loofs (,Das Nic.num' 79-80), Stead ('Eusehius and the Council of Nicaea' 85-roo)
and Grant (,Religion and Politics' 6) have perceived that the Eusebius intended mu.st
be he of Nicomedia.
13EarHer rather than later in that period, because the quick and frequent
succession of bishops of Antioch thereafter, each having only a brief reign, till we
reach Flacillus, must be fitted in.
14We do not know exactly when Hdena died, except that she predeceased her
son who died in 337. The attempt to fix her date by the re-naming of the town
Drepanum as HelenopoHs (Barnes The New Empire of Dioc1etian and Constantine 9.
n40) must fail because that a town was named after an individual in the ancient
world was no proof that the individual was dead (any more than it is today). In
addition to the very obvious example of Constantinople, other contemporary
examples could be cited, e.g. in 299 or later Pannonia Inferior was divided into
Valeria (north) and Pannonia Inferior (South), and the new Valeria was called after
Valeria, Galerius' wife. who was certainly alive at the time (Barnes New Empire 223).
210
Eustathius and Marcellus
championing of the Nicene formula and his opposition to those who
disliked it and the theology it seemed to represent, which is
mentioned several times by the historians. " It seems most likely that
Eustathius was primarily deposed for the heresy of Sabellianism, in a
council at Antioch presided over. by Eusebius of Caesarea, though
there may have been other minor charges. I. The date of his death is
not known for certain. Socrates has a story of his appearing many
years later in the year 363 in Constantinople and then being banished
once more. '7 But if he had been a confessor in Diocletian's
persecution and had been made bishop of Beroea, say about 320, he
would have been an immensely old man by 363. And, though there
were-riots in Antioch at his deposition, 18 we hear of no disturbance in
that city in the year 337 when Constantine died and several of the
bishops banished by him returned to their sees, to the accompaniment
of disturbances. Further, the pronouncement of the Eastern bishops
after the Council of Serdica in 343 suggests (in a curiously indirect
way) that he was by then dead. '9 It is wholly probable that by the
time of Constantine's death in 337 Eustathius was dead. This is why
he did not then return to his see of Antioch and why the Westerners at
the Council of Sardica did not take up his case as that of a wronged
man to be vindicated, as' they did the cases of Athanasius and
Marcellus and others.
Only one of Eustathius' works survives in toto, his attack on
Origen's exposition of the story of Saul's consultation of the witch of
Endor, which is usually called De Engastrimytho 'On the
15Socrates HE 1.23,24 (though Socrates is quite wrong in saying here (23) that
Eustathius taught three hypostases); V1.13; Sozomenus HE 11.19.1; cf. Athanasius
Hist. Arian. 4.
16See Hanson. 'The Fate of Eustathius of Antioch', 178-9. Schwartz ('Zur
Geschichte' 159-60) regarded the silence of the Western bishops at Serdica as a sure
sign that Eustathius had been deposed' on grounds of immoral conduct and not for
heresy. But very different conclusions can be drawn from this; it is likely that the
pro-Nicenes did not want to advertise the fact that their supporters had been
convicted (not without colour) of SabeIlianism. It was an anti-Nicene, George of
Laodicea who revealed that Eustathius was deposed for Sabellianism (Socrates, HE
11.7)·
17HE IV.I4, 15.
18Sozomenos HE 11.19.1-2 and perhaps Eusehius VC 59-62.
t 90f Eustathius and Cymatius, de quorum vita inJami et turp; dicendum nihil est;
exitus enim illorum eos omnibus declaravit (Hilary Col. Ar. A IV.27(66)). Declercq
(Ossius 350) has no right to translate this as 'their recent fate'.
 Period of Confusion
Ventriloquist'),20 but his fragments have been edited by Spanneut. 21
From these we can gain a fair idea of his theological outlook. 22 One
outstanding feature of his thought is that he recognized the existence
of a human soul or mind (psyche) in Christ, and did so because this
soul was able to endure the human experiences which it was unfitting
for the divine element in Christ to endure, in opposition to the Arians
who taught that the Son suffered:
'Why do they think it so important to demonstrate that Christ
assumed a body without a soul, in the course of thinking up
deceptions that savour of the earth? It is so that they can bamboozle
people into deciding that this is true; then because they attach the
mutable nature of passions to the divine Spirit, they may easily
persuade people that it is not possible that the mutable should be
begotten from the immutable.'2'
Christ's human soul, he says, preceded that of the Penitent Thiefinto
Paradise. 24 His anxiety to protect God from human experiences
shows itself in other ways: he said that the expression 'born of a
woman' (Gal 4:4) meant that God initiated the birth, but· not that
God was born of a woman; rather 'the man was born of a woman
who was united with ("ayel<;) the Holy Spirit in the Virgin's
womb.'25 It was not the Logos nor Wisdom who forbade Mary to
touch him after the Resurrection (John 20:17), but the man
composed oflimbs who had just risen from the dead. 26 It was not the
Logos nor Wisdom that was crucified, but the man. 27 The Logos
2°Edited by Jahn Texte und Untersuchungen n.2. and preceded by a reprinting of
Origen's trea~ment of the subject from cap. 16 of the Homilies on 1 Samuel.
2t5ee above, p.208 01.
22Accounts of Eustathius' theology as a whole can be found in Sellers Eustathius
85-120; Spanneut 'La Position theologique d'Eustache d'Antioche' 220-4; and
Simonetti Crisis 71-5. No account is here taken of the Sermo Maior de Fide (which
Schwartz was anxious to attribute to Eustathius) because its theological vocabulary,
though not that of the latest phase of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity,
is altogether toO far advanced to suggest the thought of Eustathius. For the same
reason the works against Photinus are not considered. See Schwartz 'Zur
Kirchengeschichte' 159-60; Spanneut Recherches 82-3,87"'"90, 127. The theory that
Eustathius survived his deposition for a long time and in his later years developed
and enlarged his theological vocabulary rests on tenuous foundations.
"Spanneut Recherches frag. 15(100).
"Ibid. frag 17(100).
"Ibid. frag 18(101).
"Ibid. frag 24(102, 103).
"Ibid. frag 25(103).
212
Eustathius and Marcellus
attached to the human organism is not affected by human
expenences:
'For if Paul declared that the Lord of glory was crucified, manifestly
thinking of the man, there will be no need because of this to attribute
human experience (pathos) to the Divine.'28
He distinguishes between 'the Logos who is God who is begotten by
him' (i.e. the Father) and 'Christ's man' who was raised from the dead
and is exalted and glorified. 29 He speaks of'he who anoints' who is
God, 'He who has anointed' who is 'God by nature begotten from
God', and 'he who is anointed' that is the human body who was
adorned by the Godhead dwelling in it.'o God who dwelt in the
hum'an body could not have been led to death nor slain like a lamb."
There is a highly significant fragment found in a Syriac translation:'2
'in this hypostasis both (sc. Father and Son) accomplish wonders. The
divine books over and over again refer their majesty to One, so that
they produce duality out of singularity or declare singularity from
duality, because there is one hypostasis of the Godhead.'
This 'one hypostasis' of the Godhead was to become the slogan and
rallying-cry of the continuing Eustathians. But the man whom the
Logos assumed was a complete man: 'he consists of soul and body; it
was proper that he should show by the human and innocent passions
(i.e. the need to drink, to sleep, the manifestation of sadness,
weariness etc.) that God wholly clothed himself with a complete man
not spectrally nor hypothetically but in very truth. '3, And he uses the
expression 'God-bearing man'.34 He calls God the Word 'the image
of the divine substance' and the man his 'true temple', '5 and protests
violently against attributing suffering to God the Word. 36 God hid
28lbid. frag 27(103): cf. frag 28(103), 29-31(104).
29lbid. frag 33 (106).
,olbid. frag 36(107); the context is Ps 45(44):8.
"Ibid. frag 37(107).
32Ibid. frag 38(107); I translate here Lebon's translation into Latin of Asseman's
Syriac text; Lebon's translation runs thus: Hac enim <hypostasi> a";bo invisibili
modo mira peragunt. Eorum porro magnificentiam multototies uni ita referunt librj divini
< ut > -dualitatem ex singularitate introducant aut ex dualitate singularitatem praedicent
quia divinitatis una est lIypostasis. '
"Ibid. frag 41(108).
"Ibid. 42(108), 59(112), deiferum hominem, presumably 8eccp6pov liv8p<mtov.
"Ibid. frag 44(109).
'6lbid. frag 46(109).
 Period of Confosion
the knowledge of the day of the Second Coming from the man,37
but the divine element in Jesus Christ was omniscient, hence Christ's
rebuke to Mary at the marriage in Cana. 38 It is the man who sits at
God's right hand.'9 He interprets the crucial text Proverbs 8:22
(LXX) 'The Lord created me the beginning of his ways', not of the
Logos but of the human body ofJesus. 4o And he declares that 'Christ's
man' was foreknown by God and determined in the depth of the
divine mind. 41 Finally it is interesting to note that among the
fragments of Eustathius' works there is one distinguishing carefully
between 'created' (ktistos) and 'begotten' (gennetos) and insisting that
the latter can apply to the Son but not the former. 42
Eustathius' essay on the Witch of Endor is a curious document. He
violently attacks Origen in it, objecting to various points of his policy
of allegorizing (none of which appears in Origen's extant treat~ent
of the same subject). In fact in his exposition of the story Ongen
specifically insists on its actual,literal, truth, asking, 'Is it true or is it
riot true?', and refusing to allow that the witch merely pretended to
consult the spirit of Samuel (a theory with which he is well
acquainted), because, since Scripture records it, it must have
happened. Eustathius maintains that the witch, possessed of a
daemon, invented the whole business of recalling Samuel's spirit. His
essay does not involve any.material relevant to his doctrine of God,
except that at one point he tries to distinguish the Father and the Son,
in connection with an appeal to Deut 13.1-3, which ends thus: 'for
the Lord your God proves you, to know whether you love the Lord
your God with all your heart and with all your soul'. Eustathius says;
'Here (the text) presents the Dyad (ouaoa) of the Father and the only-
begotten Son; naming one of them as the Lord who proves, but the
other as well as this one as the Lord and God who is loved, so that it
teaches the one Godhead out of the Dyad (ou6.oo<;) and the true divine
begetting (etoyovlav).43
It is obvious here that Eustathius has no vocabulary to express what
frag 49(110).
"Ibid.
frag 69(117).
"Ibid.
frag 50(110).
"Ibid.
frag 60(112).
4·Ibid.
frag 61(112).
41 Ibid.
frag. 57(1 II).
42Ibid.
"De Engasl,imylho XXIV (65).
214
Eustathius and Marcellus
the Son is that the Father is not, and has not thought out the
theological consequences of this distinction.
It is in some ways curious to find Eustathius attacking Origen,
because he is one of the very few theologians in the first half of the
fourth century to share Origen's view that the incarnate Logos had a
human soul, and to see the significance of the Arians' denial of this
doctrine. But he must have found Origen's doctrine of the three
hypostases in the Godhead uncongenial, and he shows no sign of
agreeing with Alexander of Alexandria in reproducing Origen's
doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. In fact, anti-Arian
though he w,,-,-" he shares with Arius the term Dyad in speaking of the
relation of the Father to the Son. He has no objection to speaking of
the 'begetting' of the Son, distinguishing it from creation. He appears
to be confused about the relation of the Spirit to the Son. For him the
Incarnation is an assumption of a man by the Logos so that the Logos
dwells in him, as in a Temple; the human being absorbs all the human
experiences attributed to Christ in the Gospels, leaving the divine
element untouched. His weakest point is his incapacity to distinguish
between the Father and the Son in the Godhead:' 'the Logos for
Eustathius,' says Loofs, 'the advocate of the Ilia ouaia (one ousia) or
67t6a~a(Jt<; (hypostasis) of the Father and of the Son, has or is no proper
hypostasis.'44 Sellers concludes, on the subject of Eustathius'
theology:45
'it would seem that Eustathius, who never definitely expresses the
hypostasis of the Son, and who unflinchingly maintains the Ilia 8e6'1],
(one Godhead), holds that the Logos is but an attribute of the one
Divinity,. which when put forth becomes the divine tvtpyela
(energy). Eustathius speaks of the Son as going forth from the Father
and dwelling as an 'energy' in Jesus. We can only conclude that he
regards the Logos - with which we include the other terms that he
uses synonymously46 - as the potentiality of God, omnipresent as
God's activity.'
He probably understood the begetting of the Son in terms of the
Logos-immanent and Logos-proceeding (Logos endiathetos and Logos
prophorikos, which had been used ever since the second century), and
represented the type of thought condemned by Arius for employing
44PtmiU5 von Samosata 296, 297, quoted by Sellers, Bustathi"s 88.
45 Eustalhius 90.
:;)
, 46For Eustathius '1tv£ijp.a (pneuma) was in some sense a synonym for Logos'. ibid.
85·
?T c:

Period of Confusion
the concept of 'issue'.47 His theology appears very like that of
Marcellus, and only differs from his in minor respects. He does not
(pace Loofs) envisage the Logos or Son as later withdrawing into the
Father again after his procession out from him, and for Eustathius the
Son as Son is the image of God and the man assumed is the image of
the Son. This is not Marcellus' doctrine. 48 There is no evidence that
Athanasius was influenced by Eustathius; he might have used
Eustathius' recognition of the human soul ofJesus to advantage, but
did not. Nor can we confidently trace Eustathius as one in the series of
theologians of the hypothetical 'Antiochene' school. 49 He does not
object to allegorisation as such; his treatment of Pro v 8:22 shows that;
he only dislikes some ofOrigen's uses of that ambiguous technique.
His determination to protect the Godhead from enduring human
experiences is not unique to him. Athanasius was a Iittlelater to show
just as great an inclination to do so.
It is not surprising, however, that Eustathius was condemned for
Sabellianism. His insistence that there is only one distinct reality
(hypostasis) in the Godhead, and his confusion about distinguishing
Father, Son and Holy Spirit laid him open to such a charge. He could
have replied (and, for all we know, did reply) that the notorious
anathema in N gave him every encouragement to believe that there is
only one distinct reality in the Godhead. He certainly would have
had no difficulty in accepting the homoousios, nor in agreeing to the
equality of Father and Son, though he was uncertain about how they
were distinct. It was long before the confusion caused by N was to be
cleared up. The existence of a school of thought holding Eustathius'
views did nothing to clear the confusion. But it is easy to see that in
this medley of opinions it is quite unrealistic to indulge in the business
oflabelling some as 'heretical' and some as 'orthodox'. It is not even
helpful to divide theological opinion at this point into 'Origenist' and
'anti-Origenist'; Arius, Alexander, Eusebius of Caesarea and
Eustathius all have recognizably Origenist doctrines among their
47Ibid. 90; for 'issue' (probole) see above P·7.
48S e ll ers Eustathius 93-4; Simonetti Studi 44-8.
49$0 Sellers and several others: for later heirs of Eustathius' tradition, see Sellers
I I 4-20. The fourth book of Or. con A,. (widely recognised to be non-Athanasian) -.
may be a document of the continuing Eustathian group. It insists on the existence of
only one IIYPoslasis (regarded as synonymous with the ousia) in the Godhead,
warmly appr9ves of attaching the word homoousios to the Son and attacks both
Arianism and a doctrine exactly like that of Marcellus and his school.
216
•
Bustathius and Marcellus
theological ideas. But none can be recognized as either an heir to
Origen nor as somebody who owed nothing to him.
2. Marcellus of Ancyra 50
It seems likely .that Marcellus was present, and indeed presided, at the
Council of Ancyra, which is usually placed in the year 3 14. Some
MSS of the account of this council say that Vitalis. of Antioch
presided, others give the name of Marcellus; probably Vitalis' name
was substituted for that of Marcellus because Marcellus was known to
scribes as an heretic. 51 He took an active part in the proceedings of the
Council of Nicaea,· though precisely what part we do not know,
except that it was anti-Arian. 52 About ten years after the Council of
Nicaea he was deposed by a council held in Constantinople. The
exact date of his deposition and the exact reason for it are disputed. It
was in either 335 or 336, most probably in 336. Some time after the
Council ofNicaea, perhaps about 330, he had written against a work
of Asterius (not his Syntagmation but a letter defending Paulinus of
Tyre), a book of an anti-Arian colour. 53 At the Council ofJerusalem
and the Council of Tyre in the same year he had supported
Athanasius. At the Council of Jerusalem he agreed to destroy his
book, which was accused offavouring the ideas of Paul ofSamosata.
But when at a council held in Constantinople (probably next year
336) the matter was brought up again, he refused to withdraw the
book and was deposed for heresy. Basil, already eminent for his
theological skill, was chosen to succeed him. It was immediately after
50For Marcellus, see Harnack, History IV.65, 66; Gwatkin AC 53-5 (including
the extraordinary statement, 55, 'as far as doctrine went, there was very little to
choose between Arius and Marcellus') SA 79-80; Gericke, Marcellus von Ancyra
(28-70 review of previous scholarship on the subject); GriHmeier CCT 274
(bibliography) and 28S--9~ Simonetti Crjsi 66--71; Tetz 'Zur Theologie des Markell
von Ancyra' I, II and III; 'MarceHianister und Athanasius von Alexandrien'. Jerome,
De Vir. Ill. LXXXVI (44) is worth very little. For phases of Marcellus' career see
Schwartz, Gesamm. Schrift. 6.122, 123; 8,230-6, 272-3; 9.269-71, 292-4. 301--'7;
Loofs 'Arianismus' 21, 22; Ritter 'Arianismus' 707.
51 Gericke Marcellus 7.
52Evidence for this. frag 129 ('some people ... whom I refuted in the Council of
Nicaea'); Athanasius Apol. Secunda 23, 32 (Gericke op. cit. 8»).
53According to Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus was attacking a formidable
number of people in this book: Asterius, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Paulinus ofTyre
(who was dead by then), Narcissus ofNeronias. Origen and Eusebius himself (Con.
Marcel/urn 1.4.7,8 (24:752)).
7. T'7
 Period of Confusion
Marcellus' deposition that Eusebius of Caesarea wrote his Contra
Marcel/um, his chief attack on Marcellus' theological position. 54 Both
Eusebius and Athanasius remark that Marcellus was already an old
man when he was deposed and exiled. 55 On the death of the Emperor
Constantine in 337, Marcellus, with all the exiled bishops still alive,
returned to Ancyra, his former see, but was exiled again in the year
338 or 339, presumably by the Emperor Constantius and presumably
because his presence in Ancyra was causing embarrassment, after
another (smaller) council held at Constantinople. 56 Marcellus then
moved to Rome, and waited there for over a year in expectation of a
measure designed to vindicate his orthodoxy from the bishop Julius
of Rome. After a year and three months he wrote a letter to Julius
asking for this vindication, and enclosing a formal statement of his
belief. This creed, which he says he received when he was taught
religion by his parents, is closely related to one which can be
reconstructed from Rufmns' Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum
(PL 21:335-386), and this in its tum was identified by Ussher in the
xviith century as the contemporary creed of the Roman Church. In
response to this move,Julius, in the year 341, summoned a council to
Rome, which vindicated the orthodoxy of Marcellus, as well as that
of Athanasius who had reached Rome after Marcellus in the course of
his second exile. 57 Marcellus remained in the West till the Council of
5450 most convincingly Simonetti C,jsi I3 1-2, except that he places the
deposition in 335 and not 336. Cf. Gericke op. cit. la, Zeiller Origineschretiennes 218.
Gericke thinks that he was deposed for having refused to attend the dedication of
Constantine's Church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem in 335. but this is unlikely.
Eusebius says that Marcellus was deposed at a syno~ of bishops from Pontus,
Cappadocia, Asia, Phrygia, Bithynia. Thrace and the parts beyond it, that
Constantine tnen exiled him. and this in spite of the fact that Marcellus had flattered
the Emperor greatly in his writings (Con. Marc. 11-4(58) (821, 824)). This suggests
Constantinople as the venue for the deposing coood} rather thanJerusalem or Tyre.
and does not fit well with the idea that Marcellus refused to attend the dedication of
Constantine's church. Schwartz had placed the deposition in 330, misled by Socrates
HE 11.42. Sozomenus HE 11.3.3.1-4 says that Marcellus was deposed for
unorthodoxy, that he had refused to attend the councils of eitherJerusalem (with the
dedication of the Church) or Tyre. and was finally condemned at Constantinople,
and that the bishops who condemned him afterwards circulated a letter giving their
reasons. Barnes. Constantine and Eusebius 240-2, accepts 336 as the date of Marcellus'
fall.
sSEusebius Eee, Theol. 2; Athanasius Hist. Ar. 6.
56 50 Gericke op. cit. 13, following Loofs; Opitz note in loco on Apol. Secunda
p. 130; the evidence comes from Marcellus'letter to Julius; cf. Hilary Coll. AT. A
IV.9(55), the Encyelical of the Easterners at Serdica,
"See Barnard 'Pope Julius, Marcellus of Ancyra and the Council of Sardica'
218
Eustathius and Marcellus
Serdica, in 343, when he accompanied the Western bishops to that
town. After the disagreement between the Eastern and the Western
bishops at Serdica, the Easterners renewed their accusation of
unorthodoxy against Marcellus and added an atrocity story about his
having insulted consecrated virgins. 58 The Westerners, on their part,
in their circular greet Marcellus as 'most beloved brother and fellow-
bishop', call him the bishop of Ancyra, make counter-allegations of
atrocities perpetrated by Eastern bishops, and say that Marcellus is
innocent of teaching that Mary gave the beginning to God the Word
(one of the charges mentioned by the Eastern bishops) and that
Christ's reign shall have no end (the other charge), because he only
put forward these views as suggestions without approving of them. 59
Not much is known of the rest of the career of Marcellus: In 344 or
about then he probably returned to Ancyra. 6o Several other bishops
returned at about this time (i.e. after Easter 344 when the debacle
concerning Stephen of Antioch caused a temporary thaw in the cold
war between East and West), but the retnrn of Marcellus again caused
disturbances in Ancyra. 61 Hilary, on the other hand, says that
69-74; Gericke op. cit. 13, 14 (though his dates differ a little); Simonetti Crisi 143-9 ..
The theological content ofMarcellus' letter to Julius is considered below, pp. 230-1.
The events of this period are traced in greater detail below pp. 262-'73 in connection
with the career of Athanasius. The fact that Marcellus declares that what was clearly
the local Roman creed was what he had learnt at his mother's knee need not give rise
to suppositions (as it has with some scholars) that in Marcellus' creed we have the
local creed of Ancyra, because when they make statements like these the ancients
invariably refer to the content of the creed considered as a whole and not to its form
nor its details; see R. P. C. Hanson 'Dogma and Formula in the Fathers' in Studies in
Christian Antiquity. Incidentally Marcellus'·reference to learning Christianity from
his parents does not agree with Gwatkin's suggestion (SA So nl) that his errors in
quoting Scripture show that he was not born of Christian parents.
"Hilary Coll. Arian. A 1V.2 (4!r5 0 ), 3 (50-1),9 (55). In 3 (50-I) they reveal that
he had been condemned at Constantinople.
59Hilary, op. cit., B 11.1(105), 3(11 1),6(117'-8); the Encyclical is also available in
Athanasius Apol. Secunda 44-9 and Theodoret HE II.S (Greek translations) and in
Cassiodorus Historia Tripartita IV.24 (Latin tr. of Theodoret's Greek); see also
Ossius' Letter written after Serdica Turner EOMIA I, 645, 648. For these events see
Simonetti Crisi 172-3; Gericke op. cit. 17-19; Barnard 'Pope Julius' 75-9.
Grillmeier CCT 272 is represented as saying that 'when the synod of Sardica in
342/3 took Marcel1us' side against the charges of the Orientals, Athanasius, the
leader of the Nicenes, spoke only of "the tatters ofSardica" '. But Athanasius did
not use this term of the Western Encyclical till about 20 years later. It looks as if
Grillmeier's English translator has here in ignorance betrayed him, rendering as
'when' a word which should have been translated 'although'.
6°S chwartz, 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 142; Declercq Ossius 417-S (dating 347).
61 Socrates HE 11.24; Sozomenus HE 111.23-4; Athanasius Apol. Secunda I and 58.

Period of Confusion
Marcellus never returned to his see, and that this argued a
consciousness in him of his being heretical, and in the same pa~sage
n
declares that Athanasius, unconstrained by any synod~l declSlo
(because he could not have recognized the condemnatIOn of the
Eastern bishops at Serdica), and without reference to a~y particular
work of Marcellus, about this time dissociated himself from
Marcellus. 62 Several writers have accepted one or both of these
statements as correct. 63 But it is probable that Hilary is wrong on
both counts. Marcellus almost certainly returned to .Ancyra II'; 337,
and very probably in 344 or 345. And AthanaslUs m wntmgs
produced several years after this time continued to defend the
orthodoxy ofMarcellus. 64 Epiphanius relates ~n mterestmg anecdote
about this: he says that he once asked AthanaslUs wha~ he thought of
Marcellus. 'He neither embarked on a defence of him nor on the
other hand did he bitterly attack him, but by the appearance of a
smile on his face he intimated that Marcellus was not far from er~or
(~oXOT]piac;), but that he was to be excused.'65 Ath.anasius' expression
may also have betokened a desire to get nd politely of an
embarrassing question from a bore. But we may be sure.that, though
he may temporarily at this period, when he was preparmg to return
from his second exile, have wished to place a distance between
himself and Marcellus, he had no intention of making a final break
with him. It is doubtful if he ever did this. EpiphanlUs tells us that
Marcellus died two or three years before the moment when he IS
writing Panarion 72.1 (255), and this must m~an 374 or 375 at the
latest. We do not know where Marcellus died; It may have been m or
For the 'affaire Stephen' see below, p. 307. Klein Constantius II lIS ment.ions. this
return and its result. dating it 343 or 344. I think that we must connect It With a
sequel to Stephen's faU at Easter 344. so that 343 is toO early.
"Coll. Antiarian BIl9.2(22) and 3(23). Hilary certainly regarded Marcellus as
heretical; see De Trinitate VIl.3(262). . ,. . ?eiegatlon to A~ha?aSlUS he was In Ancyra. His age probably rendered him
63S hwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 145-0 (as far as Athanaslus dlstancmg
c mno.cuous t~ BasIl hIS successor who did not on other occasions show himself tender
himselfis concerned)~ Zeiller Les Origines 265 ..who. thinks th~t Marcel~us may h~ve
been in Illyricum. not Ancyra, when AthanaSlus disowned him; Meshn. Les Anens
264-6. Klein even talks of a 'final break' in 345 (Constantius 8?). .
64Apol. de Fuga (written 3S7) 3.3-{i(70); Apol. Secunda (also wntten in 3S7) 32.1-4
(IIO, II I); Hist. Arian. 6 (written 3S 8). . . ,
65Panarion 7 2 .4.4(259). Gericke. who thinks that at the time of .Athan.aslus
distancing himself from him Marcellus was in Illyricum. regarded t~lS partlcular
expression of Athanasius as intending approval of Marcellus. He thlOks that the
coolness was only temporary. and was accepted by Marcellus as such (Marcellus
2<>-2).
Eustathius and Marcellus
near Ancyra, from where his disciples had for long carried on his
theological tradition, and had thence sent a delegation to
Athanas~us.66 If we make the reasonable assumption that Marcellus
had preSIded as bishop of Ancyra over the council held there in 3 '4,
I.e. he was then at least 30 years old, and probably, in view of the
observatio?s about his age when he was later deposed, older, he must
when he dIed have been a very old man. He had outlived Athanasius.
Som~ of t~work of Marcellus can be recovered from fragments
quoted I~ the books of those who wrote against him, mainly from
EuseblUs Contra Marcel/um. 67 We do not know the title of the book
which he wrote against Asterius and which Eusebius of Caesarea
attacked. 6s We also have the text ofhis Letter to Julius ofRome written
m. 3.41, preser~ed for us by Epiphanius. 69 Several other works
ongmally attrIbuted· to a variety of other authors have been
conjecturally assigned to Marcellus. Of these, one of the most likely is
a short work known as Expositio Fidei attributed to Athanasius by the
MSS.70 Its theology echoes certain points characteristic of Marcellus
the rejection of 'three hypostases divided from each other' the use of
the term 'the Lord's man: (KuplaKoc; iivOpolltoC;) for the h;man body
of ChrISt .. The work IS neIther Arian nor Ca ppadocian nor
Hom01o~slan. nor Pneumatomachian nor shows any influence from
th~ Apollina~lal'; Controversy. There is also a work called variously
Ep,stula ad L,benum and Contra Theopaschitas which has come down
to .us m several forms, the most reliable version of which has been
pnnted by Te.tz 'Zur theologie des Markell von Ankyra III' (159ft). It
h~d been attrIbuted to Athanasius traditionally. Schwartz wished to
gIve It to ~ustathius of Antioch, but Tetz has made a convincing case
for asslgnmg the authorship to Marcellus'?' It insists that there is only
66See b~Jow, ~.222. Schwartz, 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 188, confidently places
Marcellus death In 375, but then when did Schwartz not write confidently? Gericke
(Marcel!us 26-7) opts ~or 374. and ~elieves that when in 371 his disciples sent a
to hIS enemies. .
67They are collected in the GCS edition of that work
68?ericke (op .. cit. 29 n3) conjectures that it was caned 'On Recognizing One
God, (see Eusebms Bee. Theol. Praef. p.60 and frag. II S).
69Panarion 72.2.1-3.5 (256-259).
70PG 25:199-208: see also Scheidweiler 'Bin Glaubenbekenntnis' 237-8 a better
text. '
7t:Zur .Th~ologie Ill', 14S-S8, also see PG 28:1441-S. The attempt of F.
Scheldweder, Em Glaubenbekenntnis des Eustathius von Antiochien?' to show that
 Period of Confusion
one hypostasis and one ousia in God; it resembles the con~ession of the
Western bishops at Serdica. It can hardly have been wntten early or
very late in Marcellus' career as ~ ~riter. If we are to accept the
address to Pope Liberius as authentic It should be placed between 352
dn 66 A third work which we can attribute to Marcellus IS the
a 3·. d'hh
famous Sermo Maior de Fide,72 which is largely concerne Wit t e
doctrine of the Incarnation; it may be placed between t~e .years 325
and 350. It consists of a number of quotations of the ongma! work
culled from florilegia. There is also a work tr~dlt1onal~y ascnbed to
Athanasius called De Incarnatione et Contra Artanos which has many
striking resemblances to Marcellus' theology in it, resemblances
hich Tetz has effectively drawn out. 73 But there are two features m
~is work which suggest that it cannot have been written long bdore
370 (as Tetz admits, op. cit. 270), its careful doctrine of the dlvmlty ~f
the Holy Spirit, and the reference to those who declare that the Son IS
unlike (aV6)!010v) to the Father (1(983)), which suggests the eXistence
of a Neo-Arian party. But by 370, indeed well before 370, Marcellus
was probably a very old man. Th.e Marcella~ di~ci~les who se~t the
document called the Eugenii LegatlO et Confemo Fldet t~ AthanaslUs m
371 mention Marcellus as still alive but do not claim to brmg a
message direct from him. It seems highly hkely that by then he was
not compos mentis enough to communicat~ with Ath~nasius. 74 It
would therefore be temerarious to attnbute to him the De
Incarnatione et Contra Arianos if, as seems necessary, we must place that
document as late as 369 or 370. We must attribute this work to
it was written by Eustathius is not convincing. His reasons ,for refusing it .to
Marcellus are tenuous, and his own theory depends upon assummg that EustathlU~
lived well beyond 337 If the atfmities between this work and the Westerners
Encyclical after Serdic~ are genuine. then,. on this theory. the silence of that
Encyclical about Eustathius is incomprehenstble. . . . mod~fied t~s eccentric d~ctrine; his disciples may have made a point
72Text, Schwartz Sitzungberichte der Wiener Akademle der W,ssenschaftltche~. P~.­
Hist.-KI. Section, 1924.6, 3-63; PG. 26:1264--96 (a text w~ose errors J~stlfr
Schwartz's description of it (p. S) as a cloaca maxima). See Tetz, Zur Theologle II .
Schwartz wanted to give it to Eustathius, but once again ?n th~ ~ssump~ion that he
survived for many years afler 337. The Christology IS strik~ngly lIke that of
Marcellus. Tetz prefers to call it Epistula ad Antiochenos foll~wmg t~e ,ArmeOlan
version (see R. P. Casey 'The Pseudo-Athanasian Sermo Malor de FIde, ]ThS 35
(1934) 394-5). and the Latin of Facundus of Hermtane.
73'Zur Theologie l' 223-,/0; text to be found PG 26:983-IO.~8. .
74For a full discussion and edition of the text of the Eugenu LegatlD, see Tetz
'Markellianer und Athanasios von Alexandrien', and for his discussion of the date,
pp. II6-19. The text can also be found in PG 18:1277",,8.
222
Eustathius and Marcellus
Marcellus' disciples rather than to Marcellus himself Then there is a
little. treatise known as De Sancta Ecciesia found in a G~eek MS in the
Ambrosian Library, Milan, originally attributed to Anthimus who
was bis~op ofNicomedia and was martyred 302, but now universally
recogmsed as of Marcellan provenance. 75 It has recognizably
Marcellan d0-8I'ine in it, but the clear references in it to Neo-
Arianism necessitate our placing it at a very late stage in Marcellus'
life, so that the attempt to attribute it directly to his hand meets the
same ~bstacle as that encountered by De Inc. et Con Arianos. 76 Finally,
there IS the Bpistula Liberii ad Athanasium,77 which purports to be a
letter of LlberlUs of Rome to Athanasius, but manifestly is a
document exhibiting several Marcellan traits, such as an insistence on
only one hypostasis with one ousia in the Godhead; Tetz thinks it
cannot be by Marcellus because of its marked concern for the divinity
of the Holy Spirit. It also insists that the Logos at the Incarnation
assumed 'a whole man' (~eAelovlivBpCl>7tOV) i.e. a human body with an
human soul. This trait Tetz takes to be anti-Apollinarian, but it could
equally well be anti-Arian, rejecting the doctrine of the 'soulless
body' (soma apsychon) of Christ. He believes that this document
belonged to a corpus of Marcellan documents preserved by the
followers of P~ulinus ~f Antioch at Antioch when the continuing
Eustathians, With Paulmus as their bishop, and the followers of
Marcellus coalesced there. 78 The fact that it opts for one hypostasis
does not mean (as Tetz appears to think) that we must date it some
time before the Council of Alexandria in 362. It is noticeable that this
work at one point deliberately parts from a characteristic doctrine of
Marcellus. It affirms (§1, p. 192) that the Son 'possesses his kingdom
end~essly for infinite ages'. Marcellus had originally taught that the
Son ~ kmgd.om would have an end. Later in his Letter to Julius, he
of rejectm.g It. It IS most hkely that this document was composed by
some of his school, who were ready to sacrifice one of their master's
original doctrines which they considered unimportant in order to
preserve the point' which. was to them crucial, that there was one
"Published by G. Mercati Studi e Testi 5 (1901). Discussed by Tetz 'Zur
Theologie 1'.
76For these signs of Nco-Arianism, see R. P. C. Hanson 'The Date and
Authorship of Pseudo-Anthimus, De Sanda Ecclesia'.
77Text edited by Tetz, 'Zur Theologie III', 192-4.
78S ee Tetz 'Zur Theologie 1', 23 2 -S.
 Period of Confusion
hypostasis with one ousia only. It is possible that the treatise 'was
originally addressed to Athanasius (and therefore cannot be later than
373), but not, of course, by Liberius. . denotmg a second divine Being. 85 'There is no more recent God of
Marcellus' theological position can be reco~structed to so~e finr
extent. Eusebius of Caesarea in his book attacking Ma~cellus gIves us
several paraphrases and several extracts from Marcellus controversIal
book. Marcellus, he says:
'assumed that the Son was a mere word (\jIlMv Myov) and testified
that he was only a word, and constantly ~epeated this statement that
the Logos was nothing else, immanent durmg. the !lme that the Father
was silent, but active in fashioning t~e creatlOn, Just as o.~~ speech IS
inactive when we are silent, but active when we speak.
And again, Marcellus taught that
'the Logos himself alone was united to God; and this (united being) was
eternal and unbegotten, and was one and the same thing as God,. called
by the distinct names of Father and Son, but one m oUSla and
hypostasis.'80
In spite of the fact that this is almost a q~otation fro~ N, Eusebius
regards· this doctrine as outright Sabelhamsm, that IS a faIlure to
distinguish Father and Son. The much-quoted text 'The Father and I
are One' On 10:30) referred, according to Marcellus, not to the umon
of God the Father and God the Son but to that of God the Father and
God the Logos, and he quoted some texts to show that there eXIsted a
lack of harmony between Father and Son, Matt 26:39; Jn 5:30 and
. 81 He asked 'What was that which came down before the
14·9· . h . h d h t
Incarnation?' (i.e. made itself apparent to t e patrIarc s an prop e s
etc. in the OT), and answered, 'Of course, Spirit'.82 It was not the
Logos that was begotten, but the Son.83 It was not a matte~ ofon:
unbegotten and one begotten God. The world and everything m It
have been produced by one God-with-Logos. The Logos cannot be
separated from God and regarded as 'produced.' any more. than a
man's logos (word) can. God did not need anything for makmg the
world more than 'the actual plan in his own mind'. 84 God is God
"Contra Marcellum (1.1.4(24:717».
s·Ibid·1.1.4(24:718).
"Ibid. 1l.2.38(24:788.792) frag 64.
82Ibid. 1l.2.35(24:784), frag 82, 49.
83Ibid. 1l.2.36(24:785) frag 31.
"Ibid. 1l.2.39, 40(24:792). frag 92. 93. 55. 53·
224
Eustathius and Marcellus
only ~nd there is no other than he: Logos is not a roundabout way of
any Sort. nor any other later God capable of cooperating with
God.'86 The well-known text at Gn 1 :26 'Let us make man in Our
own image' is not the proof of a second divine being. but it is an
idiomatic usage, as if a sculptor were to say 'Come, let us make a
statue' having first intended and designed the statue in his mind. 87
The Logos was only called Son orJesus or Christ after the Incarnation
and if the OT calls him Son it is so only prophetically: the 'first bo~
of all creation' (Col 1:16, 17) is this Logos-with-human_body, and
the much-used text Prov 8:22 referred to the incarnate, not to the
pre-existent Logos.88 The flesh. which does not profit could not be
destined to be associated permanently with the Logos: so 'this 'Son'
would, in accordance with 1 Cor 15:28, eventually separate from the
Logos and the Logos would return to the Father.89 Eusebius'
Ecclesiastical Theology tells us a little more about the ideas of
Marcellus. He objected to Asterius' statement that the Logos was
begotten before the ages. For Marcellus, it is altogether too
anthropomorphic to say that the Logos was begotten; better to say
that he was put forth. John the evangelist had not said that the Logos
was begotten: '(God's) Logos came forth from the Father in order
that everything should come into existence through him. ' But when
all opposing powers shall have been put down, then the Logos will
retu~n to God. In orde~ to be created, the world needed (not merely
Go~ ~ power (dynamts) whIch was always there, but) 'creative
actIVIty (OPUO"tIlCi) tvtpysw)'. This the Logos supplied.90 Eusebius
more than once accuses Marcellus of reverting to an earlier, and, to
him: discredited, t?eology of an 'immanent' and 'proceeding'
(endtathetos, prophonkos) Logos, entailing a Trinity which was not
"Ibid. 1l.2.41(24:793) frag 68. 40.
s'lbid. 1l.2.4I(24:793) frag 52.
"Ibid. 1l.2.41-42(24:793-796) frag 52.
S8Ibid. 1l·3.43-4, 46. 47(24:797. Boo. BOI) frag 36. 9. 10. 13. '4. 17. Cf. 1.2.9.
10(24:73 2-3) frag I; II. 12(24:737) frag 16. 109; 12(24:740) frag 23;
II.3.4~-4(2~:797) frag 36. He even makes the statement which must have been
shockmg!y mnovatory to his.contemp~raries
that 'God' (theos) and 'Lord' (kyrios) in
the OT dld not denote two dlfferent bemgs, but were identical (Eee. Theol. 11.19. 4,
12
12
5 (frag 6B. 69. 50)). There was only one God in the QT. not two (ibid.
1l.19. I26(frag 67». Cf. SImonetti Studi 3B-40.
"Ibid. n.3.45(24:BoO). frag 104. n.2.42(24:796) frag loB.
1l.B.106-B (frag 31, 2B, lOB, 54).
'·Ecclesiastical Theology
 Period of Confusion
Bustathius and Maree lIus

t al 91 But in fact Marcellus is probably doing no more t~an to

~n~: that God did not create throu~h a~ i?te~mediar~ hypo(~~sls~~~~ world) come forth. 96 Even when in Coil: 16, 17 Christ is called 'the
first born of all creation', he is so only as incarnate,,7 Marcellus
direct Eusebius gives us Marcellus Tr11Utanan theo ogy I s~ distinguished his position from that of Sabellius, because, he said,
n b~ called) in a long extract, taken, as are all the extr;cts m th~
~:clesiastical Theology, from the same book which cause so muc Sabellius would not recognize a Logos, but God can only be known
through IUs Logos. 98 He frequently either substituted 'Logos' for 'Son'
offence: in quoting the utterances of Jesus or glossed the word 'Son' with
Logos"9 Before the foundation of the world God existed without a
'It is impossible that three who are hypost~ses should be ~n;~d hinl a Son. The Logos is not in himself Son but is identical with God.
M d nless the Trinity has first had its ongm m a Mona . e ? y Neither Son nor Logos can be separated from God in either power or
onasaid
Paul ,uthat they were summed up m . a Monad (Eph no). .' .and thiSls
I hypostasis. 100 His doctrine that the Logos was first 'silent' in God and
no different from the unity which is God; the Logos and Spmt are on y later was put forth to become 'articulate' (crl]J!UVtlKO<;), always on the
distinct from Go d m . '92
· unity.
analogy of a silently conceived and then uttered word, is not really
identical with the earlier (originally Stoic) doctrine of Word
M llus in this fragment, opposes Asterius' statement that there are immanent and Word proceeding. The 'image of the invisible God' is
arc~ ;stases' 'the Monad is indivisible and would extend mto ~ the flesh of the Saviour; the only-begotten Son (i.e. Logos + assumed
flesh) is not the image of God. 102
three YP
Trimty' and I'f' th e Spmt, .. f,or instance , were a separate
. . fhypostaSIS
h S
. . ;, m the Father he would not need the mmlstry 0 t eon, Marcellus' had, of course, a doctrine of the Incarnation. He took
~~~:~e ~~ would be perfect, or, ifhe received from ~he
Fafither a~d virtually all the texts which had from time immemorial been used by
Christian theologians to apply to the pre-existent Son, and applied
.. d . the Son's power then he did not ISsue rom t e
mmlStere grace 10 . . d d f om the then instead to the incarnate Logos (i.e. in his view, the Son proper),
Father In fact Marcellus believed that the Spmt proceehae ~ 11
L . ot from the Father.9' Eusebius declares that w t rce us not only Prov 8:22ff (by means of most implausible allegorization)
r:~~~' ~elieves is 'that there are three Names to be found m one but also Ps 109(110):3 and 97(96):1.10, He attributed Christ's
mediatorial function simply to the Incarnation. And after the
hypostasis.'9' , . f th resurrection the human body (to which all the Scriptural texts about
A !"ttle more can be learnt about Marcellus conception 0 e
Lo os ~nd his relation to the Son. Christ was the Logos who at one glory apply) was glorified by being made worthy of super-human
time '1 t I'n the Father , as our logos (word) can be
. 'g was Slen . ISilent, .and
d 96Ibid. 6(24:721); cf. II. 1.3 1-2(24:777). Marcellus had attacked Eusebius himself
later active; as when our word speaks. Then for a partlcu ar 1en0r' on one of his weakest points, his doctrine that there was one God and one mediator

and undertook the incarnate rmmstry, an on ~ t en

?
less than forty years, 'he says th~t he took fldesh d~ nO~i~n~;be~:m~
.. .
flesh and was called Jesus Christ, and King, and Image of the mVlSlble
God and first-born of all creation, and not before. And M:rcellus se~a
limit to this period of Christ's reign" s At the end of t IS reign t e
flesh of Christ was to be abandoned, the body deserted, andthe L;g:s
would return to God from whom he had (before the creation 0 t e
·'Ibid. 11.11.112, 113 (frag 92, 108, 46, 48, 47); 15.118,119 (frag 53, 52, 82).
.2Ibid. Ill.4.157 (frag 60).
·'Ibid. 158 (frag 60).
·<Ibid. 111.4.159.
·'Contra Marcellum 1.1-5(24:721).
226
between God and man (Con Marc. 1.4.2!r"-30 (frag 89, 90, 91, 7 2)). See above,
PP·57-58.
.7Ibid. 11.3.43-44 (24:800-801) frag 36.
"Eccles. theol. 1.15.74, 75 (frag 38).
··Ibid. 1.16.76 (frag 38).
to°lbid. 1.17·77, 78 (frag 62,55,93,56); cf. 11.1.100 (frag 51, 93, 9 2).
,ollbid. 11.3.101 (frag 92).
l02Ibid. II.23.I34 (frag 82). Gericke (Marcellus von Ancyra 126) points out that
Marcellus divided time into two stages, the period from creation to the Incarnation,
which he called 'the first dispensation' (oikonomia) and the second from the
Incarnation onwards (frag 9. 73. 43. 17. 19.70, IOO, 117). He conjectures, without
evidence, that Marcellus counted a third 'dispensation' from the arrival of the Holy
Spirit. But it seems more likely that he would have thought of the third as beginning
with the disappearance of Christ's human body and the return of the Logos to God.
IO'Con. Marc. 11.3.47-5 0 (24: 804-8) frag 18, 19,20,22,84; 11.3.50(24:8°9) frag 26;
11.3.5 1(24: 809) frag 35, 97.
 Period of Confusion
glory.104 Not only was it incorruptible and immortal, but also
'seated with God on his throne in heaven"os (even though fated
ultimately to disappear). It is only by his activity (Evepyetu) that the
Logos is separate from the Father during th: Incam~tion. 'The flesh
profits nothing' Un 6:64) is one of Marcellus favourite texts. But the
flesh must be retained till the Judgment so that the Je~s can look on
him whom they pierced (Zech 12:10), and then It will be dispensed
with. There is no reason why it should exist eternally.'06 The
purpose of the Incarnation was so that man who had be~n defeated by
the devil should defeat the devil, and in Christ man (I.e. his human
nature) has defeated the devil and is reigning over him. This process
must be completed. That is all. '07 If anybody were to askabout the
ultimate destiny of the assumed flesh, we must reply that this IS one of
those things which we cannot know (1 Cor 13:12).1°8 I~ another
extract quoted by Eusebius, Marcellus sets out his doctnne of the
Incarnation:
'If we were to examine the Spirit alone, it would be reasonable to
think that the Logos was one and the same thing with God. But if we
were to examine the additional fact of the Incarnation in the case of the
Saviour the Godhead would appear to be extended simply by activity
(EvtPYE:U). so that in all likelihood the Monad is genuinely
indivisible.'109
After reading this, we cannot be surprised that Mar~ellus was dep~sed
for Sabellian leanings. He does, however, beheve m an Incarnation:
'Who would have believed before the demonstration of the fac~ that
the Word of God would have been conceived through a vlfgm,
would. assume our flesh, and would display the whole Godhead in it
bodily?'"O
The Saviour ascended with the human body,'" but Marcellus
disavowed knowledge of what was ultimately to happen to thiS
l04lbid. 11.3.50. 51(24:809) frag 94, 95, 96.
lO5lbid. 11.3.51 (frag 98).
l06lbid. 11.4.53, 54(24:813) frag 103. 104·
l07lbid. 11.4.53(24:816) frag 104· . .
l08Ibid. 1I.4.5S(z4: 8I 7) frag 108; see Marcellus' summary of hIS own VIeWS
quoted by Eusebius ibid. 11.4.56, frag 108.
109Eccl. theol. 11+102 (frag 64)·
110lbid. 11.3.146 (frag 13)·
111 Ibid. 111.10.167 (frag Il4)'
Eustathius and Marcellus
human body."2 Eusebius accuses Marcellus of saying that the Holy
Spirit is 'neither God nor Son ... but one of the things produced
through the Son.'"3 In fact this description is surprisingly like
Eusebius'.own doctrine of the Spirit, 114 and it is probably a distortion
of Marcellus' own doctrine. No doubt Marcellus believed that the
Spirit was simply God with his Logos before the Incarnation and after
the Incarnation was also God with his Logos, independent of the
human body assumed. Gericke refers us to a statement by Theodoret
quoting Marcellus to the effect that the procession of the Holy Spirit
was 'an extension of the extension', the Logos being the first extension
and the Spirit the second coming from the first."s The Spirit
remains inseparably in God, but goes forth as activity (EvepYElu) from
the Father and the Logos. 116 As far as the quotations by Eusebius go.
there is no reason to conclude that Marcellus saw the necessity of
postulating a human psyche in the flesh assumed by the Logos at the
Incarnation. Whether he changed his mind on this point will be
considered later. "7 Certainly in the extracts quoted by Eusebius the
Logos appears to be the subject of all the human experiences ofJesus
Christ, as Gericke points out." 8 It is the Logos who is born, who
becomes flesh. The Logos + flesh is what is called Son, and Marcellus
can call the Logos 'Saviour' and 'Lord'. It is the Logos, not the human
Jesus, who reveals the Father, speaks at Gethsemane and sends the
Spirit. Marcellus' theory, that the Logos-with-human-body is the
Son, sometimes breaks down under stress of his desire to give
prominence to the Logos.
One point about Marcellus which is unequivocally clear is that he
believed that God constituted only one hypostasis, as he had only one
ousia. For 'him homoousios, whose presence in N he must have
welcomed enthusiastically, meant not merely' consubstantial' or 'of
"'Ibid. 111.10.166 (frag 108).
113lbid. 1II.6. 164.
114See above, Pp.55-56. .
115Gericke. Marcellus von Ancyra 128, referring to Theodoret Haer.Fab. 2.10 (PC
83:397).
116Gericke. referring to frag 67. 68. Gericke's long and careful account of
Marcel1us' theology, op. cit. 73-190, is the most abundant recent account and is
particularly useful, but is marred ,by t.he author's con.tinual attempt, following
Loofs, to see Marcellus as standmg m an hypothetIcal, indeed non-existent
'Antiochene' tradition of theology. . '
117See below, PP.233-4. Gericke (op. cit. 97. 168) denies that Marcellus ever
spoke of a human psyche in Jesus Christ.
1180p. cit. 155-62.
 Period of Confusion
similar substance', but 'ofidentical being' (tautotiato<;). For him the
anathema ofN which forbade Catholics to teach that the. Son was of a
different hypostasis or ousia from the Father had preCISely t~e full
Sabellian force which it appeared to have. There.was for him m God
only one 'Person' in the later Trinitarian sense of that word. 119 The
ambivalence of N might not have been so serious, and the reaction
against it might have been less drastic, had not Marcellns (and perhaps
Eustathius) represented a contemporary school of thought which was
only too happy to accept N ~ a se~se which .appeared to rule ~~t any
possibility of recognizmg distmcttons W!thin the Godhead. .
It is interesting to examine Marcellus letter written to Julius ~f
Rome some five years after his deposition to see If~e has. altered hiS
views in the interval. He first sets out the ideas to which he IS ~pposed,
that the Son is not the proper Logos of God, but that there ~s another
Logos and another Wisdom and Power, and that there. IS another
hypostasis different from the Father', 121 that the Fathe: eX1~ted ~efore
the Son and that the Son is not the true Son 'from God., or Ifhe IS Son
then only so as everything else is, ~n~ that the Son ~s a creature or
something made, and he is to be d,stmgUlshed (~\OP~~E\V) from the
Father.122 Clearly Marcellus had not changed hiS views ab?ut the
nature of God. Next, he gives a careful declaration of hiS own
orthodoxy:
'I believe ... there is one God and his only-begotten Son the Logos
who has always co-existed with the Father and has never had any
beginning of existence, who genuinely originates fro,m ,God, not
created, not made, but existing eternally, etem~lly rOlgnmg alon~
with God and the Father, whose kingdom, accordmg to the Aposde.'
witness, shall have no end, and this is Son, this is Power, this 15
Wisdom, this is the proper and true Logos of God, our Lord Jesus
Christ, indivisible Power of God, through whom all eXl5tmg things
came into existence.'l23
119Cf. Gericke 108-9; Sellers Eustathius 31; Tetz 'Zur ~heologie Ill' lSI. .
t20Declercq (Ossius 259) finds it difficult to admit that Marcel!us .was heretIcal;
even by the standards of the fourth cen,tury, because he was vmdlcate~ by the
Westerners at Serdica in 343. in a gathering whose canons gave such. satIsfactory
authority to the bishop of Rome. Prestige, on the other hand: recogm~es that.t~e
un thodoxy of Marcellus' views caused many who were not In fact Anans to Jam
wi~~ genuine Arians in their policy of dismantling N (CPT 222).
121Epiphanius Panarion 72.2.4(257).
!22Ibid. 5(257).
! 23 Ibid. 72.2.6-9(257-258).
230
Eustathius and Marcellus
Later he quotes a Greek version of the Old Roman Creed, which of
course left Marcellus' doctrinal aberrations wholly unaffected,12 4
and later still adds some more theological explanations of his own:
'We ~ve learnt from the divine Scriptures that the Godhead of the
Father and of the Son is indivisible. If anybody divides the Son, that is
the Logos, from almighty God, he must either think that there are two
gods, which has been judged foreign to the divine doctrine, Or confess
that the Logos is not God, which also appears to be foreign to the
correct faith ... but I have learnt strictly that the Father's Power
(dynamis), the Son, is undivided and unseparated."25
It is obvious that Marcellus has now made some concessions to the
critics of his doctrine. He no longer teaches that the Son's reign will
have an end. He is much more willing to call the Logos the Son, and
disguises or has abandoned his idea that the Son is no more than
Logos-with-human body. But his refusal to see distinctions within the
Godhead is as adamant as ever. Pope Julius and his associates who
declared Marcellus' doctrine to be orthodox can have never met the
works ofOrigen nor known anything of the theology of the Eastern
Church.
Finally it is worth taking a glance at those other works, mainly
ascribed to Athanasius, which we have already mentioned and which
scholarly opinion inclines to attribute to Marcellus, to see whether at
a considerably lat" period his doctrine had altered further. 126 The
first is the Expositio Fidei. The Son in this doctrinal statement is
described as 'begotten without beginning and eternally'; he is not a
proceeding nor immanent Logos but 'integral (aUtOtEAij) Son', the
true image of the Father. He took 'our man' and this man suffered and
rose as 'created the beginning of ways for us' (a clear reference to
Prov 8:22), and as 'the Lord's man' (KUptaKO<; iiv9pOl1tO<;) he entered
heaven as our fore-runner. 127 The document disowns Sabellians who
teach
'the Sonfather (uI01tatEpa) who is of sole substance (Ilovoucnov) and
not consubstantial (homoousion), and who thereby abolished the Son's
existence, nor do we attribute the passible body which he bore for the
salvation of the world to the Father, nor do we conceive of three
!24Ibid.72.J.I(25 8).
125Ibid. 72.J.2, J(258).
126S ee above. pp.221-4.
127PG 25:200 and 201(1).
 Period of Confusion Eustathius and Marcellus

hypostases divided ... from each other, so as to think corporeally as if T~e author throughout uses 'Son' both for the 'man' and for the re-
they were men, and so we avoid polytheism such as the pagans ~xlstent Logos, and frequently employs the terms 'Lord's ,P d
(maintain).'128 Lord's body' ( '. n man an
ICtlPl.U!COC; UVuPOlltOC;, ICtlPIUICOV crOil'u). The bod he
The statement goes on to support the model for the relation of the says, bore the suffermg, leaving the divine untouched 13. P yg.
Son to the Father of a stream flowing from a source; the stream is refers to ~he-Lord's body; what Stephen saw at God's ri ht h::~ .22
distinct from yet one with the source, 'although they are two ;~e ~or~.' bboddY; Ps 11O(I09):I (,Sit thou at my right ha~d') refer:~
structures (crxi]I'U~u) and two names.' 129 And a note on Prov 8:22ffis e or soy, not to the Logos.'35 So
added allegorizing it in the Marcellan manner to refer to the human
body ofJesus and not to the pre-existent Logos, 130 and another note
t e
blobod flfiowed not from the Spirit which is the Godhead of the
ogos, ut rom the man whom he bore.'136
defmes the status of this human body, again calling it 'the Lord's He calls God the Logos 'first born of all creation '137 Wh J
man'. A strong distinction is drawn between the human body, which .
hu h' d' I . en esus IS
was created, and the pre-existent Logos who is a product W~~~Yh: siS I~P ays the .man, when he multiplies loaves, the God.
(gennema}.'3' This could be Marcellus writing long after 341, perhaps d' 1 h ahs My soul IS exceeding sorrowful, even to death' he
in the late fifties or early sixties, a Marcellus who has learnt from the ISP ays t e uman body, and so on for many examples 138 On f
criticism of Eusebius, who wishes to distinguish God the Father and ~~se frag~ents says that the Logos assumed a whole (ltA.'1plj) man :'~9
God the Son, but does not know how to do so, and who has ere IS a ~ng fragment found in another collection from that which
abandoned or suppressed his peculiar confming of the name 'Son' to containS t e rest, but ascribed there to the Sermo Maior and
the incarnate Logos, but whose fundamental theological assumptions apparently accepted as genuine by both the M' d"
Schwartz."o It runs thus: Igne e Itor and
are still the same. Then there is the Sermo Maior de Fide. It is full of
ideas which appear to fit Marcellus' theology like a glove. It is Jesus, 'So A~us ~as ignorant when he imagined that the Logos of God was
the text says, who is to be subjected to the Father, not the Logos; Jesus, ~reate ,an rendered ~he Father irrational, for whatever does not
called Son of God, is to be subjected to God, that is to Father, Son and av~ a Logos by nature IS certainly irrational (a/ogos) Next h h
Holy Spirit. 132 This Son, descended from David, is to be subjected to attributed to him flesh by nature deprived of rationai soul w en e h
God. It is the Son born of Mary who does not know the date of the hIm to be passible and mortal and incapable of avol'd.' e proves
(aICo,; ). h' mg passIOn
Judgment; God the Logos knows everything; and the author can say: no .~10~ • smce e IS the moving agent of the soulless flesh which has
WI 0 . Its own. For flesh deprived of mind is removed fro
'Who at the consummation of the ages came down from the bosom of natur~l wdl, .once granted that there is no will or mind fm ~ny
the Father and took from the undefiled Virgin Mary our man Jesus anythmg or mdependent initiative of an intellectual soula~~::I~~
Christ whom he handed over to suffer on our behalf by his own
choice.' 133 13·S hwart.. 19(9)' PG 26'13
135S
ch ,. .
128Ibid. 204(2). 1273). c wartz 21(10), PG [4(1269); 65(24); PG 28([281); 32(12, [3), PG [9([272,
1"Ibid. 204(2). 13·S h
137 C wartz 20(10), PG 13( 1269).
130Ibid. 204-205(3). 13' Schwartz 22(10); PG 14(1269).
131Ihid. 205 and 208(4). That either Marcellus or his· disciples continued to Schwartz 60(20 21) PG 24([ ) b
propagate his doctrines after the year 341 is shown not only by the fact that eastern allows that the hum;n b~dy ofJ 277J.~ ~rve that MarceIius, unHke Athanasius.
creeds continued to denounce his doctrine hut also by the non-Athanasian Or. ,on I39S chwartz 3(4) PG ( 6) eS'u, I 'ow fear (60(21)).
4 12 5' ch t ' . h
Ar. IV which cannot be placed late and which attacks doctrine that is recognizably (not in Migne) making the refe;ence~~r~~ ~e;sl~nd as a sentence preceding this
his. See above, n 49. 14°S chwartzFragII P 53'PGI2 I .nsts 0 y and soul clearer.
132Schwartz. ut supra, 41(15); the passage does not appear in Migne, nor do the whereas th~ others are' f;om' Florjle;i~~2~:~~~~;;:es fr~m the Doctrj?a Patrum 40.5.
next three passages quoted. nO,t appear m the (admittedly not complete) Ar ~m .2,3. But thIS passage does
l"Ibid. 42(15); 45(15); 47(16); but cf. Schwartz 70(28), PG 32(f285), 72(29), PG edItor of this version, is not confide th' mema~ ~erslOn, and R. p, Casey the
33(1288). (see his The Armenian Version of th:~ a~lt ~~ an ~nglnal part ofthe Sermo Maior
seu 0- t anaslan Letter to the AntiQchenes, 4).
2 2
 Period of Confusion
strips the Lord's flesh of this, he makes it the flesh of some winged
creature or land animal or fish, and to speak more plainly not even of
one of these, because the flesh of no animal is lacking in soul.'
This fragment is most reminiscent ofEustathius in its content, though
not in style. Indeed nowhere in his extant work does Eustathius
express himself quite as fully as this, and nowhere else in any extant
work does Marcellus refer to the Arian doctrine of Christ's
assumption of a soulless body. Even though it is only in the Samo
Maior that we have any example of Marcellus attacking Arius
directly, this can hardly account for the explicitness of this passage.
To insist that the human body of Christ had a human soul would
have been quite consistent with the rest of Marcellus' doctrine, but
the evidence that he did so is fragile. The rest of the Sermo Maior is, as
we have seen, full of Marcellan doctrine. We need not withold the
work from him. It is impossible to be confident about the time of its
composition. It can hardly have been an early work.
Eustathius and Marcellus clearly" stem from the same theological
tradition. They certainly met at Nicaea. and no doubt were there able
to join forces with Alexander of Alexandria and Ossius. It is quite
probable that there Marcellus learnt the main lines of his theology
from Eustathius. It was not till about ten years later that he produced
(as far as we know) his first book. But, if they both came from the
same tradition, what was that tradition? To say that it was
'Antiochene' is meaningless; Eustathius had indeed four or five years
as bishop of Antioch, but that does not make him a member of an
Antiochene 'school', any more than was Paulinus of Tyre who was
also bishop of Antioch for a short time. Marcellus had no connection
with Antioch whatever. The two characteristics of the later
Antiochene school of Christo logy are usually reckoned to be a
disinclination to use allegory and an insistence on the full humanity of
Christ as an individual. Neither Eustathius nor Marcellus eschewed
allegory, indeed allegory was necessary for their peculiar views about
the interpretation of Prov 8:22ff. Eustathius at least, however, may
have left a legacy to the later Antiochene school in his insistence
upon the possession of a human soul by Christ as a means of avoiding
a dangerous compromising of God with human experiences. But we
have no reason for believing that he inherited this idea; it rose out of
his objection to Arian doctrine, and it is remarkable that at the
beginning of the controversy he alone perceived the significance and
234
Eustathius and Marcellus
intention of the 'soulless body' of Arian doctrine. Here he was more
observant than his contemporaries.
They also both attacked Origen. The basic reason why they
attacked his doctrine was because he had taught that there were three
distinct entities (hypostases) in God, and these graded, the second
subordinated to the first and the third to the second. It has sometimes
been said that these two rejected any Logos-doctrine, and harked back
to a more primitive, perhaps more biblical, doctrine, free from the
complications entailed upon calling Greek philosophical ideas into
theology. But in fact both men had a Logos-doctrine; indeed
Marcellus accused Sabellius of rejecting one. What they were really
trymg to achieve was monotheism; they believed that third-century
developments in theology had threatened the traditional Christian
belief in one God. What they were determined to avoid was "any
doctnne that would subordmate the Son to the Father. Their
ingenious but confused theology was designed to avoid that above
everything. In the process they failed to distinguish the Son from the
Father, and paid a heavy price for their failure. Marcellus probably
matured and improved his ideas as time went on, but he could not
find terms to express this distinction and did not see the necessity to
do so. Later pro-Nicene writers borrowed their very implausible
practice of reading into the Old Testament references to the incarnate
Word at places where before everybody had seen references to the
pre-existent Logos. This was their second legacy to posterity, and by
no means a satisfactory one.
We can however draw one confident conclusion from this
examination of a theological tradition which was neither
AI~xandriin nor Arian nor Western and which owed nothing to
Ongen: If we are to take the creed N at its face value, the theology of
Eustathms and Marcellus was the theology which triumphed at
Nicaea. That creed admits the possibility of only one ousia and one
hypostasis. This was the hallmark of the theology of these two men.
3. Photinus
Phot.inus, bishop of Sirmium, is more famous for his tenacity in
holdmg on to his see than for his theological views. 141 He came from
141For literature on Photinus, see Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 142-3. 147.
235

r
Period of Confusion
Ancyra, was a devoted disciple of Marcellus of Ancyra, and was very
popular as a bishop and as an orator. His doctrine (which will be
considered presently) at an early stage brought him to the notice of
the ecclesiastical authorities. He was censured by the Council of
Antioch which met over the affair of bishop Stephen in 344,
condemned at a Council of Milan held in 345, and at another which
met in the same place in 347, but was only ousted and exiled finally by
the Council of Sirmium which met in 351 in the presence of the
Emperor Constantius. He was sucGeeded as bishop of Sirmium by
Germinius. He had indeed the misfortune to propound a doctrme, at
the meeting of the Eastern and the Western Roman Empire, which
both Eastern and Western theologians could agree in condemning.
He probably returned to Sirmium on the death of Constantius in 361,
but was later exiled again by the Emperor Valentinian I (who wanted
to stand neutral in religion but could act when both warring sides
agreed on a condemnation) in 364. He died in 376. His doctrine left
little impression in the Eastern Church, but had quite a long history
of perpetuation into the fifth century in the Western 9hUrClt;- erhaps
. . 42
because traditional Western theology was more c ngen 0 t.
Photinus' doctrine appears to have been a form f at migh b
called middle Marcellism, i.e. what Marcellus ri inally tau h
before bis vicissitudes caused him to temper the edge f his doct· e
and take account of the criticisms of his friends w is
enemies,a little moderated. He certainly taught tha the humay ody
ofJesus had a human mind or soul, insisting on its whJllenes<and we
have seen that this was entirely consistent wid( the teaching of
Marcellus though in his early period of theological writing at least
Marcellus does not seem to have held it.'43 Photinus appealed
150; Loefs 'Arianismus' 29. 30; Gericke, Marcellus 29-30; Declercq Ossius 413-4.
420-1; Zeiller Les Origines 260--70; Meslin Les Ariens 67-'7 I; Simonetti Studi 134-59;
Crisi 202-3 (of these Zeiller and Simonetti, Studi, by far the best). The ancient
authorities are Epiphanius Panarion 71.2.1-3(251); Hilary Coil. Ant jar, BII.S.4(I9)
p. 14'; BII9.1(.I) p. 146; De Trin. VII.) (.6.); Sulpicius Severus Hist. SO". I1.)6;
Jerome De Vir. 111. CVII; Ambrose De Fide Il.I).1I7(99); IlI.8.58(129);
IV.).'9(167); V.8.I04('j4); LuciferofCalaris De Non Conveniendo lX(178); De Non
Parcendo XVIII (228, 229); Marius Victorinus Adv. Arium 1.21.18, 29. 30; Vii.32:
Sozomenus HE IV.6.I-6, 14-16. as well as others quoted in the text below.
142This dating is not entirely certain, but is probable. There is a careful account of
the ,problems in Zeiller op. cit. 262-,?o.Jerome De Vir. Ill. eVIl is our authority for
the later movements of Photinus.
143'SO that, because the body and the soul of Eve were in sin, die Lord assumed
the flesh and the soul of Eve also from the Virgin' (Hilary De Trin. X:20) is only one
23 6
,
Eustathius and Marcellus
particularly to Isa 44:6 ('I am God and there is no other') in order to
articulate a determinedly monotheist Christian doctrine of God. The
Logos for him was simply a mode of manifestation of the Father, a
power or aspect of him not in any serious sense distinct from him. He
apparentlycoined the word 'Wordfather' (AoyoltChrop) and regarded
Logos as wholly interchangeable with 'God'. Like Marcellus, he
favoured the analogy of a man and his thought for the relation of the
Father to the Son. He could hardly have used the concept of
begetting in the circumstances. Like. the early Marcellus, he
distinguished sharply the Son from the Father; the Son did not come
into existence until the Incarnation and was defmed as the whole
human being who was born of Mary; Christ had no pre-existence;
theophanies in the OT were only God appearing. When the OT
spoke of a Son of God (as at Dan 7:13) this was prediction only.
Everybody in the ancient world accuses Photinus of reducing Christ
to a mere man adopted by God, i.e. the union between Logos and man
was one of inspiration and moral agreement only. Ambrose tells us
that two favourite texts ofPhotinus were 1 Tim 2:5 ('there is one God
and one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ'), and
John 8:40 ('You seek to kill me, a man who has spoken the truth to
you'), and one can see why. 144 There is evidenced here a consistent
determination to avoid recognizing any distinctions in the being of
God. A recent study of references to Photinus in Ambrosiaster (fl in
Rome 363-384) by Lydia A. Speller 145 confirms all these points.
Ambrosiaster says of Photinus, 'because he did not regard Christ as
. God on the grounds that he was born, he appears wise to the
worldly' .146 This is probably a reference to the fact that the Emperor
Julian, in a letter, part of which is extant, addressed to Photinus
(c.362), congratulated Photinus on his refusal to believe that a god
could be introduced into the womb. '47 Christ, Photinus said, did not
exist before Adam, but Adam before Christ. '48 The sayings about
Christ's celestial origins do not refer to his person, but to his teaching
example among several of the ascription of such doctrine to Photinus. It would in
fact have improved Hilary's theology considerably had he taken it to heart.
144Ambrose De Paradiso 12:58; so also Hilary De Syn. 85(537)"
145'New Light on the Photinians: the evidence of Ambrosiaster'.
146Speller, op. cit. 104.
147JuHan, Letters 90(55) p.147. The fragment was preserved by Facundus of
Hermiane.
t48S peller op. cit. 105.
 Period of Confusion
and his character.'4. Photinus no doubt identified the Logos and the
Spirit;'50 he can hardly have done anything else, on his own
premises. He interpreted John 1:1 in such a way as to aVOid calhng the
Word directly God.'st He wanted, in fact, to avoid saying that the
Logos was God as a distinct hypostasis. He may have taught that ChrISt
was only Son of God in the sense that all Christians are.' 52 Finally,
Vigilius of Thapse in the sixth century, in a Dialogue against Arians,
Sabellians and Photinians, alleged that the Photinians taught that 'jesus
Christ (took) his beginnings from Mary, and he was adopted a Son
by the Father on account of the pre-eminence of his hoI behaviour
and the incomparable merit of his blessedness." The nstantly
reiterated charge occurs here too that Photinus t~ ght that Jes s was a
mere man promoted to divinity because ofh'S9'e~' .'54
There does not seem to be anything very ori /hal abou P otinus'
teaching. He was a doctrinaire disciple of Ma cellus. He oes not
reflect Marcellus' idiosyncratic concept of th limited ;term for
Christ's kingdom, and is more emphatic than;M clll'f about the
human soul of Christ. He probably reflects theipositiq,{ofMarcellus
between 340 and 350, and perhaps might cause.us-tb consider again
the conjecture discussed above' 55, that Marcellus did in his middle or
later period admit a human soul to Christ, and that he played down
his more eccentric earlier ideas. Photinus must have represented a
considerable embarrassment not only to Marcellus, whom he
followed all too faithfully, but also to all Western theologians. He
displayed to them what ,could happen to those who insisted
rigorously that there was only one hypostasis in the Godhead and how
near they were to falling over the precipice of Sa bellianism. He may
also have contributed to a prejudice against, or a blindness to the
necessity of, ascribing a human soul to Jesus Christ.
149Ibid. 106.
150Ibid. 107.
15lJbid. I I1-I2.
152Ibid. 113.
'S3Vigilius of Thapse, Dialogus contra Arianos etc 1.4 (PL62:182) Speller, op. cit.
106.
I 54Vigilius op. cit, 1.1O(187)-1l(188).
I5'See pp. 233-4.
9
The Behaviour of Athanasius
I. Estimates of Athanasius' Character
'Amidst the storms of persecution, the Archbishop of Alexandria wa,
patient oflabour, jealous offame, careless of safety; and although hi,
mind was' tainted by the contagion of fanaticism, Athanasim
displayed a superiority of character and abilities, which would have
qualified him, far better than the degenerate sons of Constantine, fOI
the government of a great monarchy'. So wrote Edmund Gibbon of
Athanasius in the xviiith century,' and this tribute is particularly
striking as coming from one who was far from sympathetic to. the
cause for which Athanasius struggled. The historians of the xixth
century were even more laudatory: W. Bright, paraphrasing the
eulogy of Gregory of Nazianz us, says that 'he was not only too noble
to become arrogant in his new dignity, but he had already begun to
show something of that harmony of excellences which Gregory
regards as his special glory: the business-like vigour in general
administration which was consistent with discriminating and
sympathetic attention to particular cases: the strictness which was not
rigid, the gravity which could melt into geniality, the force which
would make itself respected, the tenderness which could not but be
loved.'2 And at the end of his account of Athanasius Bright mentions
'the affectionateness which made him so tender and generous as a
friend, so patient and equitable as a peacemaker, - which won for
him such enthusiastic loyalty, and endowed the great theologian and
church-ruler with the capacities and opportunities peculiar to a truly
loveable man.'J In a later work Bright quotes R. W. Church's rather
I Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol III, cap. 21 (ed. J. B. Bury, London
1897, VolII p. 362); see L. W. Barnard 'Edward Gibbon on Athanasius', in Arianism,
361""70.
2 The Orations of St. Athanasius against the Arians, Introd. xxi.
3lbid. xcviii.
 Period of Confusion
patronising view that the Greeks saw in Athanasius just those qualities
which they themselves lacked, including 'tenacity, soberness,
inflexibility ofpurpose',4 and sees in all his artistry 'a majestic moral
unity'.5 Gwatkin said of him, 'Athanasius ... was philosopher,
statesman and saint in one. Few great men have been so free from
littleness or weakness'. 6 Harnack echoed this sentiment: 'If we
measure him by the standard of his time, we can discover nothing
ignoble or weak about him'.'
The twentieth century, however,
favourable verdict of the ninetee
provides such an instance. Schwa z des ribed A a sius as 'an
obstinate fanatic',' and said that his b av, our was t at 0 political
power-broker and not that of a theoli>gian and/clogmati ian. 9 A.
Piganiol, the eminent French historian, throughout th fourth
volume of his L' Empire chretien evinces a strong prejudi~e against
Athanasius, accusing him of organizing pogroms.' 0 Ahrnes, in
similar vein, charges him with organizing 'an ecclesiastical mafia',
and adds 'like a modern gangster, he evoked wige'spread mistrust,
proclaimed total innocence - and usually- -succeeded in evading
conviction on specific charges' ." Klein in his book on Constantius II
points to Athanasius stirring up trouble wherever he went on his
return from his first exiIe,'2 and to his instant resumption of high-
handed methods against his opponents on returning from his second
exile. '3 From the point of view of Constantius, Klein contends with
some justice, Athanasius constituted a standing threat to his
jurisdiction in Egypt.
The idealization of Athanasius in the interests of hagiography
began in liis own lifetime with Hilary, who of course never met
4Histo,ical Writings of St. Athanasi",s lntrod. xcviii.
slbid. xcviii.
6 Arian Controversy 49.
7 History of Dogma 1lI.62.
8'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 142-3.
9Gesamm. Schrift 111.9.3 I 8 'cr wirkte als politische Personlichkeit, nicht als
Theologer und Dogmatiker.'
lOA. Piganiol, L'Empire chreti'en (325-95) Tome IV, deuxieme partie of Histoire
Romaine (Paris 1972).
lIConstantine und Eusebius 230.
12Klein Constantius 113 1,32 nn 80 and 81; the accusation comes from the Eastern
bishops at Serdica (Hilary Coli. Antiar. A IV.7(54» and though of course biased may
be ncar the bone.
13Klein, op. cit. 81, nn ISS and IS9~ see Socrates HE 1I.24.7.
240
The Behaviour <if Athanasius
him," and was continued in Gregory of Nazianzus' unrealistic
eulogy on him. But even in the ancient world, where almost all the
surviving sources were written either by Athanasius or by those who
sympathized with his cause, we can find some critical and Some less
than enth'7'iastic judgments. Socrates complains that the historian
Sabinus of Heraclea, who was not sympathetic to the pro-Nicene
cause, kept silence about the atrocities committed by his OWn side; 15
he does not say that Sabinus listed the atrocities committed by the
pro-Nicene Athanasius (which Socrates says nothing about), but it
seems a reasonable inference tq draw. Ammianus Marcellinus, the
remarkably moderate pagan historian writing at the very end of the
century, says that in his relations with Constantius Athanasius had
pushed himself beyond his proper sphere (professio) and was trying to
gain 'secular ends' (externa). He had dabbled in magic to foretell- the
future and done 'other things inconsistent with the tenour of the law'
(alia a proposito legis abhorrentia). In consequence he had been deposed
and the historian seems to think that this was a just measure.' 6
Philostorgius as an extreme Arian was naturally hostile to Athanasius,
but his hostility is surprisingly restrained. Rusche, in PTAA reviews
all Philostorgius' references to Athanasius. Philostorgius represents
him as arrogant and inflexible, very ready to resort to violence and
even to murder, no respecter oflaw and unscrupulous in pursuing his
Own ends, but does so in fairly moderate language. His testimony is
consequently all the more worth considering.17
Before we begin tracing the events of Athanasius' early career,
there are certain judgments which it is possible to make about his
character. That he had courage, nobody could possibly deny. As a
y?ung, relatively untried bishop he had twice resisted successfully
direct orders from the Emperor Constantine." He spent much of his
career defying the Emperor Constantius secretly or openly. At the
end of his life he had reached a position when the threats and measures
ofJulian and Valens, Emperors though they were, could do him little
damage. Basil in OJ~e of his letters comments upon the courage
evmced partIcularly In his excommunicating a brutal and licentious
governor of Libya' 9 in the year 371. And as far as tenacity of purpose
I·S O J. Doignon in PTAA 337-48.
, .~ I'HE IV:>2.
16Rerum Gestarum Libr; XV.7.6-IO.
17PTAA 161-'77 and especially [72-4.
18At~anasius Apol. Sec. 59.3. 4(139). where part ofa threatening letter is given.
19Basd Ep 61.
2 1
 eriod of Confu 'on
goes, his career speaks for i self. He was not Ja.stingly vindictive, as,
for instance, Marius in Rep lican Rome and :R:khat'l.tJLc>fEngland
in the late Middle Ages were vindictive. By the time he diea'll;e had
been reconciled to almost all f his enemies. We can even see
something (If the gentleness a tact s oken of by Bright and'
Gwatkin when we read his Epistfe Dra ntius, in which he is gently
rebuking a monk who is also a bishop for neglecting his episcopal
duties in order to pursue his career of asceticism. And he must have
been a singularly attractive personality when he chose to appear so,
because on more' than one occasion he disarmed the hostIhty of
Constantine in a personal interview, and he had no difficulty in
winning the Emperor Constans over to his cause in personal contact
with him.
There is, however, a darker side to Athanasius' character. He
denied vehemently to Constantius that he had had any treasonable
dealings with the usurper Magnentius who had murdered
Constantius' brother Cons tans and seized power in the West from
35 0 to 355, but it seems probable that he had in fact showed himselfat
least not hostile to the usurper, and had received a deputation from
him,2o Klein conjectured that Constantine when he gained
possession of Magnentius' correspondence had found a letter
incriminating or compromising Athanasius,21 Athanasius certainly is
at pains to accuse the Arians of having forged a letter which set him in
an unfavourable light. 22 From about 355 onwards Constantme
steadily accused Athanasius of treasonable behaviour. Athanasius'
conduct over the possession of church buildings appears to have been
less than noble. He refused to allow Arians or Melitians to meet for
worship wherever he could prevent them.23 This contrasts with the
tolerance of the Arian bishop of Antioch, Euzoius, who allowed both
Melitians and continuing Eustathians in Antioch churches to worship
in, even though he had the support of the Emperor Valens.
20 Athanasius' protestation of his innocence are found in Apol. ad Constantium
6-11. Schwartz ('Zur Kirchengeschichte' 14!rSO), Declercq (Ossius 41!r20) and
K. M. "Girardet in PTAA 75. and also Pietri, ibid. 119. suspect him of eqUIvocal
behaviour here.
21Constantius II 53. and n [17·
22Apol. ad Const 1I(137).
. 23S ee Socrates HE 11.22.1-3; Athanasius Apol. Sec. 59:6, where Socrates could be
right in identifying the aggrieved party with the ~elitians. It is ev:ident t,hat
Athanasius maintained this policy to the end of his life, from the ImmedIate
reinstallation of the Arians by the Emperor on Athanasius' death.
The Behaviour of Athanasius
Athanasius' abuse of his opponents, even allowing for what he had
suffered at their hands, sometimes reaches almost the point of
hysteria. In the letters which he wrote to the church of Alexandria
and the churches of the Mareotis after the Council of Serdica in 343
he seems determined to compensate for the Eastern bishops having'
failed to excommunicate Gregory his rival in Alexandria by
peculiarly violent denigration of him,24 and in his De Sententia
Dionysii he tries to buttress a weak case by more than usually
ferocious language about his opponents; amid a chapter 'consisting of
sheer abuse devoid of argument, he reaches a climax of vituperation:
'Who could possibly then call these, whose leader is the devil,
Christians, and not rather agents of the devil?'2'
In one of his later Festal Letters, while formally urging his flock not to
indulge in hate, he expresses a venomous hatred ofJews and Arians. 2 •
Klein has called attention to the abrupt switch that took place in
Athanasius' attitude to Constantius after George had been reinstated
as bishop of Alexandria by the aid of the arm y in February 3 57 and in
358 the dux Sebastianus had put down a rising of the supporters of
Athanasius in Alexandria. In his Apologia ad Constantium, written in
356 and 357, Athanasius had taken a tone of almost servile respect
towards the Emperor, making every possible allowance for him. By
the time he comes to write the Histaria Arianorum, however (first half
of 358), he changes his attitude entirely. Now he has no further hope
of conciliating the Emperor, and lets loose the vials of his wrath upon
him, branding him as the enemy of the Church of Christ and of the
true faith in language only rivalled by the clumsy obloquy of Lucifer
of Calaris,27 Athanasius could on occasion produce unexceptionable
sentiments about the independence of the Church from the imperial
,, power:
'If it is a matter of judging bishops, what business has the Emperor
with this? If the Emperor has a right to issue threats here, what need is
there for bishops nominated (as judges)? When was such a state of
24Both letters to be found in a Latin version in Turner EOMIA Vol I 654-6. 659 .
But in fact Gregory was excommunicated; see below p. 300 and n 97.
2SDe Sent. Dio. 27.4(66, 67).
26Letter 37 (Lefort) 28, written in 365.
27Klein op. cit. 117-19.
 Period of Confusion
affairs ever heard of? When did the Emper·or-1r.t"""
Church, or was (his) judgment in these
onstantine
ajorityof
bishops welcome the Emperor's interfere e V\!:lt en a ms, but,.as
Klein points out,29 Athanasius himself r refuse ImperIal
support when he could obtain it from Consdntine, from C nstantius
and from Jovian. Indeed at the Council o~yre in 335 e directly
appealed from an ecclesiastical court to the mperor.
It is difficult to acquit Athanasius from the ha..g of having on
occasion used equivocation, not to say mendacity. We can perhaps
excuse his maintaining that there were British bishops present to
support his cause at Serdica as rhetorical exaggeration,30 and his
failure to note that though Val ens and U rsacius had recanted their
expressions of opinion hostile to Athanasius, they had later recanted
their recantation." And we can perhaps excuse his forcing of the
language of Basil of Ancyra to express opinions about the Son issuing
from the ousia of the Father and about using the word 'source' (peg€)
to define the relation of the Father to the Son which Basil would not
have endorsed. 32 But we cannot overlook his constant attempts to
represent the case against him as a thinly-disguised doctrinal
opposition when in fact it was invariably founded, not on hIS
theological views, but on the manner in which he administered hIs
see. No one ever seriously accused Athanasius of heresy, but his
writings suggest time and time again that accusations of misconduct
as a bishop should be ignored in order to concentrate upon the
doctrinal issues. 33 Much more serious however, was his treatment at
the Coun~i1 of Alexandria of 362 of the encyclical issued by
28Hist. Ar. 52.J(2IJ).
290p. cit. 105-108.
30 Apol. Sec. It 2(87) I1tuvirov, ruAA.irov, Bpettavirov. The list of countries
represented by bishops in the Westerners' encyclical includes Spain and Gaul but not
Britain, see Turner EOMIA Vol I, 644.
31 Apol. Sec. 2.3. 4(88). By the time this work was writt<:n (358) Athanasius must
ha ve known of their second volle face.
32De Synodis 41: so Simonetti Stud; 179 "94.
33This is observed by. among others, Klein op. cit. 116. The fact that Athanasius
even in the bitterest attack on him by the Eastern bishops at Serdica is called
sacrilegus, but not haereticus, has been noted by Loofs (' Arianismus' 30) and Girardet
(in PTAA 71). The Easterners at Serdica launched a vague accusation of heresy
against the Egyptian bishops who were present with Athanasius at the Council, but
this cannot be taken seriously, see Hilary Coli. Ar. A IV.19(60-I).
2 245
The Behaviour of Athanasius
Westerners at Serdica 19 years before. In the Tomus ad Antiochenos,
which though it is in form a synodical letter certainly has the full
authority of Athanasius behind it, the statement is made about the
'pamphlet about joctrine alleged to have been composed by the
Council of Serdica' that 'the Council made no such statement', and
no one is to put it forward because it can only cause dissension. 34
Athanasius was probably the only person present at the Council of
Alexandria who had also been present at the Council of Serdica in
343, and he must have known that this statement was untrue. The
Westerners at Sardica had officially and unequivocally stated that
there is only one hypostasis in God. Athanasius knew this perfectly
well and for several years after 343 held this belief. But by 362 he had
realized that to maintain a doctrine of one hypostasis only without
qualification would be to antagonize unnecessarily a large section of
basically orthodox opinion in the Eastern Church and that a doctrine
of three hypostases was compatible with Nicene orthodoxy. He
therefore made this unblushing misstatement. 35 A not dissimilar
unscrupulousness is evidenced when Athanasius accuses the Arians of
depriving the Father of both Logos and Wisdom 3• and of honouring
the locust more than the Saviour. 37 He must have known that in the
first case Arian doctrine imputed both authentic Logos and Wisdom
to the Father, though their application of these terms to the Son was
weaker, and that they referred to the locust simply to show that the
term 'great power' was applied to that insect in the Bible, in order to
prove that the application of it to the Son was less significant than
their opponents claimed. We wonder whether, when he quotes the
controversial anathema in N, it is of set intent that he omits the words
'hypostasis or' in the term 'of a separate hypostasis or ousia.'3. We have
already seen how remarkably unconvincing is his defence of the
34 Tom. ad Antiochenos PG 26:5(800-1); 1tltll.UCWV roc; tv tlj KUta. :EUplilKT)V uuv6licp
UUVtUX9BV 1t£pi 1t{Ut£roc; .. . OUliBV yap tOWUtOV &plU£V iJ UUVOOOC;; cf. ibid. 10(808),
where the prohibition against circulating it is repeated.
35Schwartz adverted upon this '-Zur Kirchengeschichte' 145-6; Simonetti Crisi
182 notices it, and observes that according to Socrates HEJI:2o and Sozomenus HE
III, 21 some people at the Council of Alexandria had adduced the example of
Serdica in favour of one hypostasis. Even H. Hess in The Canons of the Council of
Sardica, whose conventional approval of Athanasius is seldom modified, can say that
'Athanasius' account does not seem to be wholly accurate' (p.73).
360n this, see Stead 'The Thalia of Arius' 35-39~ cf. Or. Con. Ar. I.24(25)~ De
Decret. 15.1-4(0).
"De Synodis J9.4(265).
38De Deeretis 20.5(17).
 r
'f\..jiu;~I
~~ .
""'" ,
compromising statements 0;
Dionysius of ~xandria by ple~ding
that they referred to Christ s human body, not to the pre-exlste~t
Son. 39 Did Athanasius really believe this, r did he adopt this
argument with his tongue in his cheek in order tQ save the orthodoxy
of his distinguished predecessor? \"
Athanasius could on occasion give voice to admita~senti'!lent~
about free speech: 'The truth is not proclaimed', he says, '1>-yswords
and missiles, nor by means of soldiers, but by persuasion and
discussion.' 40 As we consider his early career we shall have these
words in mind; they will serve well as a criterion of his behaviour.
2. Athanasius' Career to the Council of Tyre
The date of Athanasius' birth is uncertain, but most authorities allow
that 297 is the most likely year. A Coptic text which Tetz thinks
might be reliable41 says that he was aged 33 when he was consecrated
bishop. This would place his birth in 295, because it is certain that
Alexander died and Athanasius succeeded in 328. If we think that
Contra Gentes et De lncarnatione was written before the Arian
Controversy began, then,.w~ must place his birth as early as possible.
But it is not necessary to conclude that this book was written before
318. Most recent authorities place it in 338 or 339. A History of the
Patriarchs of Alexandria which represents local Alexandrian tradition
says that Athanasius was of pagan parents,42 and some have accepted
this as an explanation of why in Historia Arianorum 64 Athanasius says
that he had heard about th~ persecution of Maximin (3 I 1-312) from
his elders (ilKouO'a taw ltateprov) But this is an inadequate explanation
because surely the persecution was striking enough for both pagans
and Christians to hear about it. All we can conclude is that Athanasius
in 3 I 1-3 12 was in some place where Maximin's persecution made no
395ee above. p. 73. In defence of Athanasius' sincerity here we may refer to Or.
Con. A,. 11.6---9(73"""'7). where he argues that the expression in Heb 3:21tlO''t'OV ana tep
7tolT1GUvn a~t6v must mean that Christ was 'trustworthy' (a~161t1(n09 i.e. that he
ought to be believed in by Christians. He will not even follow the logic of his own
premises and say that Christ was 1tlat6<; as ma~ hut a~161tl(noc; as God. But this kind
of exegesis hardly justifies Boularand's encomium. 'Dans Ie dedale de ces
discussions, sa science de l'Ecriture et sa penetration d'esprit Ie servent :l merveille.
On ne peut se defendre de les admirer' (L'Heresie 88, 89).
4·Hisl. Arian. 33-3(201).
41'Athanasius von Alexandrien' 333.
42 50 TeEZ 'Athanasius' 334.
The Behaviour of Athanasius
impression, so that he heard about it only from those who had
experienced it. In De lncamatione 56 he says of some of his teachers
'who also were witnesses (or martyrs) of Christ's divinity' (01 Kal
lIaptUpe, tij, XPIO'toU Oeot1]to, yeyovaO'l). If this means that some of
his teachers were actually martyred in the Great Persecution it is
im possible to imagine that he was still a pagan in 3 I I, and we must
place his birth earlier than 297. But the expression is an odd one;
'witnesses' could mean no more than 'confessors'; or the words could
simply mean that in their teaching these teachers bore witness to
Christ's divinity. Among the deacons who put their signatures to
Alexander's Letter to All Bishops (which we have dated pI) are two
called Athanasius, one of whom must surely be ours. 43 This means
that he was a deacon by the time he was 24, if we place his birth in
297, and that when he was consecrated bishop he was 3 I. His enemies
accused him of being made bishop under age,44 and this would fit in
with the theory that he was 3 I when consecrated. It was a very early
age indeed, but just not too early to be scandalous. We conclude that
the generally agreed date of 297 for his birth is the most probable.
On the subject of Athanasius' election as bishop the sources are
even more confused than on the subject of the date of his birth. 45 The
earliest source is the statement of the bishops of Egypt in the year
33846 who declare that Athanasius was elected openly with the
acclamation of both laity and clergy, but admit that his enemies
accuse him of having been consecrated by only six or seven bishops
'secretly and in a corner' (MOp~ Kal tv ltapapuO'tcp). Epiphanius has
two contradictory, or at least confusing, statements. At one point 47
he says that when Alexander died Theonas was elected bishop by the
Melitians but died very shortly afterwards. A little later he says that
when Alexander died Athanasius was away and Achillas was elected
bishop, but he died after a few weeks,48 and that Athanasius was then
"Opitz Urk III No. 3.21(11).
44This was alleged at a Council of Antioch in 338; see note by Opitz on
Athanasius' Encyclical Letter 10 Bishops of Egypl 3.2-5 (p.171).
45For various reconstructions based on the evidence, see Schwartz, Gesamm.
SclJrifi. I1I.8. 192, n [; Simonetti Crisi [ID-I [5; Barnard 'Two Notes on Athanasius'
345-52; Tetz 'Athanasius' 335; Barnes Constantine and Eusebius 230; A. Martin,
PTAA, 4<>-4' W. G. Rusche, ibid. 164-5.
4<Quoted in Arhana,iu, Apol. Sec. 6.4, 5(92).
"Panarion 68.71.1-4(147).
48Ibid. 69.11.4-6(161); Achillas, of course, was Alexander's predecessor, not his
successor.
 F
I
l
Period of Confosion The Behaviour of Athanasius
f
chosen. Sozomenus has an unlikely story of Athanasius, on
fact that Athanasius was away when Alexander died. It looks as if
Alexander's death, trying to escap~,C tion out of modesty, but
being brought back and consecrat d with t e assent of all, and says
that Alexander on his death-bed c lied for thanasius and predicted
I
[
Athanasius was indeed elected, but not by an immediate and
unanimo~s acclamationyand not without suspicion of sharp practice.
It IS pOSSIble that AthanaslUs refused to count Melitian bishops as
that he would be bishop of Alexa1'\dria. 49 ut he :i)so adds that the
enemies of Athanasius alleged that flft- r bishop\ duly assembled
!t qualified to elect. It had been traditionally the practice that the bishop
of Alexandria should be chosen from among the presbyters of the see
and took an oath to elect a proper s cessor to Ale I ander, but that
and Athanasius was not a presbyter. But he was not the first bishop of
about seven of them broke their oat and secretly eI ted Athanasius.
Alexandria who had not been an Alexandrian presybter, and this may
A little later50 he says that the c~ncil of Tyre (in 335) accused
not have caused much opposition to his election. Barnard suggests S3
Athanasius of receiving consecrati n from a fe oath-breakers.
that Athanasius took trouble to have Constantine confirm his
Philostorgius alleges that when the as embled bis ops were taking a
election and that immediately after his consecration he set out on a
long time to decide upon a successof-·to--Alexander, Athanasius
long tour of his diocese. Neither of these facts suggests that he had an
brought two bishops secretly at evening into the church called that of
undisputed e1ection"by many bishops from all parts of the area within
Dionysius, shut the doors firmly, and then persuaded them to
the jurisdiction of Alexandria to give him confidence.
consecrate him bishop. The other bishops objected to this move, but
Though Athanasius declared that as soon as bishop Alexander died
Constantine was informed of it and given the impression that
the Melitians began stirring up trouble again, we have no evidence of
Athanasius was the choice of the whole city, so that the matter was
such trouble, even in Athanasius' own Festal Letters, till the year 332.
accepted. 51 Athanasius, who of course endorses the account of his
The Letter for that year was issued late because the archbishop had
election given by the letter of the Egyptian bishops in Apol. Secunda 6,
been ill during the winter of 331-332. In it he mentions that his
later in that work 52 gives the impression, not only that he did not
'enemies have been covered with shame and rebutted by the church
approve of the arrangements for reconciling the Melitians reached at
because of their unprovoked attack on us.' 54 It is significant that later
Nicaea, but that immediately on Alexander's death the Melitians
in the letter he reveals that he is writing from the court of
began stirring up trouble again, and entered into an alliance with
Constantine, that he has been accused by the Melitians, and that 'they
Eusebius ofNicomedia and his party against Athanasius and in favour
of Arianism. We shall see reason to conclude that Athanasius has here were branded with ignominy and driven from here as slanderers and
were reviled for many reasons', and he even gives the names of his
telescoped events for his own advantage, and that it was not till they
foiled accusers.55 Epiphanius at one point admits that Athanasius had
had experienced his policy towards them that the Melitians began
used fairly strong meas.ures. 56 Sozomenus reproduces part of a letter
lookmg roilnd for allies against him. But he says nothing here about
apparently written by Constantine to Athanasius which is also
their impugning or opposing his election as bishop of Alexandria.
quoted by Athanasius. 57 He places it in the context of an accusation
',,0

We know from the Index to the Festal Letters that Alexander died
on April 17th 328, and that Athanasius was elected on June 8th in the
same year. This is a remarkably long interval, even allowing for the 53'Two Notes on Athanasius' (345-52). But the evidence for this is admittedly
frail. . .
49Sozomenus HE 11.17.2-3; this story, he says, he has derived from 'Apollinarius 54Let.ter 4. year 332, Migne PG 26;I37~.I. my translation of the Migne ed.'s tr. of
the Syrian', the Synac. Lefort deest. The vague warnIng to avoid heretics in the Letter 3 for the
50Il.2.5.6. Neither Socrates nor Theodoret gives us any useful information about year 33 [ (26:1376.5) is hardly significant.
55 26:1379.5; cf. Gwatkin SA 75. n l.
th~ election of Athanasius, except that Socrates (HE 1.23) says that Eusebius of
~lcomedia and Theognis ofNicaea, on recovering their sees after return from exile. 56Panarion 69.11.7(161) 6V8KclA£llCUi TpttlM:l, 6vOOOetEl Kal ot)aEl~ ilVetXEtO 'he
Impugned the consecration of Athanasius on the grounds that he was unworthy to ~sed to upbrai? and threa~e~ and, admonish. 3?d nobody objected' (or possibly
be chosen and had been made bishop by untrustworthy persons. could endure It • though It IS unlIkely that Eplphanius would have said this: the
"HE II.Il(22, 23). exact meaning of the last word is obscure). At 68.7 he quotes Melitian allegations of
52Apol. Sec: 59. atrocities against Athanasius.
57Sozomenus HE 1I.22.I-3; Athanasius Apol. Sec. 59.6.
 /
Period oj Cor!fusion
made by Melitians (not Arians) to the Emperor against Athanasius,
charging him with causing divisions and disturbances in his diocese,
with preventing people from entering the church (i.e. the church
building) and (charges made particularly by 'John', that is John
Arcaph the Melitian leader, and the clergy associated with him) of
murders and imprisonments and undeserved beatmgs and
woundings and burning of churches, even though the victims were
perfectly orthodox. Athanasius replied accusing John ?f uncan~ll1cal
ordination and innovating upon the orthodox doctrme of Nlcaea,
and also of causing divisions and insulting conduct towards the
orthodox. Athanasius in his account of the incidents leading up to
Constantine's letter puts the blame on the Arians and gives the
impression that by this time the Melitians and the Arians had formed
a deliberate alliance against him. But it is very likely that this alliance
had not yet been formed. Epiphanius says5' that Melitius died before
Alexander, and Alexander before his de.ath had begun to harass the
Melitians (those who would not accept the arrangement made at
Nicaea perhaps), that they attempted to appeal to the Emperor, but
their plea was rejected without an interview, and he names a bishop
John among the Melitians. This may be a confused me~ory.ofthe
episode referred to in the Festal Letter for 332. AthanaslUs himself,
after all, only dates the trouble with the Melitians from the death of
Alexander (or, more accurately, his own accession to the see).
Epiphanius goes on to say that the leaders of the Meli~ans were, aft~r
their discomfiture, near the court (presumably at Nlcomedla, but If
we accept Sozomenus' account possibly Constantinople) and we,: at
that point taken in hand by Eusebius of Nicomedia who promISed
that he would obtain for them an audience with the Emperor if they
would receive and champion Arius, and, on their agreeing, the fusion
of the causes of Arius and of Melitius took place. Some Melitians
remained orthodox in faith, but not all. 59 Athanasius' account of the
same incidents suggests that the Melitians had caused disturbances
before they actually made a pact with the Eusebian party.60 Certainly
the fragment of Constantine's letter quoted by both Sozomenus and
Athanasius exhibits the Emperor peremptorily ordering its recipient
to receive into the church certain people, whose allegiance is not
mentioned but whom Sozomenus, as we have seen, identifies as
58Panarion 68.$.1-4·
"Ibid. 68.6.1-6(146).
60 Apol. Sec. 59.6.
2 0
The Behaviour oj Athanasius
or
Melitians, . under pain, the Emperor sending some official who
would drIve the letter s recIpient out· of his see. It is perhaps
impossible to reconstruct the exact order of events, but the evidence
seems to point clearly to the conclusion that several years must have
elapsed between Athanasius succeeding to the see of Alexandria and
the first moves of the Melitians against him. 61
We can see why the Eusebians should have wished to intrigue
against Athanasius. He must have been known as a resolute champion
of the Creed ofNicaea which they found uncongenial and restricting.
But why should the Melitians have been discontented with
Athanasius? Ifhalf of what Sozomenus said was alleged by them was
true, they had every reason for hostility to Athanasius. But, apart
from specific accusations such as those connected with Ars'enius and
Ischyras, which we shall consider shortly, was this more than wild
hearsay? Had they any genuine grievances? We might dismiss the
accusations against Athanasius retailed by Sozomenus and
Epiphanius as the product of sheer partisanship and not worthy of
credence, as, for instance, Gwatkin does, and many a church historian
before and after him who was willing to take Athanasius'
protestations of his innocence at their face value . We might believe
the direct denial that Athanasius ever hurt or imprisoned anyone,
made by the Egyptian bishops in 338. 62 We might dismiss the
allegations of the Council of Tyre, and treat the accusations made
against Athanasius by the Eastern bishops, at Serdica in 343, with the
same scepticism as we read the defence of him made at the same
moment by the Western bishops, or with even more. All these are
statements made for propaganda purposes by very much interested
parties, though even in those circumstances it would be unwise to
refuse all credit to them. But, accidentally or providentially, we have
available to us contemporary evidence which we cannot possibly
61 For some interesting suggestions about the reasons for this alliance between the
~elitians and the Eusebians, see A. Martin in PTAA 45-6. And for much useful
Information about the Melitians at this stage, see Barnard 'Athanasius and the
MeIitian Schism' 185-'7. Though Sozomenus thinks that this letter was sent to
At~anasius by Constantine concerning the Melitians, Athanasius says that it was
Written by the Emperor to him concerning the A,ians. On the whole it seems better
~o foHow Athanasius here and to place the letter at some considerably later time than
Immediately after Athanasius' accession to the see. It could represent a reaction of
~onstantine to the letter of Arius (already referred to above, P.9) which must be
mferred from Constantine's Lette, 10 A,ius and his Companions (Opitz U,k. III
No. 34(69-75)), and placed in 333. So Opitz takes it.
62Athanasius Apologia Secunda 4.2.(9r).
 Period of Confusion
dismiss as invention or exaggeratiOh-OI-pr.opa anda, to decide this
point. . ..
This evidence consists of papyrus letters dlscov red by Brltlsh
archaeologists and published by H .. I. B in . ook Jews and
Christians in Egypt.· J Two letters amon the many covered and
published are particularly significant. T. ey PIUng~US n the middle
of the events which concerned Athanasl s between e ears 331 and
335, and which will presently be related or~]: t the oment it is
sufficient to note that one of these letters (papyrus 1913) as Written on
March 24th 334, and consists of the official appoint ent by one
Pageus who was an official of a Melitian monastic c mmu~ity at
Hathor of his brother as his deputy in the monaste while he
attended the Council of Caesarea. 64 The other letter, pafY!:!s 1914,
was written by Callistus, a Melitian mO.nk o~ chic, in ba~ ?~k (as
in papyrus 1913), and recounts the suffermgs mflicted on Melltlan~by
Athanasius and his followers. It is a factual account written for peofrle
under persecution, a private missive not intended for publication nor
propaganda, and therefore all the more damning. It can be dated With
confidence to a point just before the Council ofTyre, that is late May
or early June 335. It describes Athanasius' state of mind just before
embarking in order to attend the Council, and the barbarous
treatment which he is meanwhile dealing out to those Melitians who
have opposed him. The letter relates that several of the (Melitian)
brethren came to Callistus and that they will be able to tell the
recipient of the letter what has been happening: Isaac· s bishop of
63Vol. VI, London 1924. In a paper read to the Tenth International Conference
on Patristic Studies held in Oxford in August 1987. D. W. H. Arnold cast some
doubt on whether it is really Athanasius who is referred to in papyrus 1914 and
whether it is really the Melitians who are the victims of harassment. His arguments
were well presented, but were all hypothetical and tentative. The situa~ion and t~e
names mentioned in the papyri fit the circumstances of AthanaSIUS and hiS
opponents too well for us to abandon the account presented here. But it shoul~ be
pointed out that these papyri are by no means the only evi.dence for the c.ase agamst
Athanasius.
4
6 Pageus was apparently a village priest, not a monk. Athanasius, as V:'e sh~ll see,
had refused to attend the Council of Caesarea in 334, and never mentIons It, but
even if we did not have unmistakable evidence about it here, we could know about
it from Sozomenus HE 11.2.5; Theadaret HE 1.28.2-4; Festal Letters Index far the
year 334 and the Letter ofthe Eastern Bishops afSerdica. Eusebius afCaesarea presided
over it if it actually took place. See Bell, ap. cit. 45-9. . 6Ibid. 59.60. Archelaus had evidently been sent with this other Athanasius to
6sDe1l op. cit. 57. Isaac was a Melitian who is known to have been present at ~he
Council of Tyrc and to have campla~ned about Athanasius' ma1creatment af hIm
252
The Behaviour of Athanasius
Leto came to Herai~cus (evidently an eminent Melitian bishop) in
Alexandria, wantmg to have supper with the bishop in the camp
(near Alexandria, called Nicopolis). Some drunken adherents of
Athanasius arrived at the 9th hour (3 p.m.), with soldiers. They shut
the gates of the camp and began searching for Isaac and Heraiscus.
Some soldiers in the camp had hidden them and when the Athanasian
party could not find them, they attacked some Melitians whom they
met coming into the camp and maltreated them and threw them out
ofNicopolis. They then arrested five Melitians who were in a hostel
imprisoned them for a time and then threw them too out of
Nicopolis, and beat the keeper of the hostel for putting up Melitian
monks. And they shut up somebody called Ammon in the camp
because he welcomed Melitians into his house. So Callistus and his
friends are afraid to visit Heraiscus in the camp .•• Athanasius is
depressed and anxious because the Emperor has arrested and
Impnsoned Macarius and Archelaus; Athanasius son of Capito went
off to kidnap (u1tocnacre(I)v) Macarius, but John (Arcaph) in Antioch
heard of it and had them arrested on the charge of slandering
7
Heraiscus.· The writer and his friends are in great trouble because of
what Athanasius is doing to them. Here I quote the reconstructed
text:
'For he arrested the bishop of the lower country and shut him up in the
meat market and he shut up a presbyter of those parts also in the lock-
up and a deacon in the great prison, and Herascius has been
imprisoned since the 28th (of Pachon, an Egyptian month) in the
camp. I thank the Lord God that the beatings which he was receiving
have ceased. And on the 27th he (Athanasius) forced seven bishops to
leave the area. Emis and Peter, son ofToubestis, are among them.'
They left the bread behind, 'in order that it might not be taken
outsIde, on account of the bishop, to the intent that he might take it
with. him. '.8 This last obscure passage probably means that
~era!scus, (perhaps the Melitian archbishop of Alexandria) had with
him the supply of free bread provided by the state for the Melitians
(Athanasius Apol. Sec. 64; Sazomenus HE 11.25). He signed the Eastern bishops'
Encyclical at Serdica.
"Bell op. cit. 58-61.
7
remove Macarius from detention in Tyre by hook or by crook:
"Ibid. 60.
253
 \~
The Behaviour of Athanasius
Period of Confusion

. th bread under is control to communicate with Athanasius. He had been justly convicted of
(since Athanasius would. not give ~ h llistus and his disgraceful behaviour in his see. His conviction had nothing to do
Melitians), and the bread IS ~ow ~eyon t e r 69 with doctrinal issues. No church could be expected to tolerate
. d h t with Heralscus III the ca p. . f behaviour like this on the part of one of its bishops. It is not surprising
fnen s, s u up I I h' evid nce agrees the hst 0
It is remarkable how c ose y t IS b S us' causing that the Melitians, harried unmercifully by Athanasius and unable at
Melitian charges against A~ha~as;.s giv: ~~v:nt~ZOpe pie 'entering first to obtain help from the Emperor, turned to the ouly help
divisions and disturban~es Ill. IS IOces, de erv beatings and available to them, that of the Eusebians. They thereby gave
churches, murders and Imprlsonm~nts an h' h c uld not but be Athanasius an opportunity of clouding the issue by ascribing all
woundings. 70 Instead of 'the ten erness w IC and e uitable as protest against his outrageous conduct to bias towards Arianism, an
tien
loved', the gentleness wh~ch .made hi1m . '.. S? p; his c du~t and the opportunity of which he strove earnestly to take advantage. 74 But
k ' the 'majestic mora unity 0 the alliance of the Melitians with the Eusebians did not alter the fact
a peace-rna er, . . ble in it we find Athanasius be ving
freedom fro,;, a~t~t;h:;g~Ohired t; intimidate his en~mies. he that Athanasius' offence had nothing to do with doctrine. The charge
ilke an emp oy B 11 arks makes it certam that the against him at Tyre was the unscrupulous use of strong-arm methods
evidence of papyrus 191 4, e I rem ha~iour in his see made against against his opponents, and that charge as a general accusation,
charges of violent and unscrupu ous b e . at Serdica in 343 and whatever may have been said about individual incidents, was
Athanasius at Caesarea III 334, at Tyre III 71335, abundantly justified. We can see by virtue of historical hindsight that
many times thereafter were not baseless. Athanasius in following this policy set an evil example to his
.., B II 72 'that Athanasius, while successors of the use of force and intrigue. They learnt all too readily
'It was always SUSpICIOUS, says e, dA . hich
h ing the chalice an rsenIUS, W from him, Peter, Timothy, Theophilus, Cyril, Dioscorus, until the
dwelling on the c arges ~once~hose which accused him of violence
he could refute, says not mg~ litians The reason is nOW clear: these last draws on himself final catastrophe.
and oppreSSIon towards the e . nclude that there was a germ When therefore we try to reconstruct the events which concerned
charges were m part true .. . We must co . . ies as a self- Athanasius from his election in 328 until the Council of Tyre in the
of truth in the picture given of Athana::: ~';;ph:~:~::hority with summer of 335, we must bear in mind that our main informant
willed, unruly man apt to treat even (Athanasius himself) is determined to conceal his violent behaviour
contempt.' . h by alleging that all was invented by people who were dangerous
We are probably justified, he says earlier, in ~SSUm111ng t~a~afterl;~~e heretics, and that most of the rest of the sources, and most writers
d fti· f his enemies Athanaslus a owe lmse since, have taken this plea at its face value. 75 The first accusation
filrustrate f 0 e~~~;~30It seems clear also that Athanasius' first efforts at
which we know to have been made against Athanasius is obscure; it
uxury 0. r,p~1S h: d' h d nothing to do with difference of
ngstensm III IS IOcese a b alleged some offence concerning the duty on the part of the
ga.. b t the subject of the Arian Controversy, ut were Egyptians of furnishing the church of Alexandria with linen
~f:;:~e~ aa o;nst the Melitians. He had ~ot agreed with the garments. This was made by Melitians to the Emperor in 330 but was
g t made about the Melitians at N,caea. They may have rebutted by two of Athanasius' presbyters Apis and Macarius, who
~;~:~~~:~~t a Melitian archbishop on Alexander'~ death. Once he 74'Toute l'habilite d'Athanase consistera a masquer la veritable nature de
was in the saddle, he determined to suppress them with a ~ong han!: l' opposition meIitienne derriere l'heterodoxie des eusebiens', A. Martin, PTAA 50.
and was not at all scrupulous about the methods he used.. e can no Id 75Some of the original sources will be referred to as we continue with the
see why, for at least twenty years after 335, no Eastern bishops wou account. Much the fullest account is in Athanasius Apol. Sec. 59.83 which contains
not only Athanasius' version of the events but many official documents which he
quotes. Sozomenus 11.25.1-13 is the best account among the church historians, as
"Ibid. 62, 63. part of it may be based on the account of the Synod of Tyre given by Sabinus,
70See above, pp.249-5 0 . bishop ofHeraclea, cf. Hilary Coil. Ar. BII 5.1(16) p. 140. For modem historians, see
7tBell op. cit. 46-'7· Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift. 111.8.[96-200; Simonetti Crisi 112-17; 124-8; Martin
"Ibid. 57· PTAA 46-55; Barnard, ibid. 131-6.
"Ibid. 46-7·
2
 ---Pe";'~nfusion
,
happened to be at the court ~;;;;m ia at the ~ime. The seco~d
accusation, by the same gr~'~,-~~ai~ to Const nt e, was made In
33 I, and it charged Athanasi s with gIVI g bo of old to a certain
imperial official called Philou enusy 0 ha nee been suspected.of
disloyalty to the Emperor; had tills charge been proved, AthanasIUs
would have been guilty of encouraging treason. I ? rebut thIS charge,
it was necessary for Athanasius to leave AlexandrIa soon after Easter
33 1 , and to defend himself personall y before the Emperor. He met
Constantine at Psamathia, an imperial palace near NIcomedla,."nd
succeeded in persuading him of his entire innocence.'"' He fell ill at
Nicomedia and was not able to return to AlexandrIa tIll Just before
Easter 33 2 , but when he did return he did so in triumph, supported ~y
imperial favour. 77 When he was spending this long perIod In
Nicomedia and during the summer of 332 twO further charges were
made against Athanasius, again by Melitians, to th.eEmperor: that
one of his agents, Macarius, had with his approval vIsIted a presb~ter
in the Mareotis called Ischyras and had . used violen~e to him,
breaking an altar (and perhaps a bishop'S chair) and smashing a. sacred
chalice, and maltreating Ischyras personally; and that Athanaslus had
either murdered a bishop called Arsenius or <an equ~lly serto~!
charge) practised sorcery by u~ing th~ severed han~ of hiS corpse.
The former charge is now Impossible to examine In det~il, so
contradictory was the evidence given, so dense the cloud of prejudice
on each side; as well attempt to determine what really happened
when soldiers have clashed with a crowd in Northern Ireland: No
doubt the Eusebians who accuse Athanasius were as blmdl y
prejudiced as Athanasius himself. when he wrote in his defence.'"
Athanasius never actually denies that Ischyras was assaulted. ':Ie
confines his defence to pointing out that Ischyras was not In a stnct
sense a presbyter at all; he came from the sect of Colluthus and
. 76Athanasius Apol. Sec. 60.1-3(140). 4(14°, 141), and see Opitz' notes in lac.
77It is best to place the letter of Constantine Apol. S~c. 6I.I~I4I~-62.7(I42)
a I commending Athanasius to the people of Alexandna, at thIS pOint. For the
;at:~lhis return see A. Martin Histoire 'Akephale' 74 (using Index to Festal Letters
and the Historia Akephala). . '
78Compare the account of Athanasius by Ammlanus Marcelhnus, above. p. 241.
79 Athanasius describes it Apol. Sec. 11.5-'7(96, 97) and 6].1-5(142,14J)· ~h~
recantation ofischyras. recorded 64.1-3(143.144) cannot be ta~en senou~y. He ~
been denounced to the prefect of Egypt on a charge of ~avlt~g overt rown t e
statues of Caesar during a rising in 323 and had been lmpnso~ed. He had to
withdraw his accusation of violence against Athanas~us. Later, of course, he
withdrew the withdrawal. See Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift· 111.8(197).
The Behaviour of Athanasius
Colluthus had never been consecrated bishop by anybody but
himself, and in consequence his ordinations were invalid. 80 Another
consequence of this was that the so-called church and its furniture
cannot have been sacred, so that the charge of sacrilege could not
stick. In short, his opponents cried 'Violence and sacrilege' and
Athanasius replies 'No: only violence'. Opitz made the useful
suggestion that Athanasius' brutal conduct as revealed in papyrus 1914
was inspired by a letter from Constantine which Athanasius quotes,81
dated 332, addressed to Athanasius, in which the Emperor complains
about the emptiness of the charge concerning Arsenius, and enquires
about the new charge concerning the broken chalice, and suggests
that Athanasius should examine the matter officially (6(146)).
Athanasius may have taken this as a sanction for using 'unusually
ferocious methods against his adversaries.
This letter also makes it clear that the charge about Ischyras and the
chalice came after that about Arsenius. It is possible that Athanasius
was able to deal with the charge about Arsenius when he was at
Nicomedia in 331 and early 332. Arsenius' precise allegiance is not
known; it is difficult in view of the evidence to identify him as either a
Melitian or a Eusebian. 82 His accusers produced a severed hand,
alleging that it was the hand of the murdered Arsenius, to be
employed, of course, for magical purposes. Constantine appointed
his brother-in-law, Dalmatius, to preside over an enquiry into the
affair at Antioch. The agents of Athanasius discovered that Arsenius
was alive and in possession of both his hands in the Thebaid; tracked
down there, Arsenius fled to Tyre, but Athanasian agents found him
there too, and had him identified' before Paul, bishop of Tyre. 83
The exposure of this manifestly false charge had a damaging effect on
the Melitian case against Athanasius. Athanasius gives another letter
from Constantine to John Arcaph, to be dated 332, congratulating
SOFor CoHuthus see above pp. 137-8 and Opitz Urk III. No. 14.3(19, 20) and
Apol. Sec. 12.1(97).
81Apol. Sec. 68.1-'7(146,147), and Opitz's notes in Joe.
825ee Opitz's note on Apol. Sec. 69.1-4(147. 148). Arsenius later submitted to
Athanasius (Apol. Sec. 69.1-4(147. 148», but not till about 337. after Athanasius'
return from his first exile. Socrates HE II.P.3 says that Arsenius signed the
condemnation of Athanasius at Tyre. We may convict Athanasius of ferocity, but
not of vindictiveness. He even was finally reconciled to Ischyras!
83 Apol. Sec. 6J-69; Sozomenus HE 1I.2J; Socrates HE 1.29. Martin (PTAA
48-50) thinks that Athanasius dealt with the matter of Arsenius by sending a deacon
from Alexandria to the court. But if the case came before the Iscfiyras affair, this
would hardly be possible.
 c/
him on submitting to Athanas US. 84
Con sion
~ohn£rCaPh'
who had been
foremost in moving the charges a tisch ras, had to apologize to
Athanasius, and he was summoned to Nic media and rebuked.
It seems likely that from the summer of 332 for about a year
A thanasius was left to his own devices. Constantine had shown no
inclination to favour Melitian complaints about Athanasius, and, in
spite of Athanasius' account (Apol. Sec. 59), there is no satisfactory
evidence that the Melitians had yet united with the Eusebians. To the
year 333 we have already allotted a letter of Constantine to Arius and
his companions which, after a good deal of imperial bluster and
abuse, shows a distinctly conciliatory attitude towards them. 85 And
we have attributed to the same year a fragment of a letter of
Constantine to Athanasius peremptorily ordering him to readmit an
unnamed group and to restore their church building to them. 86
Constantine may have thought that an opportunity had arisen of
bringing about entire unity within the Church by effecting the
readmission of Arius and his followers to the Christian community in
Alexandria. Athanasius (who had good reason to believe that he was
now in good odour with Constantine) politely refused. Nothing
happened to him. It was not unusual for Constantine to make threats
of immediate punishment or suggest measures to his correspondents
without following them Up.87 But in this year or in the next the
Melitians found an ally in the Eusebians. Athanasius says that it was
Eusebius of Nicomedia who prompted Constantine's demand, and
he may be right. But it was not till the next year, 334, that the fruit of
this alliance appeared. A Council was called to Caesarea in Palestine
with the ostensible purpose of purifying the Christian people, but in
fact to examine the conduct, not the doctrine, of Athanasius. 88
'4Apol. Sec. 70.1~2(148).
"Opitz Urk. Ill. No. 34(69f1). See above, p. 176.
··See above pp.2S0-1 and n6I. See Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift. IlI.8(23!>-40).
87E.g. the letter given to us by Gelasius HE III.IS addressed apparently to
Alexander of Alexandria, to be dated probably to 327 or 328 in which he says that he
has summoned Arius to his presence with his companion Euzoiu5, that he wants to
discuss matters of faith with them in the presence ofothers, and he invites Alexander
(if it is Alexander) to meet these two and see if he can find accord with them in
doctrine. Alexander clearly did not respond to this invitation and nothing came of
it. The thunderous Edict against Arius (Opitz Urk. III No. 33(66-8) must be placed
in the year 333 also; if so Constantine quickly accomplished an entire volte-face on
the subject; it was riot out of character for him to do so.
88Athanasius never mentions this council. but it certainly was called. We have
already seen papyrus 1913 which refers to its imminent meeting, but there is also the
2 8
The Behaviouro! Athanasius
Athanasius was summoned to it, but refused to attend or send a
representative; he had disobeyed imperial commands with impunity
before; he saw no reason why he should obey an ecclesiastical
tribunal.
Next year, however, in the summer of 335, the Council of
Caesarea was re-constituted or re-summoned in Tyre. And on this
occasion Constantine showed openly his support of this move by
appointing an imperial official, the consular Dionysius, to oversee it.
It was not a vast assemblage, there were only about sixty bishops
present, but it held a wide representation. Alexander bishop of
Thessalonica was at it and, curiously, two young and enthusiastically
Eusebian bishops from Balkan sees, Val ens from Mursa and U rsacius
from Singidunum, and Marcellus of Ancyra. 89 Flacillus of Antioch
presided. Athanasius was unwillingly compelled to attend by threats
from Constantine; he testifies himself to his reluctance (Apol. Sec. 71)
and papyrus 1914, as we have seen (pp. 252-3), confirms this. There
was little attempt to conceal the fact that this Council had assembled
to investigate his conduct of affairs in his see. Not only did he suspect
that Euseblans, well informed by Melitians, would be in control of it;
they had arrested his agents; his political opponents in his see were
informing against him. But he also knew that they had a strong case.
It is not surprising that he was depressed and apprehensive.
When Athanasius arrived at Tyre he found himself accused on a
number of charges, all of them supplied with evidence from
aggrieved Melitians, prominent among whom was John Arcaph,
Index of Festql Letters for Easter of 334. the Letter of the Eastern Bishops at Serdica 7;
Sozomenus HE I1.25. I and Theodoret HE 1.28. It is not certain whether this council
ever .m~t. It certainly ~ccomplished nothing. Schwartz (Gesamm, Schrift. I11.8 (200.
n I) InSIsted upon datIng it 333. not 33'4. relying on a phrase in the letter of the
Easterners at Sardica, post alterum annum. and another in Apo!' Sec. n.77 1i1to 1tepucJl
but the Index to the Festal Letters makes it clear that the date is 334. See Martin
His/oire 'Akephale', 230, 23I. '
89~ources for the Council. of Tyre: Eusebius VC IV.42 (Theodoret HE 1.29;
GelaslUs HE III. 1.7); AthanaSlus Apol. Sec. 73-81 (esp. 79); Sozomenus HE II.2S
(RufiDus J:IE I. 17;, Socrates !IE 1.29-30; Theodoret HE 1.30); Epiphanius Panarion
68.8,9; Phdostorglus HE II.33. Details added Sozomenus HE II.33; Athanasius Apol.
Sec. 7': Martm (PTAA 51 n48) gives the list of bishops present; he discusses the
CounCIl 52-5; se,e also Schwa~tz Gesamm. Schrift. 11.8 247-56; Simonetti Crisi 1 2 4-8;
Ba~nes C~nstan,tlne an~ EuseblUs 23 1-5. The Letter of Egyptian Bishops 7 suggests that
A:nus d~rmg hIS Illyrlan exile had converted the young Valens and Ursacius to his
Vl~W po!nt. For t~e date of the Counci], which is certainly 335, nof336, see Martin
HIS/OITe Akephale 74-5.
who was probabl~.
~, C,"'"~
" ' \ 'f
o
tia bishop of Memphis" Ecclesiastical
councils were, and long 0 tinued to .be, intensely unsatisfactory
organs ofjustice, without fo ms or standmg orders or presidents who
could control them or even c piitjng of votes" , Whenever we have
anything like a verbatim repo t of t1taOle or part o. f such a council,
as we have, for instance, in the se oftli Council of Aquilela of 381,
we realize this anew. The list 0 ccusati ns against AthanaslUs was a
long one: the case oflschyras (to. . Macarius, now a prison~r,
gave testimony), various types of VIOlence committed by A~~naslUs
against individual Melitian bishops; the depositIOn of Calhmcus of
pelusium who had broken with Athanasius over the affair ofIschyras;
they even revived the case of Arsenius. They threw doubt on the
validity of Athanasius' election; they produced charges of sexual
irregularity which had become almost routine in such prosecutions
(but which were dropped in the course of the proceedmgs); they
alleged that he was unpopular with the people of Alexand~la.
Athanasius had arrived (July I rth) accompamed by 30 Egyptian
bishops who were his supporte~s, and who behaved during the
session of Council in a disturbmg and threatenmg manner. HIS
encouragement over several years to his supporters to behav.e like
hooligans was now recoiling on his own head: He d~fended himself
with spirit,, 2 After some time the CouncIl deCided to send a
Commission to the Mareotis, whence Ischyras had come, to collect
evidence on the spot. This in itself waS a perfectly reasonable
measure, indeed for an ecclesiastical council a surprisingly fair one.
But the membership of the Commission showed that those who were
appointing it were distinctly anti-Athanasian, or rather,. pro-
Eusebian: Theognis of Nicaea, Maris of Chalcedon, UrsaclUS of
Singidunum, Valens of Mursa, Theodore of Heraclea and
Macedonius of Mopsuestia. When they arnved m Egypt,
accompanied by Isch yras and a detachment of soldiers but without
Macarius, they were given every opportunity to collect eVidence
against Athanasius by the prefect of Egypt, Philagrius, a pagan.
Protests were raised at these proceedings by groups of pro-
90See Apol. Sec. 71; at one time apparently Constantine ~ro~e .to]ohn Arcaph
promising him a reward ifhe would be reconciled to AthanaslUs (Ibid. 7~). We have
already seen him at Antioch in 334 and 335. cr. Barnard 'AthanaslUs and the
MeIetian Schism' I8S. 186.
91As Schwartz observes. op. cit. 251-5.
92Sozomenus HE 11.25; Epiphanius Panarion 68.8; Athanasius Apol. Sec. 8;
Rufinus HE 1.17.
The Behaviour of Athanasius
Athanasian clergy in Egypt and by Alexander of Thessalonica, and
Dionysius the consular seems by this time to have thought the
sending of the Commission a measure of doubtful wisdom,, 3 But
Athanasius realised that he had no more to hope from the Council of
Tyre. He secretly left the city and made his way to the court at
Constantinople.
In September the Mareotic Commission returned and reported.
The result was that the Council ofTyre condemned Athanasius on a
number of charges, deposed him from being archbishop of
Alexandria, excommunicated him, and forbade him to return to his
former see. Precisely what the charges upon which he was
condemned is not altogether clear, but they probably comprised
these:
i. His refusal to appear at the Council of Caesarea
ii. The contumacious behaviour of himself and his followers
during the Council of Tyre
iii. The affair of Ischyras and the broken chalice, which was
assumed to have been proved against him.
His Right in the middle of the Council was taken as an admission of
guilt. They reinstated some deposed Melitian bishops and sent a
circular letter to all bishops asking them not to communicate with
Athanasius. The Council then adjourned to the congenial occupation
of attending the dedication of Constantine's newly-built Church of
the Anastasis at Jerusalem!' They had not convicted Athanasius of
murdering Arsenius nor of any doctrinal error at all.
931n the Apol. Sec. Athanasius gives a long list of documents relevant to the
Council, som!! of which should be listed here: I. a list ofMeiitian bishops, presbyters
and deacons in Alexandria and its hinterland which had on two occasions been
given .to the bishop of Alexandria when the Melitians had been ostensibly
reconct1c:d. I~ sh~ws how very extensive was Melitian influence and allegiance.
Athanaslus gIves It to show that Ischyras' name is not in the list (Apol. Sec. 71); 2. a
letter of Count. Dionysius asking the whole Council to appoint a Commission to go
to th~ MareotIs (72 and 81); 3. Protest letters from Egyptian bishops about the
appoInt~e.nt of the Co~mjssion, addressed to the Synod and to the Count (77 and
78); a petItton of these bIShops appealing to Constantine, through Count Dionysius
afte~ the depar.ture of the Commission (79); 4. a Letter of Count Dionysius to
Flacl~lus of AntIoch and his followers warning him of the danger of their decision to
appoInt the Commission (81); evidently the Count had had second thoughts; 5. a
Letter ofAI~x~nder ofThessal.onica to the Count complaining about the despatch of
the CommISSIOn (8o~; 6. Vano?s later letters of pr-otest from groups of Egyptian
clergy about the unjust and hIgh-handed behaviour of,the Commission in the
Mareotis (7), 74, 75, 76).
94The charges upon which Athanasius was condemned can be reconstructed
 Period of Confusion
This verdict was a crushing blow for Athanasius, one from which
it took him a long time to recover; and perhaps only he could have
recovered from it. Nobody can pretend that the proceedings at Tyre
were a model of just dealing. The difficulty facing the bishops
gathered there was that they could only condemn on specific, not on
general, charges, and it was difficult to obtain evi nce on specific
charges. But they had given Athanasius an opport ity to defend
/
himself. The behaviour of his supporters d g trial was
menacing and exasperating and suggested that
concerned with coercion than with justice. It ust
everybody that he had been for some time usin· ensible iolence
in the administration of his see, even though it as not easy t bring
him to book on exact charges. Martin notes that ~uring the curse of
his many self-exculpations Athanasius makes a ca~eful choic of what
accusations he mentions, i.e. the affair of the brokeh-m .ce and that
of Arsenius, neither of which could be properly substantiated, and
that even in the former he switches the attention from what was
actually done to the status and history of Ischyras himself. He
completely ignores the serious and well-attested evidence of his own
continual use of violence. He suggests (not perhaps without
justification) that the conduct of the Mareotic Commission shows th.e
Eusebians themselves employing violence. He represents the Council
of Tyre, which was a properly constituted and entirely respectable
gathering of churchmen, some of whom had been confessors in the
Great Persecution, as a gang of disreputable conspirators, and brands
all his opponents as favourers ofheresy.95 When we have said all that
can be said in criticism of the Council ofTyre, we must acknowledge
that there was an air of nemesis about it.
3. From the Council of Tyre to the Council of Rome
John Arcaph was thought by Constantine to have overplayed his
hand at Tyre, perhaps in reviving the exploded affair of Arsenius. He
was banished in consequence. 96 Athanasius reached Constantinople
from Sozomenus HE 11.25.16-19. Some (e.g. Schwartz)·thin~.that the Council of
Tyre adjourned its proceedings temporarily to attend the dedication' in Jerusalem
and then returned to Tyre for the verdict and sentence.
95Martin PTAA 52-5.
96Socrates HE 1.30; Sozomenus HE 11.3 I.
The Behaviour of Athanasius
on October 30th 335; he met Constantine in the street and obtained
an audience with him, and there requested him to summon the
Council ofTyre all over again. Constantine certainly did not do this,
but he did require some of the Eusebian bishops to leave Jerusalem
and come to him at Constantinople. The exact order of events cannot
be reconstructed. It is evident that Athanasius had made some
progress in regaining the Emperor's favour when something
occurred to deprive him of it altogether and caused Constantine
i~contin.ently to banish Athanasius to Trier in the Gallic provinces of
his Empire, where he would be among complete strangers speaking a
language prob~bly as yet unknown to him, well out of the way of
causmg mischief. It was alleged that the cause of this change of
attitude on the part of Constantine was the accusation that Athanasius
had threatened to delay the cornships.97 Whether this charge arose
out of some unguarded words used by Athanasius to Constantine or
f~om an accusation made by some Eusebian bishop (perhaps Eusebius
himself), now arrived in Constantinople, cannot be determined.
~hough th.e influence of Athanasius among the sailors in the port of
hiS see ~Igh~ have b~en suffiCient to delay ships sailing from
Alexandna With Egyptian com for the restless proletariat of the
Empire's capital cities, it is in the last degree unlikely that Athanasius
was fool enough to make such a threat when he was in the Emperor's
power, a defeated man, struggling to salvage his status and career.
Constantin~, .significantly, ignored protests from groups of Egyptian
clergy at thiS Judgment, but took no steps to fill the see of Alexandria.
Some authority, it is not clear what, consecrated one Pistus, an
Alexandr~a':.8 pr~sbyter who favoured A~ius, as bishop of
Alexandna. PlStus, however, never received any significant
volume of Support, and a few years later faded out of history, an
97 Athanasius Apol. Sec. 86, 87.1-3, Socrates HE 1.34; Sozomenus HE n.28. See
~~A Schwartz Ge:amm. Schrift· 111.8(25 8-63); Simonetti Crisi 129.31; Pietri in
A ~S n 7. OpitZ, n on Encye. Letter to Egyptian Bishops 5.5(174) observes that
AthanaSlus had peculiar influence among the seafarers of Alexandria
98T~e Council of Tyre might have done this, but this seems imp~obable. It is
more. lIkely that Secundus ofPtolemais. who had now been restored to his see, acted
on hIS own authority as a prominent Egyptian (Libyan) supporter of Arius.
Schwartz (Gesamm. Schrift 1II.6(98» declares that Pistus was made bishop of
Mareotls. not of Alexandria. But (i) Athanasius suggests strongly (see n 99 below)
that t~ere was no see in Mareotis and that it was absurd to make one. and (ii) the
Eusebla~ party would hardly have asked Julius to_ communicate with a bishop of
Mareons. .
 Period of Confusion
'embarrassed and transient phantom'. The Melitians in Egypt were
temporarily triumphant. The Mareotis was made ~ d cese, Isc~yras ' dIed. The actual Circumstances ofhis death are difficult to reconstruct
appointed bishop of it, and a handsome church built t serve his see.
Athanasius later alleged that there was no populati n sufficient to X
justify a bishop there, that he had no presbyters an n ns, and
that had bishop Ischyras ventured to visit his dio ese as .able
be chased out of it by the local people. 99 Later A ana ius h d the
impudence to maintain that Constantine had b is a him 0 t of
kindness, to protect him from the virulent hostilit of the Arian . I 00
He travelled to Rome, where Sylvester was still bi Op,IOI and hen
to Trier, where he spent most of his First Exile. He m ave ought
some knowledge of monasticism (now well established in Egypt) to
the West, and have made the acquaintance in Trier, an imperial Head
Quarters, of Constantine II, Constantine's son. It is likely that he had
not yet written any works apart from the Festal Letters.
When the bishops were in Jerusalem for the dedication of the
Church, Constantine, who had by now returned to his new capital,
sent them a message stating that Arius and his friends had made a
profession of faith to him which was orthodox, and commanding
them to admit this group formally into the Church. I 02 It seems
highly likely that this was a mere confirmation or more public re-
affirmation of a move which had already been made,103 all the more
important now that Athanasius had been removed from the scene,
and may have been intended as a preliminary to the acceptance of
Arius as a recognised presbyter of the church of Alexandria again. It
was not, however, followed by the results which the Eusebian
bishops, who had hastened to comply with the Emperor', orders,
Apol. Sec. 85.1--'7(163-164). lschyras' village was called Eirene Secontarouros; it
99
must have like erecting a cathedral at Ulubrae. or at Hogglestock.
tOOHistoria Arianorum 50.2(212). and this is not the only place in this work where
he makes this absurd claim. The Festal Letter for 336, describing the events, of
course, of 335, is the earliest account of Constantine's exiling of Athanasius. The
Apol. Sec. 87.1-3 (165. 166), written c. 357. does not make this claim. But a little late!
(88.4(166» he quotes a letter of Constantine II written on the archbishop's return
from his First Exile,June 17. 337, which relates this legend (and Athanasius endorses
it 88.1-3(167», so it must have been manufactured early.
10lSO Pietri in PTAA 96.
102Athanasius De Synodis 21; Apol. Sec. 84; Socrates HE 1".23: Theodoret HE I.~I.
103See above, pp. I7S-<i. There may be something in the st~ry found in Gela~lu~
(HE Ill. 12. 1-12 and 13. I-I I) that a pro-Arian presbyter Eutokms, a former protege
of Constantine's sister Constantia and now taken into Constantine's household.
assisted- the process of reconciliation for Arius and his friends.
The Behaviour of Athanasius
p~obably expect~d from it, becau.se soon after this Arius suddenly
because the elaborate account of it which Athanasius gives in th~
letter WhICh he wro~e to his friend Serapion, bishop of Thmuis,
mu~h la~er, probably m 358, called De Morte Arii, cannot be regarded
a~ hIStoncally trustworthy. It gives a romantic picture of Alexander,
blsh~p ofConstantinople, faced with a demand from the Emperor to
" admIt Anus. to commUnIon next day, spending all night in prayer.
Next mornmg hiS p~ayers were answered, because early that day
Anus dIed suddenly, m a lavatory. 10. Opitz, in loc., points out that
Alexander cannot possibly have been bishop of
Byzanti~m/Constantinople as late as 335 or 336; he was dead by 330.
AthanaslUS plac~s Arius' death shortly after the Council ofTyre, and
says that he gamed hiS mformation from Macarius who was in
Constantinople at the time. 105 But during the Council and for some
time after it Macarius was in prison in Tyre. We cannot be sure of the
exact date of Arius' death, whether 335 or 336. Most authorities
today place it in 336, ~nd agree that it took place in Constantinople.
But we do not know ItS exact details, nor .do we know why at that
pomt he was in Constantinople. 106 .
Then on !"lay 22nd 337 Constantine died and everything changed.
All the exIled bIShops were permitted to return to their sees
Athanasius among them. Athanasius gives the letter which the ne~
co-Emperor Constantine II wrote to the church of Alexandria
prepariI';g fo~ the return of their bishop, dated June 17th 337.'07
AthanaslUs dId not return Immediately, but made a long detour,
IO'De Mo;te Arjj 3. 1-3(179).
loslb'd
1 : 2.1(178-179). Socrates HEI.37, 38, SozomenusHEII.z9 and Rufinus HE
1.12, 1.3 simpl~ follow Athanasius' account, though Rufinus curiously places the
event In the epIscopate of Alexander of Alexandria (and he is not confusing the two
Alexanders).
I 06~ee Opitz op. cit. (who is r~ady to place Arius' death as early as 334)
9.(273 275), Schwartz,. Gesamm. SChTift.III.8(256-?), who places it in JJ5 because he
thInks that the CounCIl o~ Tyre took place in 334; Simonetti Crisis 128-g, who
~, appears to favour 335; Meslm Les Ariens 225 n 2 and Kopecek His/ory 76, opt for 336.
Paul the su.ccessor. of Alexander at Constantinople. attended the Council ofTyre in
335 and SIgned Its decisions (see Hilary Coil. AT. A IV.I.13(J7), cf. 18(60)).
Pht1ostorglu~ (l-!E 11.10) says that Alexander of Constantinople died immediately
after the dedIcatIon of the new capital, Le. in 332. For Kannengiesser's dating of the
De Morte ArU to a much earlier period sec below p 419
107 I ',. .
Apo. Sec. 88.4(166); see also Theodoret HE 11.2.2-4' see Klein Constan/ius II
29-31. '
 Period of co~~
including the Danubian regions, Asia Min ,SYi:· Phoenicia and
Palestine. He may have met the three co- mper rs, eirs to their
father Constantine, Constantine II, Constans and tanti~
when they gathered at Viminacium in Moesia rima ear the
Danube in September.'os The Eastern bishops at erdica st ed that
wherever Athanasius went on his lengthy ret rn he sti ed up
trouble, i.e. he supported anti-Eusebian bishops ret ning fro exile.
In particular he may have accompanied Paul to nst tinople,
where riots, which were apparently the invariable concomitants of
that unhappy prelate, broke out.'09 But Athanasius returned to
Alexandria in triumph on November 23rd, 337."° The same Eastern
bishops go on to say that on returning to his see Athanasius renewed
his high-handed and violent policy against his opponents, which is
quite possible, though this source has confused some of the atrocIties
of his enemies a little later with the measures taken by AthanaslUs.
The first reference which Athanasius in his writings makes to
Arians by name is in the Festal Letters 10, written in 338.'" This year
was to see a renewal of the opposition to Athanasius on the part of
Eusebius of Nicomedia and his party. After all, Athanasius had been
formall y deposed by a properly constituted synod on charges which
could hardly be refuted. It was against-all church order and tradition
that he should be readmitted to his see on the bare word of an
Emperor who did not even have any jurisdiction in Egypt. In the
winter of 33~338 the standing committee (not a council but what
was called it tv/i1Woiicra cr6v080<;) of the church of Antioch met and
sent a letter to the three Augusti (of whom in the circumstances
Constantius II, emperor of the Eastern part, was much the. most
important)", accusing Athanasius of acts of violence committed by
himself or by his deputy, impugning the regularity of his election and
l08Mostscholars place the meeting at Viminacium and Athanasius' return in 337.
but Martin Klein (op. cit. 31, 32)., and Barnard ('Two Notes on Athanasius' 35 2 -6),
place both eventS in 338. Lorentz (Der Zehnte OsterfestbrieJ63) makes it clear that the
tenth Festal Letter was written in Alexandria before March 26th, 33 8.
t09For Paul's stormy career, see below pp. 279-84. It is by no means certain that
he sympathised with Athanasius' doctrinal views. Athanasius probably met
Constantius twice, at Viminacium and later at Cappadocian Caesarea (see Barnes C
and E 263-4).
lt0See the Index to the Festal Letter. which is a reliable source for local events.
Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift. 111.9(269-70); Zei1ler Origines 219; Simonetti Crisi 137--9;
Tetz 'Athanasius' 337; Martin Histojr~ 'Akephale' 75-6. whose account is the most
recent and reliable.
II t See n 108 above.
266
The Behaviour of Athanasius
recalling the uncancelled verdict of the Council of Tyre. They also
sent a presbyter, Macarius, accompanied by two deacons, with a
letter to Julius, who had now succeeded Sylvester as bishop of Rome.
The letter requested him to have no dealings with any of the bishops
who had returned to their sees on Constantine's death, and least of all
with A thanasius, and forthe time being to address Pistus as bishop of
Alexandria, "2 and they sent with these men a copy of the Report of
the Mareotic Commission and some signatures of (Melitian)
Egyptian bishops. Thismission came to nothing, but the appeal to the
Emperor Constantius resulted in his writing a letter'13 accusing
Athanasius of delaying the shipment of corn from Egypt; it was no
more than a preliminary warning; Athanasius does not tell us to
whom it was addressed and professes to believe that it might be a
forgery. .
In reply to this move, Athanasius held a grand council of bishops in
Alexandria in 33 8." It sent a circular to all bishops which contained
copies of many documents (to be found in Apologia Secunda 3-19),
suggesting that his enemies were preparing to overturn the decisions
of the Council ofNicaea. He sent a deputation with this document to
Rome. This deputation met the deputation from Antioch and a
lively interchange took place. During the discussion one of the
Eusebian delegation let fall a remark which Julius was able to
interpret as a request to him to call a Council. This certainly was not a
formal request from the standing committee at Antioch to call a
council, because the Eusebian party had no desire to appeal to Rome
from the decision of the Council of Tyre, though Athanasius later
represented it as such." 4 Julius therefore (still in the year 338) wrote
to both paities, summoning them to a synod in Rome."s This was
not much more than an excuse to avoid the request to treat
Athanasius as excommunicate. It was in 338 that Anthony the hermit
(whose life Athanasius was later to write) visited Alexandria for two
days in order to declare his support for Athanasius. Simonetti thinks
that this was a significant moment in the career of the archbishop.
112Atha~asius Apol. Sec. 20 and 24. For the events leading up to Athanasius'
Second ExIle, see Schwartz Gesamm. Schrifi. VII.9(278"'""'90) and Simonetti Crisi
139-4 2.
:::Athanasius Letter ofB~shops of Egypt 18; cf. Apol. Sec, 3, 5. 7. 18 and Hist. Ar. 9.
Apol. Sec. I ,2(87)i -ypa\jlavt'o~ El1u&f}iou; see Pietri in PTAA 97-100. Macarius
had su.ggested that the report of the Mareotic Commission should be laid before a
councIl.
IlSApol. Sec. 22; Hist. Ar. 9; Encycl. ofEg. Bishops 7.
 Period of ConfUsion
From now on, the balance of power in Egypt shifts. The Melitians,
whose main support was the Coptic-speaki -pe~ants, begin to
weaken, and the cause of Athanasius begins 0 make a pP-<:~Lto the
section of the populatIon from whIch the onks m'Y.f\1Y arne, slmp!~
uneducated people rather than the 'ari tocrati,C ~radi ion of the
Didaskaleion'. The later fanatical attac men\ t . the person of
Athanasius has its beginnings here, and th ove Impli led vulgar
identification of the Nicene interpretation wit. the true faith. This
vulgarisation of theology was to have far-reachmg ~n y no means
wholly good results in the future.""
During the winter of 338/339 the Eusebian party, stiII mlder the
leadership of Eusebius of Nicomedia (who had become bIshop of
Constantinople at the very end of 338) ,117 met in Antioch to plan
future policy. They declared Athanasius deposed from the see of
Alexandria again and then, completely ignoring Pistus, after
Eusebius later bishop of Erne sa had refused the see, mose as bishop of
Alexandria a learned Cappadocian called Gregory who had once
studied at Alexandria. He was a much more presentable rival to
Athanasius than Pistus, and he had imperial support, because
Constantius issued an edict to the Alexandrians telling them that he
approved of Gregory. Just before Gregory arrived in Alexandria, at
Eastertime (Mar 18th), Philagrius, reappointed prefect of Egypt,
appeared on the scene with a detachment of soldiers. They drove
Athanasius out of his episcopal residence into the church ofTheonas,
where he baptised several of his supporters, and then he fled from the
city by sea. In the resulting riots two large churches went up in flames
and several people were killed. Gregory then arrived and tried to
compel everybody to treat him as patriarch of Alexandria,u 8 This
was a grave mistake on the part of the Eusebian party; their chief
justification in opposing Athanasius had been that he had certainly
used violence in administering his see, and they were now fighting
him with his own tactics. Perhaps it shows the hand of Constantius,
1I6C,is; 141-3. quotation I4I.
1I1S0 Barnard 'Two Notes on Athanasius' 252--6.
118S ocra tes (who confuses the meeting in Antioch in 338/9 with that which took
place there in 341) HE 11.8; Letter of)ulius 29; Index to Festal Letter of339; Hilary Coli.
Ar. AIl.S (p.55). Opitz has two notes on Pistus, at Encycl. Letter oj Eg. Bishops
6.2(17 8) and at Apol. Sec. 19.2(101), cf. Klein Constantius II 69-71, where he goes too
far in seeing the rejection ofPistus as a rejection of Arianism by Constantius; Pistus
had apparently been excommunicated (presumbly for Arian sympathies) when a
presbyter by Alexander.
The Behaviour of Athanasius
less sensitive than that of his father; or it may be that the influence of
Eusebius of Constantinople, who was a very able ecclesiastical
diplomat, was waning.
In March or April Athanasius published the Encyclical Letter of the
Egyptian Bishops which had been provoked by the arrival of Gregory
in Alexandria." 9 The letter was in effect addressed to Julius of
Rome, and to Rome Athanasius came late in 339. 120 As a result of
pressure put on him by Athanasius, Marcellus and other pro-Nicene
exiles in Rome, Julius now wrote to the Eusebian party, (calling
them invidiously by that name oi 1tepi EllcrEpwv) inviting them to a
council in Rome iii the spring of 340, to be called for the purpose of
investigating primarily the cases of Athanasius and Marcellus. The
Eusebians did not reply to this letter for a whole year, partly no doubt
in order to prevent any council assembling in Rome in 340, but
mainly because political circumstances made any communication
between the Eastern and Western parts of the Empire difficult and
delicate. It was in the year 340 that the Emperor Constantine II made
his unwise and disastrous attempt to depose his brother-Emperor
Constans and take over his portion of the Empire, and in consequence
met his death near Aquileia. We do not possess the Eusebians' delayed
reply, but we can reconstruct much of its contents. 121 They defended
the validity of the Council of Tyre and its decisions, acknowledged
that the Eastern Church respected the see of Rome, but did not feel
inferior to it, repeated the charges against Athanasius and Marcellus
and threatened schism if Rome continued to commmlicate with
. these two. In order to rebut the bishop of Rome's pretence to act as a
court of appeal they cited the cases of Novatian (where the East had
119Ap. Sec. 3.
12°50 Barnard 'Two Notes' 352-6; Schwartz, Gesamm. Schrift. IIJ.9(294-300)
places his arrival in 340. Athanasius (His!. Ar. 9.1-12.3(187-9) in the course of a
highly tendentious account of the events leading up to the Synod afRome of 341.
says that he came to Rome, not only because of the violence which had been offered
him, but also 'in order that the Council should take place, as he Gulius) desired'!
Klein (Constantius II 39 and n 91) conjectures that Athanasius may have found
supporters among members of the imperial house resident there. Eutropia (sister of
Constantine! and mother ofNepotianus), and believes that Apol. ad Constantium 6.3
hints at this. Such a connection, however, would not fit well with Athanasius'
friendly reception later of the representatives of Magnentius, who had murdered
both Eutropia and her son.
121From Socrates HE II.n, Sozomenus HE III.8.4 and from the subsequent letter
of Julius.
 Period of Confusion
not intervened) and of Paul of Samosata (where the West had not
intervened). '22
Julius finally held his Council of Rome quite early in 341.'23
About 50 bishops attended it, in the church of the presbyter Bito (or
Vito), who had been present at the Council ofNicaea~we have
seen, '24 not only was Athanasius' conduct examined b this Council
and pronounced blameless, but Marcellus' 0 hodoxy was
investigated and declared to be sound. After the uncil was over,
Julius wrote a letter to the Eusebian bishops w
Antioch. '25
He again uses the invidious title for thoser,ho addresses th
letter, 'the party of Eusebius'; he na es them
Cappadocian Caesarea), presiding over a kind
Eastern bishops, Flacillus (Antioch), sebius (Constantinople),
Maris (Chalcedon), Macedonius (Mops la) and Theodore
(Heraclea), 'and those who are with them from Antioch."26 The
presbyters sent to Antioch (over a year ago) ,Julius says, have returned
disappointed and dispirited; the reply which they brought was an
unnecessarily uncivil one, '27 and he did not like their claim that each
Council has its own jurisdiction and that a council which has made a
decision is slighted if its verdict is reviewed by another.'2. But, says
Julius, 'the party of Eusebius' have received Arians, and Athanasius
and Marcellus, doughty opponents of Arianism at the Council of
Nicaea, have been shamefully and unjustly treated. This was in effect
to impugn the validity of a council- that ofNicaea.'2' The Eusebians
in their letter had accused Julius of'lighting the flame of schism' by his
behaviour, and of giving them too short notice of the Council of
Rome (originally planned for 340). In retaliation Julius complained of
the Easterners' practice of translating bishops irresponsibly from one
122S0 Simonetti Crisi 142--6. Schwartz (Gesamm. Schrift 1I1.9(297)) greatly
admires this (reconstructed) letter and calls it a 'masterpiece'.
123Athanasius Apol. Sec. 23-4 and 27-31; Theodoret HE 11.2.4. For a list of the
various letters written in connection with this Council see Simonetti Crisi 146-7.
For the Council generally ,ee Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift 1l1.9(30'-7), 'Zur
Kirchengeschichte' 142-3; Loafs 'Arianismus' 26; Pietri in PTAA 103-1 II; H. C.
Brennecke Hilarius lion Poitiers und die Bischojsopposition gegen Konstantius II 7-9.
124See above, p.2I8.
125Given in Apol. Sec. 21-35. Socrates HE 11.17 reproduces from these.
126Apol. Sec. 21.'('OZ).
1271bid. Z1. 1-4(102, 103).
128 22.1--6(103. 104).
129 23 .2, 3( 104).
The Behaviour of Athanasius
see to another (which wa, formally forbidden at Nicaea). Thi, was an
obvious hit at Eusebius.'30 Julius uncritically accepted Athanasius'
account of the 'affaire Ischyra,', though it is pretty clear that he had
read the report of the Mareotic Commission. 13l Julius next criticizes
the manner in which Gregory of Cappadocia had been intruded into
the see of Alexandria: none of the traditional rules for ordaining and
installing a bishop were observed; he was not consecrated in
Alexandria; the presbyter" deacons and bishops of Alexandria were
not present; he was not consecrated in his own church by his own
bishops; instead he entered this see surrounded by soldiers and hi,
arrival was accompanied by disturbances and outrages. '32 Here Julius
certainly was on stronger ground. The Mareotic Commission, he
goes on to say, heard evidence in the presence of pagans, Jews and
soldiers, and refused to hear the evidence oflocal c1ergy.'33 Marcellus
i, perfectly orthodox and indeed at Nicaea proved himself a zealous
opponent of Arianism.'3' The Eusebian party had written to Julius,
'choose communion with us or with Marcellus and Athanasius';135 it
is clear that Julius prefer, the latter alternative. He next makes an
important claim. The occupant' of important ,ee, founded by
Apostles, he says, such as Alexandria (siel) and Ancyra, should be
judged by the bishop of Rome: eOEI ypa<pi'jval lIiiOIV Jil1iv ... ij
dYVOEhE I'm tOUtO &OOC; 1'jv lIp6tEPOV ypa<pECIOaJ Jil1iv Ka\ OUtroc; EVOEV
6p(~ECIOaJ taOiKaJa. 136 .
Declercq describes this letter of Julius as 'a truly magnificent
document of quiet dignity and authoritative wisdom' .'37 Simonetti,
writing twenty-one years later, takes a very different view. The
bishop of Rome, he thinks, had no secure precedent in seeking to
overset the Council of Tyre or hear appeals from it. He must have
appeared to the Eastern bishops to be meddling. 13 • Even though it
13024-1(105).3(106).
131 27"-5('06), zK'-7('07, 108).
13230.1-4(1°9, 1I0).
133 3 1. 1-2(IIO).
134 32 ..1- 4 (IIO, III).
1"34·3(I12).
136 35 .3- 5(112. I I 3), quotations from 3(113) and 4(113); the Greek means 'it was
necessary to write to all of us ... or are you unaware that this was the custom, that
we should be written to and so the just course should in consequence (or possibly
"here") be determined.' It seems difficult (in spite of the 'all of us' which suggests the
Western Church rather than the Pope) to avoid the conclusion that Julius is making
a claim of universal jurisdiction. Opitz in loc .. takes it of the Western Church as a
whole, 137.
1370ssius 303.
138Crisi 149-50.
 Period of Confosion The Behaviour of Athanasius

was perhaps inevitable that the bishop ofRpme should ultimately be allusion to the controversy, but had not yet begun his series of
brought into so important a conflict, Juliu~' action had placed a new polemical theological works. Though the controversy about Arius
and unpleasant aspect upon the controve"~y. Hitherto the Emperor lay, really unresolved, in the background, this controversy formed
had been tacitly accepted as the final arbi kr of Church disputes, even only a minor part of the unhappy situation created after Julius had
(as in the case of the Donatist controve sy) beyond the arbitration of wntten his letter to the Eusebians of 341. The chief causes were the .
the bishop of Rome. Even less would e interference of the bishop of intrigue ofEusebius of Constantinople, the opportunism ofJulius of
Rome be welcomed in this case. Be een 2 35 nobody had . Rome, and the misconduct of Athanasius of Alexandria, and among
appealed to Rome. '3 • The bishop Ro e had al ays tended to these three causes we must judge the last to be the most serious.
support the bishop of Alexandria wh Jl.e c uld; it as therefore in
accordance with this policy that Jp:fius no e dorse holeheartedly
Athanasius' account of his trial.1[he Western 1S ops made no serious
attempt to analyse the complexit'x of the sit tion which faced them;
they had hitherto remained on the periphprY of the controversy; their
traditional Monarchianism could square well enough with the little
they knew of the Council of Nicaea; by an oversimplification they
were able to see Marcellus as orthodox.'40 This intervention gave
those in the East who wished to change the Creed of Nicaea an
opportunity; the West's vindication of the manifestly heterodox
Marcellus increased the disquiet which N had already created, for N
appeared to favour the near-Sabellianism of Marcellus. The case of
Athanasius also tended to press divergent schools of thought in the
East into a united party. Even if some of the proceedings of the
Council of Tyre were high-handed, it was beyond doubt that
Athanasius had behaved with violence against the Melitians and
evinced in his general conduct an authoritarian character determined
to exploit the influence of his see. The Eastern episcopate were
convinced that' Athanasius was a person to be held at arm's length as
much as pilSSible.' 141
The Greek-speaking Eastern and the Latin-speaking Western areas
of the Christian Church were now heading for a major rift, one
which actually happened two years later. The cause of this was not
primarily the doctrine of Arius. Theoretically at this point the Arian
Controversy had been settled. Certainly Athanasius had up to this
point taken no part in it at all: he probably had by now written the
Conlra Genies el De Incarnaljone (338 or 339), which makes no overt

tJ9lbid. ISO-I.
140Ibid. 151-2.
1411bid. 152-3. quotation I S3 ('che Atanasio fosse persona da tentre it piu lantano
possibile').

272 27'2

Attempts at Cree . Phase 1,
34 -349
I. Was there an Arian Conspiracy?
'As we have learnt from various letters which the bishops were
writing to each other after the Council, the term homoousios was
troubling some people."
So wrote the historian Socrates, and we have every reason to believe
him. The production ofN by the largest council of bishops hitherto
held, supported by imperial approval for those who agreed and
imperial penalties for those who did hot, must have been deeply
disturbing for many who could not seriously be described as Arian in
sympathy but could not believe that God had only one hypostasis, as
the creed apparently professed, and could not suddenly at the bidding
of an unbaptized Emperor, however benign he had shown himself to
the Church, abandon completely a subordinationism which had been
hallowed ~y long tradition. The usual explanation of the next stage
of the history of the search for the Christian doctrine of God describes
the favourers of Arianism as setting themselves with deliberate craft
and malignant intrigue to depose and replace every and any bishop
who was known to be particularly favourable to N. And people who
follow this conventional line can point to the fact that within ten
years of the Council ofNicaea all the leading supporters of the creed
of that Council had been deposed or disgraced or exiled - Athanasius,
Eustathius and Marcellus, and with them a large number of other
bishops who. are presumed to have belonged to the same school of
thought, Asclepas of Gaza, Paul of Constantinople, Euphration of
Balanea, Cymatius of Paltus, Carterius of Antarados, Eutropius of
ISocrates HE 1.23; Declercq (Ossius 291) calls attention to this passage.
274
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
Adrianople, and his successor in that see, Lucius. 2 It is usually asserted
that the leader of this remarkably successful conspiracy was Eusebius
of Nicomedia (later of Constantinople). That Eusebius was the
leader of a party, and that he was recognized as such by his con-
temporaries, there can be no doubt at all. 'The party of Eusebius',
(01 7t8pi/aj.lrpi tov EucrtptOv) is an expression used by Eustathius, by
Julius and by Athanasius. But to see his hand active in every case of a
bishop being deposed, and to conclude that theological odium was
the motive for such activity in every case, is more than.the evidence
warrants. If we follow the recent trend (which is a wrong one, I am
confident) to place the deposition ofEustathius and of Asclepas in 325
or 326 or 327, then Eusebius can have had nothing to do with these
cases, for he was either in exile during those years or so recently
returned from exile that he could not possibly have engineered the
business. We have ·no reason to believe that Eusebius was a leading
spirit in the Council ofTyre of 335; he did not preside; he was not one
of the Mareotic Commission. He is not usually thought to be
involved in the deposition ofEustathius nor of Marcellus. Of course,
he may have acted as an eminence grise working sedulously behind the
scenes in these cases, but this assumption rests on sheer speculation:
Again, we cannot regard all the cases of the bishops deposed after
325 .as on a par and capable of being swept into a single general
category of innocents wronged as a result of unjust intrigue. There
was in fact no reason to regard Athanasius as a zealous supporter of
the doctrine ofNicaea until at earliest his second exile (339-346). He
had published no considerable work criticizing the doctrine of Arius
and his supporters. He could not possibly have been, as he was later
erroneously represented to have been, a leading figure at .the Council
ofNicaea. He was, no doubt, known as a henchman of Alexander of
Alexandria, and was recognized as having no love for Ariaps. But he
was not until much later in his career an obvious target fOr those who
were anxious either to limit .or to undo the achievement of the
Council of Nicaea. And it is perfectly clear that he was fmally
deposed at Tyre for reasons which had nothing to do with Arianism,
nor with any doctrinal issue, but for misbehaviour in his see,
disgraceful and undeniable, and that against Melitians rather than
Arians. We have already noted 3 that Athanasius in his Contra Gentes
2These are the bishops listed by Athanasius in De Fuga 3 and Histaria of
Arianorum 4.
3See above, PP.272-3.
?'" <
 Period of C dSion
et De Incarnatione (if, as seems eason e, we assign to this a later
rather than an earlier date and usebi s of Caesarea in his
Commentary on Psalms, whic~ were o~p sed during the period
when Eusebius of Nicom~.\.c;,onst ino Ie was supposed to be
intriguing in favour of A ·anis),l~·mal<. " 0 overt reference to the
controversy at all. The subj t was not ·n the forefront of the minds
of most theologians and churc,Ie rs between 328 and 340, though
the development of the Christian doctrine of God could not be
completely forgotten and remained an unsolved difficulty. Marcellus
of Ancyra was certainly deposed for unorthodoxy in 336 and
Eustathius of Antioch was deposed in all probability for similar
reasons earlier. We can be sure that both of these men had been strong
supporters of the homoousian line at Nicaea. But both also had put
forward views which were open to the charge of Sabellianism. We
can readily imagine that people such as Eusebius of Caesarea who
were not whole-hearted supporters of the doctrines of Arius but who
saw in N, if it were pushed to its logical conclusions, a serious threat
to the proper distinction of Persons within the Trinity, would think it
right to impugn the orthodoxy and reduce the influence ofEustathius
and Marcellus. They would have said that they were not conducting
a persecution in the interests of Arianism but trying to restore proper
balance to the Chur-Ch's understanding of its doctrine of God. We
must remember that there is no evidence at all that at the time of the
deposition of these two Athanasius made any protest on behalf of
orthodoxy. It is not until many years after Eustathius' deposition that
Athanasius even refers to him, and on his return from his First Exile
Athanasius showed no disposition to vindicate Marcellus. His cause
was only linked with that of Marcellus when the two met in Rome in
340. Of course, both the eminent Eusebii, with others, had, at the
command of Constantine, readmitted Arius and some of his
followers to communion on at least one occasion, whereas the bishop
of Alexandria had steadily refused to receive Arius back into his fold.
But Arius and his friends had made statements which were ostensibly
orthodox and, we must assume, had withdrawn the objections which
they had held to N. For people in whose minds N was a dangerously
one-sided document this must have appeared a reasonably
satisfactory conclusion of the controversy.
Our estimate of the activity and policy of the Eusebian party or of
any other group within the Eastern Church at this peri0d is rendered
peculiarly difficult by the obscurity which shrouds the chronological
276
Attempts at Creed,making: Phase One (341-349)
order of events. We have seen 4 that it is probable that Eustathius was
deposed by a council meeting in Antioch and presided over by
Eusebius of Cae sa rea in 330. Eutropius of Adrianople was deposed at
the same time, though we do not know on what charge. By 335 Flacillus
was (we can be sure) bishop of Antioch, because he presided at the
Council ofTyre in the Summer of that year. Between 330 and the;',
no less than three people had been bishops of Antioch, succeeding
Eustathius and preceding Flacillus; Paulinus (formerly of Tyre),
Eulalius and Euphronius (and Eusebius of Caesarea had been offered
but refused the see). 5 When and why Asclepas ofGaza was deposed is
almost impossible to determine with accuracy. Such evidence as we
have is confused and contradictory. Theodoret says that he was
present at the Council ofTyre in 335;6 ifso, he presumably shared in
the condemnation of Athanasius. Athanasius says that Asclepas was
accused by Theognis ofNicaea by means of forged documents 7 and
indicates that he was accused at Antioch in the presence ofEusebius of
Caesarea,8 but gives no clue as to what was the charge. The Eastern
bishops just after the Council of Serdica said that it was seventeen
years since Asclepas has been deposed and that Athanasius himself
condemned him by his own vote (sua sententia ipse damnavit), and that
Marcellus never communicated with him. 9 These statements cannot
be all true. The Council ofSerdica took place in 343; seventeen years
before that brings us to 327. But in 327 Theognis was in exile and in
no position to accuse Asclepas at a council. If Athanasius condemned
Asclepas with his own vote, then Asclepas could not have been
present at the Council ofTyre in 335. We must abandon attempts to
place Asclepas' deposition either very early (326 or 327) or very late
(after 335)". The Eastern bishops at Serdica calculated wrongly:
Theodoret was misinformed about Asclepas' presence at Tyre in 335.
Eusebius of Caesarea, in describing events at Antioch when he was
offered the see, betrays the fact that at this stage Euphronius was made
4See above, pp. 209-1 I.
. 5S ee ~usebius VC 111.59-62; Con. Marcel/um 1.4; Theodoret HE 1.22;
PhdostOf?IUS HE 111.15; Jerome Chronicle sub ann. ]28, H. Chadwick History and
Thought In the Early Church XIII.27-35; Simonetti Crisi 107-8; R. P. C. Hanson
'The Fate of Eusebius of Antioch'.
6HE 1.29.7. Martin in PTAA 51 n48 appears to accept this.
7 Apol. Sec. 45.
sApol. Sec. 47.
'Hilary Coli. AT. AIV.II(56, 57), 13(57). This document is equally silent about
the reason for Asdepas' condemnation.
277
 l/
Period of Confusion~
bishop of Antioc 's th ref, re cannot have been the occasion
upon which E stathius de osed. because he was immediately
succeeded by Pa linus fro yee. and he by Eulalius. But Athanasius
assumes that Ascle as deposed at Antioch. and in the presence of
Eusebius of Caesarea. and the words of the Letter of Ossius and
Protogenes written immediately after the Council of Serdica confirm
this} 0 If the see of Antioch were vacant. or if the bishop of Antioch
were under accusation. the most likely person to preside over a
council held to investigate charges against a bishop in that area was
the bishop of Palestinian Caesarea. We must therefore conclude that
Eustathius and Asclepas were deposed at two different councils held
in Antioch. Eustathius earlier (perhaps in 330) and Asclepas later (not
later than early 331). At the second. Eusebius of Caesarea probably
presided. He may also have presided over the earlier council which
condemned Eustathius. though we cannot be sure of this. II What the
charge was upon which Asclepas was deposed we do not know: the
likelihood inclines to the conclusion that it was not a charge of
heterodoxy because forged. or supposedly forged. evidence here
would not have been much use if the accused was able to make an
orthodox profession of faith at the trial. We need not distrust the
evidence that Theognis of Nicaea was the accuser. or at least the
person who gathered the evidence against Asclepas, and that
Athanasius acquiesced in (i.e. was not present at but made no protest
against) the sentence; he presumably did not do so either when
Eustathius was deposed}2
Some moments in the rest of the career of Asclepas can be traced.
He returned with the other bishops on Constantine's death in 337,
but was anome point after that again extruded from Gaza on the
ground that his presence was causing disturbances, in time for him to
meet Athanasius in Rome in 340.13 He was present with the Western
10Turner E"OMIA 1.648. The Latin text of the Encyclical Letter oj the Western
Bishops at Serdica (from a Greek version of which Athanasius is quoting in Apol. Sec.
4S. 47) iSlo be found in Hilary Coli. Ar. BII Itf(losff). The letter makes it dearthat
Asclepas was present at Serdica.
11 We know that he presided over at least one council held in Antioch because the
canons wrongly attributed to that of Antioch in 341 were shown by Schwartz to
belong to an earlier council in the same city at which Eusebius certainly presided.
12Schwartz asserts (for Schwartz seldom conjectures) that Asclepas was deposed
for despotic"behaviour in his see, 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 141, Gesamm. Schri}t. III.9
(272-3).
"See Sch",artz Gesamm. Schrift. 1l1.9 (278-81); Pietri in PTAA 102. The
evidence for Asclepas' second removal because of violent behaviour is found in the
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (J41-349J
bishops at the CouncilofSerdica in 343. 14 The Letter of the Eastern
Bishops at Serdica says that at some point Asclepas accompanied Paul
when he came to Constantinople, and that (either then or at some
earlier period) frightful atrocities were committed as a result of Paul's
(and perhaps also Asclepas') presence. IS Simonetti thinks that this
particular incident took place in 341, when Paul returned to
Constantinople on the death of Eusebius then bishop of that city.'"
There is considerable evidence also that Asclepas was about 347
permitted by Constantius to return to his see (along with Athanasius,
Marcellus, Lucius (Adrianople) and Paul of Constantinople), and that
on this occasion (as Sozomenus specifically says) there were no
disturbances in Asclepas' see.!? He may therefore have ended his days
in peace. In his Apologia de Fuga (3.3-6(70)), written in 357, and in his
Historia Arianorum (5 .2( 185)), written in 358, Athanasius lists Asclepas
as a classic sufferer for the true faith. Asclepas then may have been
dead by the time these two works were written. We know virtually
nothing of the fate of Eutropius of Adrianople. It is remarkable that
his successor in the see, Lucius, should have later figured among those
who were thought to be unjustly deposed by the Eusebian party,
because the presumption must be that he was chosen as bishop of
Adrianople by that party. Sozomenus mentions him among those
who were able to return to their original sees without disturbance
about 347. It should be noted that none of the evidence so far
considered presents a reliable picture of a systematic campaign by the
Eusebian party against known opponents of Arianism. We cannot
even say that no supporters of that party suffered, because it is likely
that Lucius was one. All that we can say is that a number of bishops
were deposed between 328 and 336 for various reasons, and that
Eusebius ofNicomedia or some of his party had a hand in most, or all,
of these depositions.1 8 They were perhaps controlling events, but not
controlling them in the interests of forwarding Arianism.
To determine the career and explain the fate of Paul of
(very partisan) statement of the Eastern bishops at Serdica. Hilary Call. Ar.
AIV.9(SS).
14See n 10 above.
"Hilary Coli. Ar. AIV.20(61).
16Crisi 162.
"Socrates HE 1Il.23; Sozomenus HE 1Il.24.
18Cf. Klein Constantius II 29-31, where he concludes that these depositions took
place for various and sufficient reasons.
279
 Period of Confusion
Constantinople is a more complicated task.'" We can be confident
that Paul succeeded Alex~~S biS.hop of Constantinople, probably
in the year 332. s amon ose who condemned Athanaslus at
the Council ofT in 335,20 wh e he signed its decisions as bishop
of Constantinop '. we must a:lcet'*iS fact if we are to believe our
earliest source. T .s does not, 0 co se, mean that Paul was either
pro-Arian or ago 'hh~doc. ine 0 N, but only that, like all th~
other Eastern bishops'lrt-dill( time, he equid not tolerate AthanaslUs
misbehaviour in his see. If Paul was at Tyre, the story of Adus dying
in Constantinople when Alexander was bishop cannot be true. Even
if we accept Kannengiesser's thesis that the De Morte 4rii was written
as early as 339, this does not constitute convincing evidence that
Alexander was bishop of Constantinople when Adus died. But not
long after this, perhaps in 336, Paul himself was deposed and exiled,
though we do not know on what charge. He returned with all the
other bishops on Constantine's death in 337, but was soon again
accused by one of his presbyters, Macedonius, and again exiled in 33 8
19For Paul see Athanasius Apol. de Fuga 3; Hist. Arian. 7~ Hilary Coli. Ar.
AIV.13(S7), 20(61), 24(63), 27(6S-6); Turner EOMIA 1.66J.I-664.2; Socrates HE
11.6.12,16.22,23.26 (V.9)i Sozomenus HE 111.3. 4, 7. 8, 9.10, II, 13.20,24; IV.2
(VII. 10); Theodoret HE II.S; V.6 (virtually useless); Gelasius HE 11.28.13 says that
Alexander of Constantinople, then a presbyter, later the bishop, attended the
Council of Nicaea accompanied' by a reader called Paul. Philostorgius does not
mention Paul but assumes that Eusebius from Nicomedia directly succeeded
Alexander shortly after the building of Constantinople (HE 11.10). The earliest
sources for Paul's movements are the statements of the Eastern bishops ofSerdica
(343). information given by Athanasius in various works written in 357 and 35 8,
and a passage in the Historia Akephala dealing with events in Constantinople,
written perhaps as early as 378" but possibly as late as 38 I. All the main church
historians,Socrates, Sozomenus and Philostorgius, writing in the Vth century, give
us some information. But the Easterners at Serdica (our earliest source) are violently
prejudiced, and Athanasius, who is also prejudiced in a different interest, is certainly
confused about some of Paul's movements; the Historia Akephala (1.2-6 (138, 140 )
ed. Martin) has brought together two incidents separated by several years, and refers
anachronistically to Eusebius of Nicomedia instead of Eusebius the court
chamberlain. And the fifth century historians also display considerable confusion
and a tendency to schematize. The best reconstruction is that of ~imonetti (Crisi
132-33 and n 104, 162-3). but he places the meeting of Athanasius and Paul in
Constantinople in 332. whereas the better date for this is 337; Schwartz 'Zur
Kirchengeschichte' 148-g, Gesamm. Schrift. 111.19(273-5. 230-2) completely omits
reference to the incident in Constantinople in 344, as do Loofs and Declercq; cf.
Zeiller, Origines 220; Declercq Ossius 12-13; Ritter 'Arianismus' 45; Loafs
'Arianismus' 25, 26; Hess Canons 15, 16; Harnack History IV.63-4·
20Hilary Coli. Ar. A IV.I3(S7), the Leiter oJ the Western Bishops at Serdica; cf.
Schwartz Gesamm. Sellrif/. 1I1.9(273-S).
280
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
at the command of Constantius. The year 337 is probably the best
point at which to place the presence of Athanasius in Constantinople
when Paul was accused by Macedonius. 21 Eusebius of Nicomedia,
who may have engineered Macedonius' accusation, succeeded him in
Constantinople. Socrates (HE 11:22) quotes a letter from the Emperor
Constans to his brother Constantius, to be dated 339, saying that
Athanasius and Paul are with him in italy, and requiring that they
shall be readmitted to their sees. In 341 (or possibly early in 342),
Eusebius died and the see of Constantinople was vacant. Paul
returned to his former see. The result was the worst riots which the
New Rome can have experienced in its short history. The magister
equitum Count Hermogenes, had been sent by Constantius to eject
Paul. His attempts to do so provoked an explosion of popular wrath
which ended in the Count being killed and his body dragged
ignominiously through the city. Constantius himself came with
soldiers from Antioch, suppressed the riots, exiled Paul to Singara in
the province of Mesopotamia near the eastern border of the Empire,
and left the city without having appointed any successor to Paul. 22
Paul had on this occasion again been supported by a letter of
recommendation from the Emperor Constans. Schwartz believed
that Theodore of Heraclea and Theognis of Nicaea, who were the
heirs of the policy ofEusebius 'the great', on this occasion supported
Macedonius. 23 But Macedonius clearly was unable to establish
himself firmly as bishop of Constantinople at this juncture. Paul was
not long afterwards removed to lighter detention at Emesa, but he
was not present at the Council ofSerdica in 343. The Western bishops
in their manifesto after the debacle do not refer to Paul, probably
because he ·was under imperial displeasure and because his exile was
much more obviously the result of riots than of intrigue by his
ecclesiastical enemies. But the Eastern bishops in their manifesto heap
21Historia Arianorum 7; Barnes (who places Paul's accession to the see in 337)
thinks that Apol. de Fuga 3.sffand Apol. ad Const. 5 imply that in 338 Athanasius was
arraigned for murder by Constantius in Cappadocian Caesarea, but acquitted (C and
E 263-4). He places Athanasius' accompanying Paul to Constantinople in 337·
22Klein, Constantius ii 71-3. 64. n 50 says that this was in order to keep Paul near
him, as he was engaging in a war with Persia on the eastern frontier, but this seems
unlikely. Earlier (70) Klein had suggested that Paul was a fcHower of Eusebius of
Nicomedia and a favourite of Constantius before the events of 338, but this seems
equally unlikely. He places Paul's return on Eusebius' death in 342 and Constantius'
action in 343.
23Gesamm. Sellrift. 111.9(230-2).
 ..•.. ~ .. ) \1
.~'", --- !
.
) Period o{ Confusion
obloquy upon~m; accusing hi'in-of being involved in frightful
atrocities and crilege; the memory of the riots in Constantinople
and the murder f Hermogenes is still green. They condemn hIm
unequivocally.2 4 tt·~s.Jikely that Paul was able to return to
Constantinople again in 344. Socrates has a circumstantial account of
the prefect (presumably praeJectus urbi) Philip being ordered by
Constantius to remove him, and of a trap laid to kidnap him in the
baths ofZeuxippus and put him aboard a ship and whisk him away to
his native city, Thessalonica. 25 As we have seen, some scholars have
rejected this story, but there is nothing contradictory nor implausible
in it, and Athanasius (Hist. Ar. 7) says that Paul was exiled four times,
though he has confused the order of events. Paul certainly returned to
his see city again in 347 or thereabouts, armed with another letter of
recommendation from Cons tans and profiting from the better
relations between East and West which prevailed at that time. He was
free from attack now for some few years, but in the year 349
Theodore of Heraklea, Narcissus of Neronias (by now a very old
man) and George of Laodicea who were at this point the leading
representatives of the school of thought which had tended to
sympathize with Arius and to find N unsatisfactory, approached him
with the intention of winning him over to their side. He refused and
thereby incurred theIr enmity. A little later, perhaps in 35 I, they
were able to conspire with the court chamberlain Eusebius to have
him exiled for the fourth and last time on a charge (which may not
have been completely without foundation) of collaboration with the
usurper Magnentius who had only recently been suppressed. The
expression used by our source for this incident, the Historia Akephala,
is de Constimte et Magnentio. 26 It may be that there is something in
Klein's contention 27 that Constantius regarded Paul as suspect on the
grounds that he had been 'planted' in Constantinople by Constans as
his agent; in 339 or 340 Constans had handed over the diocese of
Thrace (which included Constantinople) to Constantius. Anyway,
Paul was now transported to Cucusus in Armenia where not long
afterwards he died. The Pro-Nicene party alleged that he had been
24Hilary Coli. Ar. AlV. 13(57),20(61),27(65-67),27(66).
2S HE II. 16; Sozomenus 111.9. 1-14 reproduces this, clearly without relying on any
other source. . undisturbed; iv) the reconstruction given in the text of this book best accounts for
'.Tumer EOMIA 1.663.1-664.2 (1.](138) ed. Martin). This account is confused
and in some points manifestly incorrect, but not to he wholly di"strusted.
27Constantius II 76. 77.
282
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
murdered by imperial command. Macedonius apparently succeeded
Paul at this point as bishop with little opposition. 28
Paul probably was, or at least fairly early in his career as a bishop
became, a supporter of the Creed of Nicaea. He refused to have
anything to do witlr the representatives of Arianism at the end of his
career, and Sozomenus (who, with Socrates, accepts Athanasius'
estimate of the significance of Paul) at one point goes out of his way
to emphasize his loyalty to the pro-Nicene cause (HE III.I3). But,
except for the last incident, all Paul's tribulations and periods of exile
arose out of circumstances which had nothing to do with the dispute
about doctrine, and even the last was probably more concerned with
politics than widr theology. Paul's most persistent rival, Macedonius,
was certainly not a fav0l4rer of Arianism and was destined within a
short time of Paul's disappearance from the scene of history to be
himself deposed because he was not enough in sympathy with
explicitly Arian ideas. Paul's case is indeed a good example of the
danger of assuming that all depositions of bishops in the Eastern half
of the Empire up to the year 361 were motivated by explicitly
doctrinal or ideological policies. Furdrer, by the time Paul
encountered his fourth and final exile forces within the Eastern
Church were manifesting themselves which put a very different face
28By the time Athanasius wrote Apol. de Fuga 3 and Hist. Arian. 7 (357 or 358) it is
clear that Paul is dead, and is regarded as a martyr for the pro-Nicene cause. Klein
(op. cit. P.74 n 149) says that he died in 351, I do not know on what authority.
Socrates (HE V.9) and Sozomenus (VII. 10) describe how his body was in the reign
ofTheodosius brought back with honour to Constantinople and buried in a church
named after him. Most recently A. Martin has made an elaborate reconstruction of
Paul's career. (Histoire 'Akephale' 35-48) which rejects the reconstructions of
Schwartz and Telfer; regards the identification of Eusebius as the chamberlain as
unnecessary and supported only by legend; places the choice of Paul as bishop of
Constantinople in 337 and his first exile in 338; holds that he only underwent two
exiles, in that year and in some year between 344 and 350; and suggests that the point
at which Paul voted against Athanasius was 338, i.e. against his return to his see in
spite of the verdict of the Council ofTyre (scarcely a year after he had apparently
welcomed the returning Athanasius in Constantinople!). I cannot accept this
reconstruction for the following reasons: i) Athanasius says explicitly that Paul was
exiled four rimes (HA 7). not two; ii) the explanation of Paul's condemning
Athanasius in 338 is very weak; iii) it is incredible that after the riots in
Constantinople resulting in the lynching of a magister equitum sent specially by
Constantius Paul (the main object and centre of the rioting) should have been left
the silence of the Westerners at Serdica over Paul. But I do not dispute that Martin is
correct in envisaging the Hist. Akeph. as attempting to parallel Paul's career with
that of Athanasius, to the advantage of the latter.
 Period of Confusion
on opposition to N to that which existed at the beginning of Paul's
troubled career. Certainly Eusebius of Nicomedia/Constantinople
on his return from exile (probably in 328) to the moment of his death
(probably' 341) t increasing control of ecclesiastical affairs in the
East and, ssisted by a onsiderable number of bishops who were in
sympathy. jth-his poli y, made every effort to oppose and damage
those bi ops whQ id not agree with his point of view or who
obstruc ed his path to wer. Eustathius of Antioch saw this as early
as 328 r 329. 29 Bu we cannot lay all depositions of all bishops
between 8 ang _ 4 at his door., nor must we assume that what
Eusebius and his par were aiming at Was to substitute for the Creed
of Nicaea a nakedly rian formula. What precisely they wanted to
establish as doctrine Became quite clear when they showed their hand
at the Council of An~ioch in 341. To that Council we must now tum.
~. The Council of Antioch of 341
In the year 341 a council of ninety bishops assembled at Antioch,
under the presidency of Flacillus, sometime between May and
September. The formal occasion was the dedication of a church in
Antioch which Constantius had built. Its leading spirits probably
were Eusebius, nOw of Constantinople, and Akakius who had
succeeded the church historian Eusebius at Palestinian Caesarea in
339. Gregory of Alexandria, George bishop of Laodicea, Eudoxius of
Germanicia, Patrophilus of Scythopolis, Theodore of Heraclea,
Narcissus of Neronias and Dianius of Cappadocian Caesarea were
there. Dianius is said to have brought with him the eminent
theologian Asterius. 30 The Emperor Constantius was in the city at
the time, and attended the council. Klein is probably correct in
scouting suggestions that at this point Constantius was anxious above
all to promote Arianism and that he was using political means to
attain this end. What he probably had in mind was a desire to prevent
bishops exceeding the rights and limits of their sees (as in his view
Julius of Rome was doing), and interfering with the decisions of
other bishops and of councils far removed from their proper sphere
"Theodoret HE 1.8.1-5.
30The Libellus Synodikos which records the presence here of Asterius, is not
wholly trustworthy (see Mansi Coneil. II.I350and Bardy Lucien d'Antioche 326), but
we shall see good reason for regarding it as truthful in this particular (pp. 288-9
below).
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
of influence. 31 There can be little doubt that this Council of Antioch
was co.nceived by those who organized it as an answer to Julius'
CouncIl ofR0n:'e and the letter which he wrote to the Eusebian party
after It, and whIch must have been received in Antioch early in that
year.
This council produced three credal formulae, and another
gathering of bishops (we do not know who) a few months later in
Antioch produced a fourth. Two of these creeds are of considerable
importance. 32 The first creed is a colourless and innocuous statement
interesting only for two points: 33 it starts with the words:
'We have neither been followers of Arius (because how should we
who are bishops follow a presbyter?), nor have we accepted any other
form offalth than that which was set out at the beginning but we have
rather approached him as investigators and judges of his belief than
followed him.'
The other point is that at the end of the Christological article it adds
the words 'and remaining King and God for ever'. This is a palpable
hit at Marcellus of Ancyra. It is obvious that the bishops who
composed thIS creed are conscious of being suspected of Arianism by
the Western church, but they made no attempt to disavow Arianism
m thIS statement. It is not easy to determine why it should have been
produced. It !s possible that this was the production of those among
the mnety bIShops assembled who were most sympathetic to the
vle~s. of Arius, and that the others (who were probably in the
m'\Jorlty), illSlsted upon the composition of a longer and more
carefully deVISed creed. ThIS Second Creed of Antioch, often known
31Co.nstantju~ II 166--9. 205-6. in connection with Constantius' relations with the
Armentan patriarch Nerses.
32S~crates HE II.S and Sozomenus HE 111.5.3 give general accounts of this
Co~ncl~. but they confuse this gathering with that which met at Antioch three years
earlIer. m 338. But then E. M. Buytaert, LJHeritage litteraire d'Eusebe d'Emese 77-82,
also co~fuses them! Sc~wartz Gesamm Schrift. 111.19.310-18 and Simonetti Crisi
153-5 ~Ive long and useful discussions of this council; cf. also Simonetti Studi 163,
Gwatkm AC, 67,' ~-:t 12~4; Harnack H~story IV.67-8; Loofs. 'Arianismus' 25. 26;
Boul~rand L He~esle 147-8. 150-4; Klem Constantius 42-3; Kopecek History 73.
80-3, Bardy LUCIen 85-132; Declercq Ossius 304; Person Mode of Decision-Making
164; Brennecke Hilarius von P. 13ff.
33To be. found Athanasius De Synodis 22; Socrates HE 11.10. Sozomenus HE
111.8.1-8 gives no more than a summary of its contents. It is printed in Hahn.
Symbole 18 3-4 (§I53), Schwartz (Gesamm. Sch,!ft.1Il.J9(3IO) conjectured that [hi,
was the creed which Anus submItted m order to be readmitted to communion.
 Period of Confusion
both in the ancient and the modern world as the 'Dedication' Creed,
was the Council's most important result. It must be given in fulJ:34
'I' ing the evangelical and apostolic tradition, we believe in one
od fathe Almighty, artificer and maker and designer (ltpOVO'ltT]v)
f the univer :
nd in one Lor Jesus Christ his only-begotten Son, God,35 through
w om(;;re 1 t ings, who was begotten from the father before the
ges, Gbd fro od, whole from whole, sole from sole, perfect from
erfect, King m King, Lord from Lord, living Wisdom, true
ight, Way, uth, unchanging and unaltering, exact image of the
G ead an the substance and will and power and glory of the
father,36 first/born of all creation, who was in the beginning with
God, God t~7Word according to the text in the Gospel [quotation of
Jn I: I, 3 arid Col 1: 171 who at the end of the days came down from
above a,{d was born of a virgin, according to the Scriptures, and
became (;"an, mediator between God and men, the apostle of our
faith, author of life, as the text runs [quotation of Jn 6:38], who
suffered for us and rose again the third day and ascended into heaven
and is seated on the right hand of the father and is coming again with
glory and power to judge the living and the dead:
And in the Holy Spirit, who is given to those who believe for comfort
and sanctification and perfection, just as our Lord Jesus Christ
commanded his disciples, saying [quotation of Matt 28:19], obviously
(in the name) of the father who is really father and the Son who is
really Son and the Holy Spirit who is really Holy Spirit, because the
names are not given lightly or idly, but signify exactly the particular
hypostasis and order and glory of each of those who are named, so that
they are three in hypostasis but one in agreement. 37
Since we hold this belief, and have held it from the beginning to the
end, before God and Christ we condemn every form of heretical
unorthodoxy. And if anybody teaches contrary to the sound, right
faith of the Scriptures, alleging that either time or occasion or age
exists or did exist before the Son was begotten, let him be anathema.
And if anyone alleges that the Son is a creature like one of the creatures
or a product (yeVV'lllu) like one of the products, or something made
34To be found Athanasius De Synodis 23; Socrates HE 11.10; a Latin version in
Hilary De Synodis 29. 30 (PL 10:502-4); it is printed in Hahn Symbole 184-6 (§154)·
350r, depending on the punctuation, 'his Son, the only begotten God': but this IS
a rather awkward expression.
J·t~, 9.6t'1to, olla(u, Kui Po"~~, Kui a"va~."" Kui ao~'1' tOU nutpo,
D.1tapaAAUKtOV ehc6va.
37m ; dVUl 'tij ~tv tmoO'tCr.atl tpia, tij Bt O'UI.U9rovi~ ev.
286
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (J4 1-349)
(ltoi'lIlU) like one of the things that are made, and not as the Holy
Scriptures have handed down concerning the subjects which have
been treated one after another, or if anyone teaches or preaches
. anything apart from what we have laid down, let him be anathema.
for we believe and follow everything that has been delivered from the
Holy Scriptures by the prophets and apostles truly and reverently.'
This is a remarkable treed for many reasons. In the first place, unlike
the other three creeds produced at Antioch in 341, it is not
deliberately anti-Marcellan. It makes no reference to Christ's
kingdom enduring for ever. 38 It is, of course, strongly anti-Sabellian,
which suggests that it was drawn up, not with the teaching of
Marcellus in mind, but in order to COunter what were thought to be
the dangerous tendencies of N. It has been by different scholars
branded as Arian and also as anti-Arian. 39 True-blue Arians would
have found it impossible to accept the statement that the Son is 'the
exact image of the substance (ousia) ... of the Godhead of the Father',
and all but impossible to agree that there was no 'occasion' when the
Son was begotten. On the other hand, they would have welcomed
the formula that the Son was not a creature like one of the creatures
etc., because that left it open to believe that he was a creature, though
an unusual or unique one. And they might have welcomed the
admission that the names of the Three signify the particular order and
glory of each, because these terms would allow a graduated or
subordinated Trinity. But we cannot regard these words as a sop to
the Arians, because almost everybody in the East at that period would
have agreed that there was a subordination of some sort within the
Trinity. This creed is not deliberately contrived to permit Arian
doctrine; in fact at places it explicitly excludes such doctrine. Its chief
b2te noire is Sabellianism, the denial of a distinction between the three
within the Godhead, and the most obvious recent example of a
formula which appeared to make this mistake was N. Loofs comes
nearest to the truth when he says that it is both anti-Marcellan and anti-
38Pace Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift. III.I9(3II-12}; Simonetti 157-8 and Loofs
'Arianismus' 25. 26.
39 Arian: Gwatkin (Ae 68, designed to let Arius through; Arians constantly
reproduced it - but were they Arians?); Simonetti (Stud; 163. deliberately
acceptable to Arians, a judgment a little modified in Crisi r55-8); Boularand
(L' He,esie 15<>-4, crypto-Arian): Anti-Atian: Schwartz Gesamm. Sch'ift. 1II.9
(210--3); Klein Constantius II 42-3. Hilary De Syn. 33(505. 506) defends it as
perfectly orthodox. Athanasius (De Syn 36) regards it as Arian.
 Period <if Confosion
homoousian,40 if for 'anti-Marcellan' we substitute 'anti-Sabellian~.
It is interesting to note, with Simonetti, what significant terms m
N . edication Creed does not reproduce: eK tii, otiaia, toli 1tatp6,
(from tli ousia of the Father') 'begotten, not made', homoousion. All
,hese term would have been unacceptable to Origen. We ?ave se<;n
a'i?OJ1!! that r~en repudiated 'from the ousia of the Father, and dId
10~P omo& sios to the Son, and that he was ready to regard the
Son asin 0 esse a 'creature' (though he would not have said a
'thing made' 1t 'lJ!a)).4! The 'God from ?od', 'wh~le from whole'
.. ~ressions were designed to disown the Idea, whICh was
abhorrent bot to Origen and to the Arians, that th
m e Son was, 'as It
were, a brok n-otf piece of the Father, and the handlmg of the
'aspects' (epi. oiai) of the Son, such as Wmd, ,wIsdom, ~Ight, Way
etc., in thislcreed accords better WIth Ongen s con~e~tIon of them
than witlfthat of Arius. The strong em~has~s on tlIe dlstmct hypostases
is remini~cent ofOrigen. 42 The expressIOn three m hypostasIs but one
in agreement' also harks back ultimately to Origen (Contra Celsum
43
VIII.I2). Schwartz rightly calls it an 'Origenist' creed.
One particular expression in this creed has always attracted
attention, the statement that tlIe Son is 'tlIe exact Image of the
Godhead, the ousiaand the will and the power ~nd tlIe glm~ of t~~
Father'. Gwatkin alleges that this expression denves from Orlgen,
though in fact it does not. But he rightly points out m the same
passage that the term 'exact image' is used by Alexander of
45
Alexandria of tlIe Son in his Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica and
that it em be found in Athanasius Contra Gentes 4 1 ,46 and 47 and Or.
con. Ar 1.26; 11.33 and 111.5 and I I, but that in his De Synodis he aVOIds
using it except in an argument about the employment of
unScriptural language (36). A much closer resemblance to thiS
formula, however, is to be found in a fragment of AsterlUS where
4o'Arianismus' 25. 26; he attributed it to those who had constituted the 'm~ddle
party' at Nicaea. But we do not possess enough evidence to be sure, that ,such a smgle
identifiable party existed at that Council, far less that it had survived mtact for 16
years afterwards.
41See above, pp.63-64. . submitted to the Council of Nicaea (Opitz Urk III No. 22(42)) and in Con. Marc.
42Boularand's idea that this creed by three hypostases mtended three substances
(L' Heresie 150-4) is very odd.
43Gesamm. Schrifi. II1.lO(JI 1-12). . ._
44SA 12o-4~ he adduces Origen Comm.Jn XII~.36~ Kal YEv£u9al 'to eeA.TJ~a 'tou
u{ou aRupc\l.l.UKTOV tOU 9.1.~~utO' toil Rutp6" which IS not a close enough parallel
to convince.
"See Opitz Urk III No. 14·)7, )8(25).
288
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
these precise words, from 'the exact image' to 'glory of the Father'
(but omitting 'Godhead') are to be found. 4• Further remarkable
echoes of Asterius can be found in tlIis creed. 'The FatlIer truly
Father, the Son truly Son and the Holy Spirit similarly' occurs in
fragment XX,47 and the hypostases (a term which Asterius certainly
favoured) 'agreeing' (O\)J!IjIOlvolial, (J\)J!IjIOlviav) is applied to the Father
and the Son in fragment XXXII. 48 The extreme Arian Philostorgius
criticizes Asterius for having applied the term 'exact image of the
substance' to the Son.49 It is impossible to avoid tlIe conclusion that
Asterius had some influence on the composition of the Second
(Dedication) Creed of Antioch of 341. The information from the
Libel/us Synodikos that Asterius attended this Council becomes more
plausible in view of this.s o
One otlIer point has yet to be determined about this creed.
Sozomenus says of it 'They used to say that they had found this creed
copied out by Lucian' who was martyred in Nicomedia, a man who
was not only of the highest reputation but who was supremely well
acquainted with the Holy Scriptures; but whether they said this
correctly or whether in order to exalt their own composition by the
martyr's reputation, I cannot say.'51 Other authorities nearer to the
year 341 than Sozomenus made the same claim; none of them is very
convincing.s2 We know so little certainly about Lucian that this is a
question impossible to d.ecide with any.confidence. If we could
connect Asterius with Lucian, the matter would be clearer, but there
is no particular evidence for such a connection. Two faint indications
argue against the theory. Arius was certainly a disciple of Lucian,
because he tells us so himself, but it would have been difficult for
Arius to accept at least two statements in the Dedication Creed. And
we have concluded earlier that the only doctrine of Lucian about
46Sec Bardy Lucien 125-7 and 349, frag XXI. See above, p. 36.
47Bardy op. cit. 349; above, p. 35. For the other occurrences of this formula see
Lorentz AriusJudaizans? 191 (the remarkable parallel in Eusebius of Caesa rea's creed
1.4), and Tetz 'Zur Theologie des Marcellus von Ankyra III' 193 (a fuller list).
48Bardy, Lucien 352-3; see above, p. _37.
"HE I!.IS.
50S ee n 28 above.
"HE III.S.9; cf VI. 12.4.
52They are Passio Arlemii (PG 96:]20); Ps-Athanasius Dial. de T(initate III. 1,2, IS
(PG 28:1204, 1225).
 Period of Confusion
which we can be sure is that he taught that the Saviour took to
l:'
. -Cr
imself at the Incarnation a body without a soul. But the Dedication
declares that 'became man', in contrast to the First Creed of
( this c ncil which says that he 'took flesh', a statement more
consona t with Arian doctrine. We must regard the theory that
Lucian omposed the Dedication Creed as not proven. 53
This reed then appears as one undoubtedly intended to replace N.
"'{iw:atl'j'nsays that Socrates tells us that this Council of Antioch 'spoke
respec fully' ofN.54 But all that Socrates says is that 'they' (by which
we a e to understand the Eusebian party) 'never criticized the
for ulae of Nicaea', which is a different statement. The nearest
ap roach to a reference to N is the words of the introduction to the
Fir t Creed 'any other form offaith than that which was set out at the
beglnning'; but this is a vague statement from which nothing definite
can be deduced. The Dedication Creed is significantly silent about N,
and is scarcely compatible with it.55 It can hardly be regarded as
either a supplement to N or an interpretation of it. It is put forward as
a substitute. It deliberately excludes the kind of Arianism professed
by Arius and among his followers by Eusebius of
NicomediajConstantinople. Simonetti, indeed, thinks that at the end
of his life Eusebius shifted his views to support a less extreme position
than that found in his Letter to Arius written perhaps twenty years
before. 56 Many scholars have noticed the affinities between this creed
and the kind of doctrine which Eusebius of Caesarea taught in his
Praeparatio Evangelica and Demonstrato Evangelii, before the Arian
Controversy came into the open. The ancestors of this creed are
Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea and Asterius. 57 It represents the nearest
approach we can· make to discovering the views of the ordinary
educated Eastern bishop who was no admirer of the extreme views of
Acius but who had been shocked and disturbed by the apparent
Sabellianism of N, and the insensitiveness of the Western Church to
53Bardy. Lucien 9; Declercq Ossius 304; Lorentz Ariu5 1182-98; Kopecek History
81. Simonetti, Crisi ISS and 159 n 154. and Person (Mode i64) 3re sceptical. Batiffol
had apparently conjectured that Sozomenus' information caine from Sabinus of
Heraclea. One could ask on what occasion would Lucian have composed a creed? It
is not an easy question to answer.
"SA 93, adducing Socrates HE 11.10, oM'v toov.v NI1,al'1Il"~1jIa~£vol.
55Boularand has seen this, L'Heresie 147-8, but few others.
56Crisi J 53-5.
57Bardy Lucien 119.32 gives his idea of the. pedigree of this creed, and 85-116
gives its later history.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
the threat to orthodoxy which thi$ tendency represented. If the First
Creed represents what the Arians of sang pur would have liked to see
adopted as a standard of belief, the Second Creed shows us how the
hitherto silent majority wished to modify this. They constituted a
widespread point- of view, but we can hardly call them a party.
The third Creed of this Antiochene Council is not really a
manifesto by the assembled bishops, but an act of self-exculpation by
an accused man. 58 Theophronius bishop ofTyana had evidently been
accused of Sabelli anism, probably in the form ofleanings towards the
ideas of Marcellus of Ancyra. This is a profession of faith, not
intended to give any full or formal statement of belief, but to ensure
that nobody can suspect him of Sabelli anism. Three expressions alone
in his creed are significant: of the Son he says 'and existing distinctly
(lit. "in hypostasis") with God'; later in the creed he describes the Son
as 'remaining eternally', after the clause dealing with the Second
Coming; and he ends his profession with a sentence explicitly
dissociating his beliefs from those of Marcellus of Aneyra, Sabellius
and Paul of Samosata. It is quite obvious that the chief object of this
Council was to make an emphatic statement against Sabellianism.
But if, as we have every reason to suppose, Theophronius was not
deposed, we can conclude that those who were conducting this anti-
Sabellian policy were genuinely concerned with doctrinal purity and
were not anxious to depose those bishops who disagreed with them
on any and every pretext .
. The Fourth Creed of Antioch, which was not drawn up by all the
bIshops who produced the First and Second and who witnessed the
Third, but produced by an anonymous group in Antioch some
m?nths later, is not easy to characterise."9 It is widely accepted that
thIS creed was intended to function as a reconciling formula
obnoxious to nobody and capable of being accepted by all. 60 It
describes the Son as
'our LordJesus Christ who before all ages was begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, through whom (are) all things both
5~To ,be f~und Athanasius De Synodis 24.1-5 (250); Socrates HE n,lO; a Lacin
ve~~on m Hdary De Synodis 29; Hahn Symbole 18S. 186 (§ISS).
Athanasius De Synodis 25. I (250)-5(25 I) who tells us that it was composed some
months afcer the others; Socrates HE II. 18. Loofs (' Arianismus' 26) thinks that it was
produced,bya new council which met in 342. For the text see Hahn Symbole 187-8
(§IS6). Hdary (De Sy". 36. 37(SOI, S09» defends it as orthodox.'
60S 0 Simonetti, Crisi 164; Kopecek History 73,
 \
Period of Confusion
~'\ which we can be sure is that he taught that the Saviour took to
J
imself at the Incarnation a body without a soul. But the Dedication
) eed declares that 'became man', in contrast to the FIrSt Creed of
t is council which says that he 'took flesh', a statement more
, / onsonant with Arian doctrine. We must regard the theory that
>/- Lucian composed the Dedication Creed as not proven. 53
This creed then appears as one undoubtedly intended to replace N.
Gwatkin says that Socrates tells us that this Council of Antioch 'spoke
respectfully' ofN. 54 But all that Socrates says is that 'they' (by which
we are to understand the Eusebian party) 'never criticized the
formulae of Nicaea', which is a different statement. The nearest
approach to a reference to N is the words of the introduction to the
First Creed 'any other form offaith than that which was set out at the
beginning'; but this is a vague statement from which nothing defmite
can be deduced. The Dedication Creed is significantly silent about N,
and is scarcely compatible with it.55 It can hardly be regarded as
either a supplement to N or an interpretation ofit. It is put forward as
a substitute. It deliberately excludes the kind of Arianism professed
by. Arius and among his followers by Eusebius of
Nicomedia/Constantinople. Simonetti, indeed, thinks that at the end
of his life Eusebius shifted his views to support a less extreme position
than that found in his Letter to Arius written perhaps twenty years
before. 56 Many scholars have noticed the affinities between this creed
and the kind of doctrine which Eusebius of Caesarea taught in his
Praeparatio Evangelica and Demonstrato Evangelii, before the Arian
Controversy came into the open. The ancestors of this creed are
Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea and Asterius. 57 It represents the nearest
approach we can make to discovering the views of the ordinary
educated Eastern bishop who was no admirer of the extreme views of
Arius but who had been shocked and disturbed by the apparent
Sabellianism ofN, and the insensitiveness of the Western Church to
5JBardy. Lucien 9; Declercq Ossius 304; Lorentz Arius 1182--98; Kopecek History
81. Simonetti, Crisi 158 and 159 n 154. and Person (Mode i64) are sceptical. Batiffol
had apparently conjectured that Sozomenus' information came from Sabinus of
Heradea. One could ask on what occasion would Lucian have composed a creed? It
is not an easy question to answer.
54SA 93. adducing Socrates HEII.IO, oMs:v 'trov tv Nl1I:cltq.Il6J1.'I'aJ.lSVol.
55Boularand has seen this, L'Heresie 147-8, but few others.
56Crisi 153-5.
57Bardy Lucien II9.32 gives his idea of the pedigree of this creed, and 8S-II6
gives its later history.
290
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (J4 1-349)
the threat to orthodoxy which this tendency represented. If the First
Creed represents what the Arians of sang pur would have liked to see
adopted as a standard of belief, the Second Creed shows us how the
hitherto silent majority wished to modify this. They constituted a
widespread point of view, but we can hardly call them a party.
The third Creed of this Antiochene Council is not really a
manifesto by the assembled bishops, but an act of self-exculpation by
an accused man. 58 Theophronius bishop ofTyana had evidently been
accused of Sabelli an ism, probably in the form ofleanings towards the
Ideas of Marcellus of Ancyra. This is a profession of faith, not
intended to give any full or formal statement of belief, but to ensure
that nobody can suspect him of Sabelli ani sm. Three expressions alone
in his creed are significant: of the Son he says 'and existing distinctly
(lit. "in hypostasis") with God'; later in the creed he describes the Son
as 'remaining eternally', after the clause dealing with the Second
Coming; and he ends his profession with a sentence explicitly
dissociating his beliefs from those of Marcellus of Ancyra, Sabellius
and Paul of Samosata. It is quite obvious that the chief object of this
Council was to make an emphatic statement against Sabellianism.
But if, as we have every reason to suppose, Theophronius was not
deposed, we can conclude that those who were conducting this anti-
Sabellian policy were genuinely concerned with doctrinal purity and
were not anxious to depose those bishops who disagreed with them
on any and every pretext.
The Fourth Creed of Antioch, which was not drawn up by all the
bishops who produced the First and Second and who witnessed the
Third, but produced by an anonymous group in Antioch some
months later, is not easy to characterise."9 It is widely accepted that
this creed was intended to function as a recondling formula
obnoxious to nobody and capable of being accepted by all. 60 It
describes the Son as
'our Lord Jesus Christ who before all ages was begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, through whom (are) all things both
s~To .be f~und Athanasius De Synodis 24.1-5 (250); Socrates HE 11.10; a Latin
ve~~on In H~lary De Sy~odjs 29; Hahn Symbole 185, 186 (§ISS);
Athanaslus De Synodls 25·1 (250)-5(251) who tens us that it was composed some
months after the others; Socrates HE 11.18. Loofs (' Arianismus' 26) thinks that it was
produced,bya new council which met in 342, For the text see Hahn Symhole 18 7-8
(§! 56). HIlary (De Syn. )6, 37(SO!, 509)) defends it as orthodox ..
60S 0 Simonetti, Crisi 164; Kopecek History 73,
2 91
(--
Period of Confusion
I\
" in heav and on earth, visible and invisible, who is Word and
( Wi om and Power and Life and true Light'.
\ It has a sp cial clause inserted against Marcellus (so its toleration is not
\', unli t ),
. . . - ;. ose kingdom is unending (ch.:ata.1tauO'to~) and remains ~or e~dless
/ ages (for he is seated at the right hand of the Father not only ill thIS age
/ but also in that which is to come)'.
It ends with an anathema which may have been modelled on that of
N but which is by no means identical with it:
'But those who say that the Son is from non-existence (t~ OIlK ovtrov)
or of a different hypostasis, and not from God, and that ther~ was once
a time or age when he did not exist, these the holy Catholic Church
recognizes as alien'.
The omissions of this creed are more significant than its positive
statements. It leaves out the word ousia and its compounds altog,ether;
it makes no attempt to establish the distinctness of the 'Persons m an
anti-Sabellian manner. It does not rule out the possibility that there
was an 'occasion' or point oftime (kairos) when the Son did not exist,
as the Dedication Creed does. It leaves it open to anyone to believe
that the Son is a creature, as long as'it is acknowledged that he is
begotten. And the only possible interp~etation of hypost~sis as used m
the anathema is that it is meant to be Identical WIth ousla; any other
interpretation would make this. out to be ~ flagrantly Sabellian
statement. Except that this confeSSIOn does not mSlst upon the distmct
existence of three hypostases, it leans much more to the left than to the
right theologically. It may have been composed by a ~roup of
bishops who were to the left of the majority who had sanctIOned the
Dedication Creed; presumably these last had now returned to theIr
sees."1 It is hard to see how it could have been regarded as likely to
conciliate opinion in the West. But the fact remains that it was
destined to be used for nearly fifteen years as the basis for all other
creeds which were designed to be ecumenical.
61We cannot, however, with confidence trace the hand either ~~ Flacillus of
Antioch or of Eusebius of Constantinople in it. because most ~uthont1es agree that
the latter died soon after the Council which saw the product1o~ of ~e first three
creeds of Antioch 341, though it has been suggesced that he surVIved till early 342 ,
and Flacillus also died not long after that Council, to be succeeded by Stephen. See
also Brennecke Hilarius von P. 21-2.
292
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (;41-349),
3. The Council of Serdica 343
Early in the year 342 a delegation from the Eastern Church presented
itself at the court of the Emperor Constans in Trier. It consisted of the
bishops Narcissus of Neronias, Maris of Chalcedon, Theodore of
Heraclea and Mark of Arethusa. It carried with it the Fourth Creed of
Antioch 34' and asked the Emperor to consider it. As a gesture of
reconciliation, this embassy was fruitless, because nobody in the West
took any notice of the creed, and because the Eastern bishops were
concerned with theological agreement and the Western authorities
with reversing the formal deposition of several leading bishops of the
Eastern Church."2 Under pressure, however, from Julius of Rome
and Maximus of Trier, Constans decided to take the initiative in
ecclesiastical affairs. 63 His brother Constantius was on the Eastern
frontier occupied with war against the Persians and could not himself
make such a move. He agreed to permit, at the suggestion of
Constans, that a grand Ecumenical Council should take place, with
the intention of resolving the tension between East and West in the
Church, at Serdica, modern Sofia, a city carefully chosen as standing
beween the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire. The
invitations to this large-scale gathering were sent off in 342.
Meanwhile Constans was occupied in Britain. But in 343, in the
autumn, about 90 bishops from the West and about 80 from the East
set off to meet in Serdica 64 Constans himself, accompanied by
62The sources for this incident are Athanasius De Synodis 28, Socrates HE ILlS,
Sozomenus HE III. 10.3-6; Sozomenus represents Constans.as taking the initiative in
asking for a d.elegation from the East, but this is unlikely. See Simonetti Crisi 163-6;
Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift. III.9(322-S); Loofs 'Arianismus' 26; L. W'. Barnard The
Council of Serdica 343 is the fullest and best account of the Council.
63Athanasius Apol. ad Const. 4.
64Socrates HE 11.20 (eleventh year after Constantine's death) and Sozomenus HE
IIJ.I2.7 (in the consulate of Rufinus and Eusebius) both place it in 347; both are
certainly wrong. For long the accepted dated was 343, and Gwatkin SA 124 n 2 and
125 gives some perfectly good reasons for this choice. But Schwartz Gesamm.
Schrifi. IIb(ro, II), 2(55-6), 9(325-34» argued for 342, mainly relying on the text
of the Historia Akephala (consolatu Constantini et Constantini, emended to Constantis et
Constantij, i.e. 342) and the possibility ofinterpreting the Index to the Festal Letters
(which appear to place it in 343) by either the Egyptian or the Roman calendar.
Opinion since has been much divided. The difficulty for those who opt for the
earlier date is how to ftli the time between the end of the Council ofSerdica and the
known dates of the death of Gregory of Alexandria and the return of Athanasius to
Alexandria after his Second Exile; the difficulty for those, who choose 343 is how to
account for the apparent fact that eighteen months elapsed between Constans
293
 Period of Confusion
i'lthan~'~s and several other Eastern bishops who had been deposed
d ring the past twenty years, attended the encounter, The
de is~rs f this meeting were certainly not Eastern bishops. Socrates
E I .20) expressly says that they did not want to come. It was a
..... ·smal group of Western bishops, influential with Constans. who
planned the Council: MaximinusofTrier, Protasius of Milan. OSSlUS of
i Cordova, Foftunatianus of Aquileia and Vincent of Capua. Julius of
Rome was not a prime mover in the affair; he sent a comparatively
minor delegation who kept a low profile. 6s Though Constans was
the Emperor who took the initiative, Constantius his brother was not
indifferent to the outcome of the affair. He sent the comes Strategius
Musonianus and the castrensis Hesychius, to assist the Eastern bishops
in their journey and ordered Philagrius (an offIcial experienced in
troublesome ecclesiastical matters, now comes in Thrace). to
accompany them on their journey from PhiJippopolis to Serdica, and
afterwards duly exiled Lucius of Adrianople and some Egyptian
clergy who had met with the Easterners' disapproval.
Had all the bishops met to constitute a regular General Council, it
would have been a large one. Zeiller reckons that there. were one
hundred and seventy eight bishops present, 98 from the West and 80
from the East. 66 The representatives of the· bishop of Rome were the
presbyters Archidamus and Philoxenus and a deacon Leo. Ossius was
generally regarded as the leader of the Westerners. Maximinus of
Trier and Gratus, Catholic bishop of Carthage (who needed imperial
support for his struggle against the Donatists and could not ignore the
Emperor's summons) were prominent in their number. Athanasius,
Asclepas and Marcellus were present as Eastern bishops with a
grievance. 'Gaudentius of Naissus and Protogenes of Serdica had
originally been regarded as belonging to the 'Eusebian' party, but
calling the council and its actual meeting in the autumn of 343 (as Socrates HE 11.20
observes). There are excellent resumes of the evidence in Hess Canons 140-4, in
Zeiller Origines 228-30 and most recently in Barnard 'The Council ofSardica: Some
Problems Re-assessed', and The Council of Serdica 343. 49-55. all of whom argue·
convincingly for 343. Sources for the Council of Serdica are Socra,res HE II. 20 and 22;
Sozomeous HE III. 11.3-12.7, Theodorer HE 11.7. 8: Athanaslus Apol Sec. 36-50;
Hist: Arion. 15.3(190), 18:)(192); De Synodis 25:" Tomus ad Antiochenos s. 10; Hilary
Coil. A,. B 11.1(103-126); Uber ad Constantium 1.1-11.3 (181-1.87).
6SS ec Athanasius Apol. ad Const. 4; Hist. Arian. 1St 44. and Pietri in PTAA
109-1 I. Simonetti Stud; 161-2 gives a useful account of the dispositions on both
sides; see also Klein Constantius 11 1°9-13; Zeiller Origines 231-2:
660 rigines 232-4.
294
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
had now changed sides and associated with the Western bishops. The
leaders of the Eastern bishops were probably Stephen the recently-
chosen bishop of Antioch, Akakius of Caesarea, Menophantus of
Ephesus, Valens and Ursacius, Narcissus, Maris, Theodore, Basil of
Ancyra and Eudoxius of Germanicia. They convened at
Philippopolis, a town ninety-six miles south east of Serdica, and
prepared to travel as one body to Serdica. 67 .
The Council ofSerdica never met as a Council. It was in fact a
debacle rather than a Council, and it is absurd· to reckon it among the
General Councils, whether we look at it from the point of viewof the
~estetn or that of the Eastern bishops.6s The unwilling Eastern
bIshops, spurred on by Philagrius, on reaching Serdica were housed
ill a wing of the imperial palace and carefully kept from informal
contact with the Western bishops. In spite of this tWo of their
number, Arius of a Palestinian and Asterius of an Arabian see,
managed to change sides and join the Western bishops. The Eastern
bishops refused to join counsel with the Western bishops until these
had separated themselves from the bishops who had been tried,
condemned and deposed by regularly convened and ordered Eastern
councils. This demand was the rock upon which the attempt to effect
a council at Serdica split: 'At first sight', says Simonetti, 'it was a
splitting of hairs and a pretext, but in reality it was a plea which
sparked off the crucial point of the situation and of' the
confrontation'.69 The Easterners had no intention of allowing the
Westerners to review decisions which they were competent to make;
the Westerners had no intention of behaving as if the decision of a
Council of Rome could be regarded as ineffective. The Easterners
had a perfectly good case, and this fact till recently has not been
sufficiently realized. Western bishops had no right to review the
verdIcts of Eastern councils. The bishop of Rome had never before
gone so far as to question the decision of an Eastern council.
Metropolitan jurisdictions were fairly clearly established in the East
but were still in an uncertain and unformed state in the West. 70
67S ee Zeiller.op. cit. 231-4; Simonetti Crist' i67-g.
. 68For ~cco.u~ts of what happ~ned, s~e Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift. 1II.2(SS-62);
Simonetti Cnsl 170-87; Barnard Councd ofSardica' 13-24; Brennecke Hilarius von
P.29-46.
Meris; 170.
7°The word "!etropolitanus was not in use in the West until the fifth century. So
~uch for the claIm that the third British bishop who attended the Council of Aries
In 314 was archbishop of Colchester (Camulodunum)!
295
 Period of Confusion
",thanasius was deservedly unpopular in the East. 71 Serious attempts
w~re made to overcome the impasse. Ossius more than ten years later
~
ai 72 that he had gone so far as to offer to take back Athanasius with
h' to Spain if the Easterners would join him in discussion, but the
. istrustful Eastern bishops refused this suggestion. In return they
suggested that a new commission should be sent to the Mareotis with
Western representatives on it (only Theognis of Nicaea among the
original members of the Commission had died). The Westerners
rejected this unrealistic plan. Finally the Eastern bishops conveyed a
message to the Western that news of a victory by Constantius over
the Persians compelled them to return to their sees. They composed
an Encyclical Letter or manifesto at Serdica, retreated to
Philippopolis, and then published their manifesto. Both sides took
the most imprudent measures towards the others. The Western
bishops examined the cases of Athanasius, of Marcellus, of Asclepas
and of Lucius all over again and declared them innocent. The
Easterners excommunicated Ossius. Protogenes, Maximinus,
Gaudentius and Julius. The Western bishops excommunicated
Stephen, Theodorus, Akakius, Narcissus, Valens, Ursacius, Basil of
Ancyra, Quintianus of Gaza, Menophantus, and even Ge()rge, just
elected to the see of Laodicea, who was not present at Serdica. The
Easterners branded all the Westerners as Sabellians. The Westerners
stigmatized all the Easterners as Arians. Both charges were equally
ridiculous.
The Western bishops remained at Serdica for some time after the
departure of the Eastern bishops and occupied themselves not only in
launching anathemas and acquitting the' accused but also in
producing 'several documents. The Eastern bishops only produced
one document, that which was composed at Serdica and published at
Phili ppopolis: 7 3
Gregory of Alexandria heads the list of bishops addressed at the head
of the Letter. The bishop of Carthage is addressed by the name of
711The arbitrary behaviour and violence of which Athanasius had given full
proof in the struggle against the Melitians had contributed to sharpen these anti-
Alexandrian sentiments', Simonetti. Cris; 171 04.
72Athanasius Hisl. Arian. 44.
7JTheir letter and profession of faith survive only in Latin in Hilary Coli. Ar.
IV.1-3(48-']8) and in Turner EOMIA 1.637 (profession of faith only and in a
corrupted form). Hilary gives the profession of faith again in his De Synodis 33. 34.
Hahn prints the profession of faith in Symbole 190-2 (§158). On the profession see
Zeiller . .origines 238-9; Klein Constantius 1147-9.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
Donatus (not Gratus the Catholic or anti-Donatist bishop}.74
Marcellus of Ancyra is violently condemned, both for teaching that
the reign of Christ began four hundred years before and would end at
the end of the world, and that 'the image of the invisible God' was
created at t~e conception of the body ,of Christ and that it was then
that he was made Bread and Gate and Life. 75 At a recent Conference
in Constantinople in the presence of the late Emperor Constantine
bishops from many Eastern provinces tried to dissuade Marcellus
from his views, but he persisted and was condemned. A Liber
Sententiarum (Book of Opinions) exists written against Marcellus by
several bishops, and in this appear opini~ns adverse to Marcellus by
Protogenes of Serdica and Cyriacus of Naissus, who now side with
Marcellus. 76 They next tum their attention to Athanasius. They
complain of his violent and arbitrary behaviour in his see, both before
and after his First Exile; they give an exaggerated account of the affair
ofIschyras, but also supply a list of other violent acts such as floggings
and incarcerations. 77 That the Westerners have accepted him is
contrary to 'the authority of the law, the law of the church and the
holy tradition of the apostles'.78 They next complain of the coercive
and ferocious measures used in their sees when they returned to them
after exile by Paul of Constantinople and Asclepas of Gaza. It is here
that they say that it is seventeen years since Asclepas was deposed. The
~estern bishops are trying to establish a new principle, 'the Eastern
blShops must bejudged by Western'.'" Athanasius had assented to the
deposition ofAsclepas and of Marcellus, Paul had personally agreed to
t~e condemnation of Athanasius at Tyre. 80 Julius had wrongly given
hIS support to Athanasius. 81 They display peculiar animosity against
Protogenes and Ossius for their support of Athanasius and
Marcellus. 82 Five of the (six) members of the Mareotic Commission
74Hilary Coli. Ar. IV.I. Praef. 48-9.
"Ibid. IV.I, 2(49-50). .
,76Ibid. IV. 1.3(50-1). Cyriacus was probably dead by now, so that some scholars
thmk that the name of Gaudentius, Cyriacus' successor, has fallen out of the text,
and want to emend to some such words as Gaudentium ut immemorem decessoris sui
Cyriaci ('~audentius who has apparently forgotten his predecessor Cyriacus'. the
terms which are actually used of him at 27(66)). Gaudentius was on the side of the
Westerners; cf. Sozomenus HE III.II.S who says that Gaudentius defended
Marcellus whereas Cyriacus had taken the other side.
"IV.1.6(5J); 8(54, 55).
"IV. 1.7(54).
"10(55)-12(57).
8° Il (57).
"14(57, 58).
82 14- 17(57-9).
297
~~
Period of Confusion
\ "
sur~: cd and were present at Serdica. Ossius, Protogenes and. t~eir
associ tes rejected the suggestion of a re-constitut~d. Comm~ss~on
) exa ning the case on the spot. 83 Attacks on indIvIduals, glvmg
~ ils in language which. is often obs~ure ~o •us,, fol;ow, on
/ / / Protogenes. Dionisius of Ells, Bassus of Dlocicnan S CIty (. S~lona),
Actius of Thessalonica 84 , At least the Westerners should realIze t.he
wickedness of splitting the whole Church f~r. the sake ,of AthanaslUs
and Marcellus. 85 These evil men are reqUlnng that whatever the
Eastern bishops had determined in a Council should be opened up
again by the Westerners, and likewise whatever the Westerners (had
decided) should be annulled by the Easterners,"· Therefore. the
Eastern bishops now formally condemn, depose and exco~mum~ate
the following, listing their misdeeds in the case of each: JulIUS, OSSlUS.
Protogenes, Gaudentius, Maximinus (Trier)~. Marcellus and
Athanasius. 87 In addition to their other enOrmitleS, they. are 8~lso
heretics, because they follow Marcellus' new form of JudaIsm.
Finally, the Eastern bishops set out a profession offaith. This formula
is no more or less than the Fourth Creed of AntlOch 341, the one sent
vainly to Constans, with an addition to the ;tnathemas at the end
tacked on to it. The addition runs thus:
'Likewise the holy and Catholic Church.anathematizes those who say,
that there are three Gods, or that Christ is not God, and that before the
ages he was neither Christ nor the Son ofGo~, .or that Father, Son and
Holy Spirit are the same, or that the Son IS mgenerate, or that the
Father did not beget the Son by his counsel and Will.'89
Clearly they wish in this addition to allay Western fears that in
maintaining the existence of three hypostases wlthm th~ Godhead
they are falling into tritheism, and to reject Anan doctrme equally
with Sabellianism. The last clause may be aImed both at the Anan
playing down of the role of the Son as Logos and Wisdom and at pro-
Nicene doctrine of the consubstanttality of the Father and the Son
83 1 8(60).
84 20 (61).
85 22 (62).
86 2 6(6S). .
87 27 (65-'7); it is here (66) chat Eustathius is mentioned as Ifhe were deceased.
"28(67). . 92Hilary's version may represent the Latin original but neither he nor Athanasius
89IV.2(72): Similiter et eos qui dicunt: tres esse Deos, vel Chnstu~ non esse Deum, et
ante saecula neque Christum neque Filium eum esse Dei, vel eum Ipsum esse .p'atrem et
Fifium et Spiritum Sanctum, vel innascibilem Filium, vel q~od neq!4~ consilIO neque
vofuntate Pater genuerit Filium, anathematizat sancIa et cathollCa ecclesla.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (34 1-349)
which appeared to rule out the moral union between the Father's
being and that of the Son. Among the seventy-three bishops who
signed this manifesto we are struck by the names of Stephen
(Antioch), Akakius (Palestinian Caesarea), Eudoxius (Germanicia).
Dianius (Cappadocian Caesarea), Basil (Ancyra), Valens (Mursa) and
Ischyras (Mareotis).90 Their profession of faith cannot possibly be
described as Arian. But neither is intended to be a supplement to N. It
is the production of men who were searching for a substitute for N.
From the assembly of Western bishops in Serdica. or in connection
with them emerged no less than eight documents. 91 They are as
follows;
I. A Synodical Letter to all Churches. including a profession of
faith (to be found in Theodoret HE I1.8; Hilary Coll. Ar. BIl(I)
1-8( 105-24); Turner EOMIA I 645-53 and Athanasius Apol.
Sec. 44-9).92
2. A Synodical Letter to the Church of Alexandria (Athanasius
Apol. Sec. 37-40).
3· A Synodical Letter to the Bishops of Egypt and Libya
(Athanasius. Apol. Sec. 41-43. almost identical with the last).
4· A Synodical Letter to the Churches of the Mareotis (EOMIA
1.657-5, Latin version).
5· Letter of Athanasius from Serdica to the Churches of the
Mareotis (EOMIA 1.65~2).
6. Letter of Athanasius from Serdica to the Clergy of Alexandria
and the Parembole (EOMIA 1.654-6; on the subject of the
condemnation of the Eusebians and their refusal to attend the
Council).
7· Synodical Letter to Pope Julius (Hilary Coli. Ar. BII(2)
1-4(126-39».
8. Synodical Letter to the Emperor Constantius (which is Hilary's
Liber ad Constantium Imperatorem I. 1-5).
90IV·3(75--'78): the Latin scribes find Ischyras too much for them, and render the
name (76) as Squirius.
91For useful lists of them, see Declercq Ossius 401-4, and ZeilIer Origines 24 2 -3.
give the Profession ofFaich. There is also a Latin translation ofTheodoret's version
in the Historia Tripartita ofCassiodorus IV.24. The text of the Profession of Faith
given below is a translation of a careful collation by Loofs of the Latin in the
Collection ofTheodosius the Deacon (ed. of the BaUerini brothers), Cassiodorus'
translation of Theodoret's text, and the two most important MSS of Theodoret's
299
'~\ , Period of Confusion
/ I~add~ion Ossius and Protogenes wrote a letter to Pope Julius which
w~ shal consider below, with the others.
1Th.e esterners' Encyclical to all Churches begins by defending
A/h.anasius, Marcellus and Asclepas on the ground that the
o.o.4cc~sations made against them were false, their accusers had refused
( to come and explain themselves when summoned to do so by Julms,
I and indeed the accusers themselves were guilty of many crimes. 93
The incidents of Arsenius and Ischyras and the Broken Chalice are
briefly touched on, reviewed Wholly from the standpoint of
Athanasius. 94 Marcellus has convinced the writers that his writings
had been misinterpreted and that he was guilty neither of deriving
the origin of God the Word from the Virgin Mary nor of setting a
term to Christ's reign. 95 Asclepas had cleared himself by producing
the proceedings of the trial 'which were carried out in Antioch in the
presence of his enemies and ofEusebius from Caesarea, and from the
expressed opinions of the bishops who were judging him and showed
that he was innocent' 96 The leaders of the opposite party after the
death of the two Eusebii are named, Theodore, Narcissus, Stephen,
George (Laodicea), Akakius, Menophantes, Ursacius and Valens;
they are suitably reviled, and the Encyclical goes on formally to
expose and excommunicate Gregory of Alexandria, Basil of Ancyra,
Quintianus of Gaza and the heads of the opposite party already
mentioned. 97
Next follows the Profession of Faith of these Westerners. It is
particularly significant and must be given in full: 98
text, Bodleianus Allet. E4 (18th cent. X (BI» and Bodleianus Allet. Ell (14th cent.
XIA), printed (in Greek) in 'Das Glaubenbekenntnis def HOmOQllSial!-er vO,n
Sardica', Schwartz had discussed this document most illuminatingly in 'Ober dte
Sammlung des Cod. Veronensis LX' (1936) 1-23. For a full discussion of the origin,
history and significance of the MS from which the Collection of Theodosius is
taken, see Telfer 'The Codex Verona LX (58)' 169-246. The Synodical Letter is
very briefly summarised by Sozomenus HE 111.12.5.
9JHiiary Coll. Ar. BII (1)1-3(105-1 r). At 3{I 1I) Theognis ofNicaea (1'heognitus)
is accused of having forged letters to discredit Athanasius and Marcellus. which
deceived Constantine. cf. above. p. 277 where the charge of forgery applies to the
case of Asclepas.
"Ibid. S(lll-I7).
95
6(117-19).
'66(118).
9'7(119)-8(12.4): Athanasius apparently had not realized that Gregory was in fact
excommunicated; see above. P.243.
98For the text tramlated here. see above n 94. Hahn printed Theodorec's version
300
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
(I) 'We disqualify and extrude from the catholic church those who
assert that Christ is indeed God, (2) but that he is not true God, that he
is Son, but not true Son; that he is begotten and at the same time has
come into existence (YEVVTJtO~ liJ,1a Kai 'Y£vTJt6~); for this is the way in
which they regularly interpret "begotten", professing, as we have said
above, that "begotten" is "having come into existence" (to
Y8Y8VV1111'VOV y8Vl)].lEVOV Eemv); [and that though Christ has existed
before the ages they assign to him a beginning and an end which he has
not in time but before all time]. (3) And recently two adders have been
born from the Arian asp, Valens and Ursacius. who declare and state,
without equivocation, though they call themselves Christian, that the
Logos and the Spirit was pierced and wounded and died and rose
again, and (what the heretical rabble likes to claim) that the hypostases
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit are distinct
(Bw'l'6pou,) and are separate (1C8XCOP'''~'v'',), (4) But we have
received and have been taught this (tradition), we have this catholic
and apostolic tradition: that there is one hypostasis, which the heretics
(also) call ousia, of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
And if anyone asks, "What is the hypostasis of the Son?", it is
obviously that which is of the sole Father. We confess that neither the
Father ever existed without the Son nor the Son without the Spirit nor
ever could [text corrupt hereJ. The witness of the Son himself is Un
I4:rO] and Un 10:30]. (5) None of us denies the term "begotten" (... )
but begotten in what circumstances? (do we say), the artificer of
archangels and angels and the world and the human race was begotten
along with absolutely everything else which is called visible and
invisible, because the text runs [Wisd 7:22] and Un 1:3]? For he could
never have received beginning of existence, for the Logos of God exists
eternally and has no beginning, nOr does he undergo an end. (6) We
do not say that the Father is the Son, nor again that the Son is Father.
Butthe Father is Father and the Son (is) Son of the Father. We confess
that the Son is the power (B6v,,~IV) of the Father. We confess the
< h > e is the Logos of God the Father, beside whom there is no other,
and the Logos is true God and Wisdom and Power. We have handed
down that he is true Son, but we do not name him Son as other sons
are named, because they are named sons either by adoption or because
they have been born again or because they deserve (the name), not
because of the single hypostasis, which is that of the Father and of the
Son. (7) We confess that he is Only-begotten and First-born; but the
Logos is Only-begotten since he always was and is in the Father, but
in Greek (Symbole 188-190. §I57). but his text is not as good as Loafs'
reconstruction. I have placed square brackets round words at poihts where Loofs
does not think that we can restore the text with confidence.
30 1
\ Period of Confusion
\ Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (;4 J -349)
th ter~"\mt-born" applies to (lilUcptp£l) his humanity (t<l> uv9pcilltcp)
an to t new creation, because he is also first-born from the dead.
e co ess that there is onc God, we confess one ?odhead of Father
/ "S (8) And nobody denies that the Father somehow
-~- an~ate~~han the Son. not because of another hyp~stasis ?or because of
15
e unacquainted with the theology ofOrigen and have no conception of
Ilf , d·"'erence but because the name of Father Itself IS gre~ter than
any Iw , t t
. . they
·'Son". (9) This is their blasphemous and corrupt mterpre a Ion.
contend that he said Un 1O:30J because of the agreement ~nd harmo~y.
We who are catholics condemn this silly and wretched Idea of thel~s.
Just as mortal men when they begin to differ, :o~front each other m
their disputes and then again return to reconcIlIatIOn, so they sa~ that
differences and disputes could exist between God the Fathe~ almIghty
and the Son, which is altogether absurd eith~r tOr thmk or to
. t (10) But we believe and affirm and so thmk, that he uttered
ro~~ . hh . three ousiai he concluded that ousia and hypostasis were synonymous,
On 10:301 with his sacred voice because of the um~y oft e ypostasls,
which is a single one of Father and of Son. T~lS we have ~lways
believed that he reigns without beginning and WIthout end wIth.the
Father a~d that his kingdom has neither term (Xp6vov) nor declme,
because what exists eternally has neither begun to eXIst nor can
decline. (II) We believe in and hand down the Comforter the Holy
Spirit which the Lord promised and sent to us. And we beheve that he
was s;nt. And he (the Spirit) did not suffer, but the man whom he put
on, whom he assumed from the Virgin Mary, the ~an who was
ca·pable of suffering, because man is mortal but Go~ Imm~rta~. We
believe that he rose again the third day, and God d,d not nse m the
man but the man in God, (the man) whom he also offered to the
Fath~r as his gift, whom he had freed. We believe that at a pr0t:er an~
determined time he willjudge all men and all causes. (12) Such IS th~Ir
folly and their mind is blinded by so thick a darkness that they cannot
see the light of truth. They do not understand the words of the text On
17"21.J Itlscear
· I why "one" (is said) , because the apostles have
re~eived the Holy Spirit of God, but not however t~at they
themselves were Spirit nor any of them was Logos ~r. WIsdom or
Power nor was any only-begotten On 17:21]. B~t ,the dlv~ne .utterance
carefully distinguished: "they may be one in us' ,It says; It dId not say
" we are one I and the Father"; but the disciples are linked and
u~~ted among ~hemselves
by their confession of faith, s~
that they
could be one in grace and worship of God the Father and ill the peace
(cruYXroPtlcrEl) and love of our Lord and Saviour'.
Several interesting points are to be noted in this piece of theology.
The authors are determined to refute what they see as the mam errDrs
of Arianism, and it is worth noting that their reference to the teachmg
302
of Ursacius and Valens «3)) shows that these two reproduced the
regular Arian teaching about the Son suffering as God and not only as
man. Clearly the framers of this profession of faith are Wholly
(ltOtE)
the distinction between hypostasis and ousia. They think that
whenever the Eastern theologians use the word hypostasis they mean
'substance', and in fact the Latin version in Turner's EOMIA
invariably translates hypostasis as substantia. This alone should dispose
of the idea that Ossius, who certainly had a hand in producing this
document, was the person to whom Calcidius dedicated this book,
and was learned in Greek philosophical terms; and it confirms the
99
conjecture that when he heard Narcissus state that he confessed
and that they always meant 'substance'. And indeed the anathema of
N reproduces this view. It is remarkable, however, that this
document distinguishes, for the first time in the controversy,
between gennetos and genetos, and here at least an advance in
understanding the subject of the controversy can be noted ((2)). Most
significant of all, however, is the fact that the writers of this
profession of faith have no word for what was later to be called
'Person' in a Trinitarian context, and in fact their thought upon the
subject is so confused that one can understand why they gave their
opponents the impression that they were Sabellians. The Son, they
are sure, is not the same as the Father and in some not very clear way is
less than he. But they do not know how he is distinct, and it is hard to
avoid the impression that the Incarnation consisted of the Spirit
taking a body which did the suffering, and that the Son is not
distinguishable from the Spirit ((3)); (they hold that ((II)) the Spirit
(toiho, not UOt6<;) put on the man who suffered, though the Arians
teach that the Spirit suffered the Pa,ssion). This is the first lengthy
Western statement about the subject of the controversy. It makes
clear how little comprehension the Western theologians had of the
background and history ofEastern theological thought. Whether the
profession is influenced by Marcellus or not carmot easily be
determined. The Greek expression olacptpBl ('applies to', Latin
adtinet) is used by Marcellus of the Incarnation and the use
occasionally of 'God Almighty' rather than Father recalls
Marcellus.'oo But there is a direct denial of Marcellus' doctrine about
99S ee above, PP.45 and lSD-I.
IOOSO Gericke Marcellus 18.
30 3
 ~/ Period of Confusion
the reign!~f Christ and no suggestion that the Son only came into
existenc4 at the Incarnation. though the reference to the humamty of
Christ as the Only-begotten ((7)) is suspicious. Gericke's statement
that the document represents 'normal homoousian theology' as
found in Rome (Julius). in Spain (Ossius) and in Antioch.
(Marcellus)'o, is absurd. Julius was not present. We have no re~son to
think that Ossius represented a recognizable school of Spamsh (or
even of Western) theology. and Marcellus qnnot plausibly be
connected with an hypothetical Antiochene tradition of thought.
Loofs saw the document as an official attempt. fostered by OSSIUS and
Protogenes and accepted by the Western bishops. to produce. with
the aid of Marcellus' theology. an interpretation of N which would
satisfy the Westerners and oppose the Easterners. • 02 Th"IS IS perhaps
the nearest we can come to classifying it. Zeiller·0 3 and Declercq'o,
find the profession of faith gravely embarrassing. both because it
appears to commit the Western church to a form of Sabelhamsm.
approved or at least not reproved by the Pope. and by a Co,,:ncil
which had also passed canons so congemal to later Ultramontamsm.
and also because Athanasius. their paragon. in 362 violently demed
that the Council ofSerdica had produced any such statement. though
he certainly knew that it had.'o s A final count against thi~ document
is that. in the words of Kopecek. 'It (the Western Councd) ISsued an
101[bid. 19. .
ca
I02S
ee his 'Das Glaubenbekenntnis der Homousianer von Sardi .' 37-9·
I030 rigines 240 n I and 241.
I040ssius 365--"71. . Serdica is. however. of rather more interest. They beg the Emperor
lOS Achanasius Tomus ad Antiochenos 5 and 10. See above, pp. 244-5· Gwatkm (SA
724-7) can b.elieve Athanasius' denials. Few lacer scholars can: There can be no
doubt that Ossius and Proto genes were the authors (or mam authors) of t?e
statement see Sozomenus HE III.I2.6 and Turner EOMIA 644· AthanaSlus
admitted iliac a 'broadsheet' (1tlt'taKlov) had been circulated, but denied that it ~ad
any significance. Hilary omits the creed from his version ofth~ Westerns' Encychcal
in ColI. Ar. Scheidweiler and Tetz (see Tetz 'Zur Theolog1e des Mar~eIlus v?n
Ankyra' III. 171, 188 n 2 12) observe. that l~ter Marcellans (perhaps. UnIting With
continuing Eustathians (Paulinians) in Antioch) knew, and used this .cre~d. And
Telfer conjectured that Aetius of Thessalonica and his suc~essor Achohus Ulvested
the Creed ofSerdica with peculiar importance as representmg Western orthodoxy
from which Pope Liberius had fallen ('Codex Verona LX (58)' 198""'9). Declercq
maintains simultaneously that Ossius had only an indirect influenc~ on the formula
and that its original language was Latin, not Greek, theses whl~h are scarcely
compatible. Harnack had called it 'the most unambiguous expression of Western
thought on the subject' of the Trinity (Lehrbuch der D~gmengeschic~t~ 5th ed 11. 2 46 n,
quoted by Kelly Early Christian Creeds 277). Kelly himself calls It an extreme a~d
highly provocative statement' and agrees that it did form part of the official
30 4
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
encyclical which defined Arianism so broadly that nearly every
easterner who had ever heard of Origen was considered Arian." 06
The Letter sent by the Western bishops ofSerdica to Julius is of no
great importance. because it is mainly concerned with a summary of
the Council's Encyclical. without giving its profession of faith.'o,
Ossius (ab Spania Cordobensi. which suggests that he was still in
control of the see of Cordova) signs first. followed by sixty others.
Several bishops came from the Balkan provinces and from Italy. but
apparently only one from the Gauls. Verissimus a Gallia de Lugduno.
The letters of Athanasius to the clergy of Alexandria and to the
Churches of the Mareotis consist almost wholly of uruimited abuse of
his opponents. especially of Gregory in Alexandria. who. he alleges •
was not condemned and excommunicated at Serdica, to Athanasius'
secret disgust. The letter sent by Ossius and Protogenes to Julius was
simply a covering letter for their despatching to him of the Encyclical
of the Western bishops. The only point of interest in it is that they
describe the formula with which the Encyclical ends as simply a
justification and clarification of the creed ofNicaea.' 08 Had this letter
come into the hands of an Eastern theologian it would only have
confirmed his suspicion that N was of a dangerously Sabellian
tendency. The other letters of the Western bishops at Serdica consist
of much the same material as those of Athanasius. that is plentiful
abuse. several allegations of atrocities committed by their opponents.
and regular treatment of those opponents as if they were Arians to a
man.'09 The Letter qf the Western Bishops to Constantius sent from
to let the people of each see choose their own bishop (a measure
which wotild not have pleased either Western or Eastern theologians
had it been applied to Photinus); they do not want Arian bishops
appointed. They ask that those who were unjustly exiled should be
recalled. and they mention as containing particularly dangerous
heresies works written by the two Eusebii. Narcissus. Theodore.
Stephen, Akakius. Menophantus. and by 'those two inexperienced
Encyclical (op. cit. 278). Declercq's defence ofOssius here (op. cit. 371-6) is very
la~e: A~I that he .can say in response to the remarks of Harnack and Kelly is that the
Trlmty IS mysteriOus anyway (376). See also Prestige CPT 182, Sellers Eustathius 58;
Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 145-6; Klein Constantius II 49-51.
I06History 85.
'''Hilary Coli. AT. BlI(2)(126-J9).
I08Turncr EOMIA 1.644.
I09For the sources of these letters, see p. 299.
305
 Period of Confusion
. d V I '110 Almost
and outrageous young men, UrsaCIUS an a ens. . .
nothing written by these last twO has come down ~o us, but It IS
interesting to note that they were not simply eccleSlastlcal power-
seekers but had entered into the field of th.eologlcal dISpute on a
clear! Arian side.' 11 . .
So :nded the Council ofSerdica. '12 Intended as a means ofhealmg
a dangerous rift which was developing between the Eastern and
Western Church, it succeeded only in widening that nft to an
a parenti y unbridgeable extent. It revealed how little elther stde
k~ew of the theology of the other. It exasperated dangerou.sly bot~
the theological and the canonical disputes. Were the deCISIOns 0
either side to be taken seriousl y, it meant that elther the leaders of the
Western or those of the Eastern Church were. dep~sed and
excommunicated and that either the East was steeped m Anamsm or
the West in Sabellianism. In fact the two sides were not as !ar apart
theologically, and neither side was as monochrome m ItS behef, as the
utterances of the Council would lead the reader of them to expect.
And, as events were soon to show some sort of reconcihatlOn was
I suggesting compromise or concession.
possible.
4. Period of Reconciliation
Clearly, after Serdica the leaders of both sides thought ~at they had
gone too far, and were shocked that what had been mtended as a
110Hilary Liber ad Constantium I, printed as an Appendix by Feder to the
Collectanea Antiariana. 181-4. . hI' 1 .' 'n the
ltlWe ha~e already seen a reference to thelf t eo oglca opmlOn,s ~n '
et son Temps 86, 90-1, calls attentIon t~ the fae: tJ:at V. an
0
Jud
profession offaith of the Western ~ishops. See above, p. 3 I. M ~U:;!~;a b'o~~e
. I •
though he connects it with the Counell of Anmmum. h C
1121 do not here enter into the complex and v,exed qu~stion of t e . anons
produced by this Western Council of Serdica, For mformatlon on ~~~ s~Ject '~if
Turner 'Genuineness of the Sardican Canons.' and H,ess The Cano~ oJ~:rk ~~nt~e~e
Sardiea It is almost impossible to doubt their genumeness afithter t b'
two m~n; Hess in particular gives a comprehensive~urvey of, e su ~ect,.an sows
d h
. -135) how well they fit the situation which prevaded at Ser<i1ca. On the
~Ji'c~t~ ?~bject of the appeal to the see of Rome ahllowed by the~t bano~:~cJ:~~u~ ~~d
think it is clear that an appeal was a110wed. (per aps prompte y w. . I
) b U t that Julius was not gIVen umversa
said in his Letter after t he Syno d a fR orne. h Politique et TMoJogie 16'{8, Klein Constantius II 5 1-2 {who gives many details of the
a ellate ·urisdiction. but the power of deciding in certain ~rc.u.rnstances ow an
a~~eal sh~1l be dealt with, See also Zeillcr Origines 243-56: Pletrl 111 PTAA 113-14·
For the text of thc canons, see Turner EOMIA I 45-8 3.
306
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (34'-349)
process of reconciliation had turned into an explosion. Both sides
were ready for peace feelers. The first sign of this was the arrival in
Antioch at Easter-time in 344, the Easter after the Council ofSerdica,
of a Western delegation consisting of two bishops, Euphrates or
Euphratas bishop of Cologne, and Vincentius bishop of Capua; the
latter was probably a representative, formal or informal, of Julius.
This visit unfortunately proved abortive owing to the mischief-
making proclivity of Stephen bishop of Antioch. He attempted to
ensnare Euphrates in a false charge of fornication by planting a
prostitute in his bedroom. The plot miscarried and the instigator of it
was exposed. Stephen was deposed from his see and defrocked.
Leontius was chosen bishop in his place. ll3 The two Western bishops
returned home in understandable umbrage. It is highly likely that
when Constantius heard of this he began for the first time to doubt
whether the ecclesiastics whom he had hitherto relied upon to give
him guidance in theological alfairs were as reliable as he had thought
them to be, and to incline more readily to listen to Western voices
The chief of these Western voices was that of his fellow-Emperor
Constans. Undoubtedly Constans was at this point pressing his
brother strongly to recall Athanasius to his see of Alexandria. Five
ancient church historians are unanimous about this, and they even go
so far as to say that Constans threatened war ifConstantius would not
acquiesce. ll4 Socrates and Philostorgius give us alleged extracts from
threatening letters written to Constantius by Constans. Schwartz
regarded these extracts as spurious.'15 and though they have been
accepted as genuine by recent scholars such as Simonetti, it is dilftcult
to believe that Constans would have been ready to plunge the Empire
into civil war, no matter how irresponsible he may have been, for the
sake of the restoration ofa few bishops. The fact that Athanasius, who
113Athanasius HA II.20; Theodoret HE 11.9.1-10.2. Neither Sozornenus nor
Socrates mention the incident. See Gwatkin SA 149; Simonetti Crisi 188-9.
114S ocrates HE 11.22,23; SozomenusIII.2o. I; Philostorgius llI, 12; Theodoret HE
11.8·54, 55; Rufinus HE X.20. Philostorgius alleges that Athanasius had bribed
E~stathius, the comes privatarum rerum of Cons tans. to persuade the Emperor to make
thiS threat, but his account is confused because he appears to think that at this time
George. not Gregory. was Athanasius' rival at Alexandria, See also Rusche. in
correspondence between the brothers). For the whole period, see Simonetti Crisi
I89-201; Klein Constanlius 1179-80.
11S'ZUf Kirchengeschichte' 139.
307
 of Confusion
was not b ckwaid in me ion' g facts which told in his favour, does
not mentio this threat e. against its authenticity. But Constans did
indeed press .s-br er to restore Athanas~~s. Constantius was
preoccupied with e Persian King Shapur hImself, was not m a
position to refuse his importunity, and agreed to recall AthanaslU~.
Another reason hich must have weighed with Constantlus In hIS
decision to recall Athanasius was that Gregory, his rival bishop of
Alexandria had failed owing to illness to attend the Council of
Serdica and was probably by 344 known to be mortally ill.. He died
on June 26th 345."6 Athanasius gives the text of three letters WrItten
to him by Constantius in flattering terms requesting him .to retur~ to
his see, two from the Emperor to the people of AlexandrIa preparIng
them for the return of Athanasius, one to an Egyptian offiCIal
requiring him to make the necessary preparation and a letter from
Julius of Rome to the Church of Alexandria also preparing them for
A thanasius' return. 11 7
Athanasius was slow in acting on the invitation. After the Council
of Serdica, he had visited Trier and stayed in Naissus with its bishop
Gaudentius. He spent Easter 344 there, and we know that he was In
Aquileia, with its bishop Fortunatianus, for the Easter of 345· He
probably stayed at Petavium in the interval."· It was at AqUllela that
1I9
he received the first summons from Constantius to return. He
made a very slow journey back. He was anxious to secure by
diplomatic negotiations with the Emperor that his followers in
Alexandria should receive amnesty and restitution"'o He also may
have doubted the good faith ofConstantius. Athanasius at one point
wrote of Constantius 'He thought that I was luke-warm about
returning liecause I was alarmed by the events which had happened in
the past"2' - probably the bad treatment meted out to Athanasius'
116Athanasius HA.4.1-3(I94) and Opitz's note in lac.; Schwartz 'Zur
Kirchengeschichte' 139-40; Martin Histoire 'Akephale' 76.
117HA 51.1-8(13.-133); 52.1-53.6(133. 134); 54.1-55-7(136); 56.1-3(1)6);
57.1-'7(136, 137). all reproduced in Socrates HE Il.23· . .
118S ee his Apol. ad Const. 3.3(280) and the notes of Opitz In lac., and 3. and see
Zeiller, Origines 261-2. . .
1190pitz. note on HA 21.1-3(194) believes that negotla~lOns, for AthanaslUs
return began as early as 344. but Schwartz ('Zur Kirchengeschlchte I.39-14~) seems
to have more probability on his side when he says that Constantlus waIted for
Gregory to die before opening communication with Athanasius.
120S 0 Schwartz, op. cit. 140-1.
121 HA 21.1 (194) £V6J.ll~& 'Yap Ola 'tov 1P6~ov 'tOW 1tpo'tE:Prov Y&V0J.lEvrov 6J. 1'Y ro p&iv J.l&
1t&pi 'tliv 81t('lVOOOV.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (;4'-349)
friends by the followers of Gregory. We know that by 346 he had not
yet returned to Alexandria, because in a letter written in preparation
for Easter 347 to his flock he says that he expects to celebrate Easter
among them in 347.'22 He probably met Constantius in Antioch
some time in 345, and in the same year attended a small council held
by Maximus ofJerusalem which purported to undo the work of the
Council of Tyre of 335 by acquitting Athanasius of the charges on
which he had been convicted ten years before.'2' But this
comparatively minor gathering could scarcely be regarded as capable
of seriously annulling the decisions of Tyre.
In other parts of the church, the prevailing temper was also one of
reconciliation. The Council of Antioch which had deposed Stephen
and elected Leontius as bishop of Antioch in 344 also produced a
creed, which was conveyed to the Western church by a delegation of
Eastern bishops, Eudoxius of Germanicia, Macedonius of
Mopsuestia, Demophilus of Beroea and Martyrius of an unknown
see who arrived in Milan where a council was sitting in 345. 124 The
creed which was brought on this occasion was that universally
known as the Macrostich (Eethesis Maerostiehos, 'Long-Liner'
Manifesto').'25 The first part is much the same as, if not identical
with, the IVth Antiochene Creed of 34' (the creed produced some
time after the other three and later sent to Constans, see above
pp. 291-2). To the anathemas of that creed, however, it adds a few
more, and then spends the rest of this very long document explaining
why further views are ruled out. The added anathemas are against
those who say;
'that there are three gods. or that Christ is not God, or that neither
Christ nor the Son of God existed before the ages, or that the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit are the same, or that the Son is unbegotten. or
that the Father did not beget the Son either by his counsel or by his
WiU'.126
122Festal Letter XI (PC 26:1429.8) Lefort deest. The same letter (1430:10) makes it
clear that Arsenius has now made his peace with Athanasius; he has been made
bishop of Hypesala and has 'returned to peace with the church'. Athanasius reached
Alexandria in fact on October 21st 346. He was to remain relatively undisturbed
. . there for ten years - the longest period of uninterrupted residence in his see that he
was ever to enjoy.
123Socrates HE iI.24; see Klein Constantius II 80.
124Athanasius De Syn. 26.rff(251).
125Socrates HE 11.19 (summarized Sozomenus HE III. I I), Athanasius De Syn. 26,
printed in Hahn Symbole 192--6 (§159); the divisions of the text marked by Roman
figures are these of Hahn, and the Arabic figures those of Hahn's pages.
126Hahn 11(192).
30 9
·... ~"J
/'\ Period of Confusion
/~app
) ded explanation can be divided into seven parts:
S~n non-exis.te~ce (t~
It is t.afe either to say that the is from OIlIC
6vtd,v), because the Scriptures do not say so; nO,r that he IS from ~ome
di1fe~ent underlying hypostasis from the Father, but we defme hIm as
'genuinely begotten from God alone'. Only the Father of Chnst 15
unbegotten and unbeginning. 'But ~e do not take, the dan?erous
course of declaring that there was a tIme when he dld not eXlst and
envisage an interval of time preceding him,. but only Godwho begot
him timelessly' (preceded him). Though tlm~S and age~ were made
through the Son we must not think of hIm as co-umnltlated and co-
unbegotten' «J\)vavIlPXov ICal 'lUvaYEVV1]tov) with the Father. No
father and son can seriously be said to be co-ummuated and co-
ingenerate. The Fathe'[ begat the Son in, a manner inaccessibl~ and
incomprehensible (cl.v&<pIICtro<; ICal cl.ICata""lttro<;), and the Father 15 the
Son's origin (apx1\).'27 We do assert 'three Objects and three Persons'
(tpla ltpay~ata ICal tpla ltp6aroxa), but not three gods. The sole self-
sufficient (aotott..,,<;) and un-begotten and invisible God is one only,
the Father of the Only-begotten, who alone has being and graciously
gives being to other things. This is not to deny that Chnst 15 God, and
we reject the doctrine of Paul of Samos ata that he became God aft~r
the Incarnation and was till then a mere man. Even though he IS
subordinated (U1l0tEtaICtat) to the Father, still he is God 'acco~ding to
his perfect and true nature' (<pucstv).128 The next two semons are
occupied with rejecting the views (or what were thought to be the
views) of Marcellus and Photinus, who are mentioned by na~e.l~9
Next comes a rejection of the doctrine of pe?ple called Sabellians m
the East but 'Patripassians' (Ilatpoltaa",avol) m the West, that there IS
only one Object (1lpay~a) and Person (ltp6a':'ltov), but three
names. 130 The idea is next rejected that the Father dId not produce the
Son by h.tention and will, but that 'necessity devoid of plan or choice'
(cl.VUY1C1]V cl.pou""tOV Kal a1lpoa(pEtov) must be attributed to God.
This is against generally accepted ideas (KOtvU~&VV01.at. almost 'natural
theology'), and against the Scriptures, espeCIally Pro; 8:22. But the
Son was not created as other 'creatures and products (KtiaJ.1U'tU Kat
n0111J.1U'tU) are produced; he cannot be compared with them, because
'the only-begotten Son is begotten sale and solely'. 131 Finally, strong
emphasis is laid on the union of the Father and the Son, whIch IS still
1271I1(193).
I28IV(193).
I,.V, VI(I93-4).
130VII(I9~).
IJlVIII(194-S),
310
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (34 1-349)
called 'harmony' (a"~<provia) and 'conjunction' (a"va<ptla). There is
no space or distance between them 'for we believe that they are joined
without meqiation and without interval to each other and exist
inseparable from each other, the Father receiving the whole Son into
his bosom, and the Son being dependent upon and clinging to the
Father and alone continually reclining upon the Father's breast'. They
also believe in the Trinity, that is in God the Father, and God the Son.
The Son is described as 'subordinated' (uno't£'tuYJ.18VOU) to the Father,
and as granting the grace of the Holy Spirit. And the statement ends
with an eirenic expression of conviction that East and West believe
alike. 132
This is an informative document as far as the theological position of
the school of thought dominant at Antioch goes. It is remarkable for
firmly refusing Origenist thought. The doctrine of the eternal
generation of the Son is carefully avoided. There is no mention of
three hypostases, but the impression is given (we can say no more) that
there is only one. On the other hand, the word ousia does not once
appear. The subordination of the Son is strongly affirmed. The
authors clearly wish to avoid blatantly Arian doctrine, but experience
difficulty in finding the proper terms in which to do so within the
limits of refusing the eternal generation, insisting upon the Son's
subordination.and rejecting the consubstantiality of Father and Son.
They obviously think that the homoousios of Nicaea implies a
production of the Son from the Father by a kind of blind necessity.
They use the word ltp6aroxov (,Person') more than once, and also
pragma ('object') and have in this respect begun to refine a little their
Trinitarian vocabulary. But their very scanty treatment of the Holy
Spirit, whom they only include in the Trinity by courtesy of the Son,
and their inability to say whether the Son originated in time or not,
mark them as the heirs of the thought ofEusebius of Caesarea. They
clearly wish in defining the unity of Father and Son to approximate as
closely as possible to the position of the bishops of the West without
falling into the suspicion of Sabellianism which hung around the one
Western theological statement which had appeared since the
controversy began, the Formula accompanying the Encyclical of the
Western bishops at Serdica.'33 The men who wrote the Macrostich
"'IX(19S-6).
133For opinions of the Macrostich. see Harnack History IV.69-7o; Loafs
'Arianismus' 28; Meslin, Les Ariens 264--6; Kopecek History 87-95. Kopecek thinks
that the Macrostich was partly designed to answer the arguments of Athanasius in
Or. con Ar. I. This is possible. but not certain.
3[[

/ ~C
•• Period of Confosion d h D d
C
. ./ ···W re no of the same school as those who produce t e e Icatlon
\~~ ~iOC
. \ Cr ed i 341, but were of those who stayed on rather longer in
.. to publish the fourth creed, a more drastic statement. But
/ .... . they e, from that position, trying to make all the conceSSIons to the
/ w¢it that they can. Some have seen in the Macrostich the hand of the
n{wly-appointed bishop of Antioch, LeontlUs, the patron of AetlUs.
He appears to have been of a tolerant disposition: Sozomenus relates
an anecdote about him which has the ring of truth. Leontlus once
touched his head whose hair was white with age, and said, 'When this
snow melts, there will be plenty of mud'. 134 Perhaps he realized that
the apparent homogeneity of the Eastern Church's theology could
not last much longer.
The deputation which in 345 brought the Macrostich to Milan did
not succeed in its aim of reconciliation. The CouncIl of MIlan
condemned the doctrine ofPhotinus (though it was unable to depose
him) and gave audience to the Antiochenes with their creed. Before
rhe Council would consider the Macrostich, however, they
demanded that the Eastern bishops should condemn Arius. The
Eastern delegation refused to do this, not assuredly because they were
unwilling to condemn Arius, but because they thought it insulting to
be suspected and arraigned in this way. They returned to AntIoch,
their purpose unaccomplished. l35 Meanwhile the opponents of
Athanasius had gathered at Antioch and protested agamst hIS
readmission to his see. It is possible that this was the point at which
George, a learned Cappadocian, friend of the (later) Caesar Gallus
was chosen as bishop of Alexandria to replace Athanasius (when and
if he could), but this is not likely.130 Though George was to cause
Athanasius'plenty of trouble later, before he met his bizarre end, at
the moment he and his supporters lacked imperial support.
Constantius was pursuing a policy of reconciliation, when he had
time to tllrn his attention to ecclesiastical affairs, and the enemies of
Athanasius were powerless.
134HE UI.20.9.
13SHilary Coil. Ar. B 11.4(142-3); the Letter Obsecro of Liberius (see below
p. 33 8); Athanasius De Syn. 26. Photinushad by now been c~ndemned and deposed
(in intention only) twice, once at Antioch 344. once at MIlan 345·
136Sozomenus HE IV.S.Jf. (probably relying on Sabinus of Heraclea). For the
reasons for dating this gathering to 346 or 347 see Klein Constantius ii 81, 82 (and n 2,
82); cr. Kopccek History 103-5. For the date of George's consecration, see below
p. J 2 5·
3 12
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase One (341-349)
•
I
Though the Eastern and Western bishops were unable to agree on
positive Trinitarian doctrine, they we.re able to combine in
condemning the egregious Photinus. He was condemned, not only at
Milan in 345, but also at another council in Milan in 347, and at a
council in the same year, 347, or in 348, held in Sirmium. 137 At the
councils of Milan, Valens and Ursacius, hitherto banner-bearers of
the extreme anti-Nicene cause, reversed their policy, condemned
Arius and expressed their willingness to communicate with
Athanasius. Nothing could indicate more clearly that the watch-
word at this period was Reconciliation, when these two expert
students of the imperial wind began to Veer towards the pro-Nicene
side.'" They wrote a letter to this Council which has not survived
but which is referred to in a later letter which they wrote to the
bishop of Rome, Julius. All that they did was to withdraw their
opposition to and accusations against Athanasius, condemn Arius, his
doctrine and disciples, and write a polite and purely formal letter to
Athanasius, making no mention of doctrine at all. They were not
required to affirm the homoousios. This was not a 'return to
communion with Rome'. nor an 'abjuration of their errors' nor 'a
restoration of their churches to them'. They had never been deprived
of their sees. 139 The Council ofSirmium of 347 or 348 was held in the
presence of Constantius, who happened to be passing through the
town. Its formula offaith was so vague as to be not worth noticing. It
noted with satisfaction Milan's condemnation ofPhotinus in 347, but
remarked upon Marcellus' association with this heretic, and called
upon Athanasius to dissociate himself from Marcellus. This was the
furthest point reached in the attempt by Constantius to bring about
137The precise chronology of the councils which condemned Photinus is
confused and has never been exactly established. He was to be condemned at one
more ·council yet (see below PP.325-6). For the chronology of the affair see
Harnack History IV.7D--2; Loofs 'Arianismus' 28; Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte'
144-5; Zeiller Origines 262-5; MesHn Les Ariens 264-8; Simonetti Crisi 202-3.
138Because of the confusion in the available sources, it is not clear when precisely
they recanted. AU we know for sure is that they did so in two stages. In 345 (Milan)
and 347 (also Milan). Or in 347 {Milan) and 351 (Sirmium)? It seems rather more
likely that the two councils of Milan in 345 and 347 witnessed their volle face. The
actual recantation is to be found in Hilary CoIl. Ar. B II 6 and 8 (143, 144) (Greek Cr.
Athanasius Apol. Sec. 58). For this period generally our sources are Athanasius Apol.
Sec. 2, 58, 88; HA 26, 44 (Latin Hilary Coil. Ar. BlI.6-8 (14J-4»: Hilary Coil. Ar.
BI1.7(144), 9(1¢-50); Socrates HE 11.29; Sozomenus HE IV.6.ltf. The Council of
Milan 347 was held in Constans' presence.
13950 Meslin us Ariens 266-8, convincingly.
313
 Period of Confusion

unity in tl)e church by sweet reasonablene~s. When a little later events

were to play into his hands, he would try the alternative method of
coerClon.
II

Attempts at Creed-Making: Phase 2}

35 0 -357

I. Constantius II

We now enter a period of our account dominated by the figure of the

Emperor Constantius II, because there occurred in the year 350 a
political revolution which resulted within a few years in his being
undisputed master of the whole Roman Empire and alone
responsible for the policy exercised by the Roman government
towards the Christian church and its warring factions.
Constantius was born on August 7th 317, the second son of
Constantine by his second wife Fausta.' He had been named Caesar
in his infancy and had been entrusted by his father with various
military commands at an early age. When Constantine died in Ma y
337, none of his three sons was near him, but Constantius was the first
to reach Constantinople. The testamentary dispositions of the late
Emperor were disturbed by the massacre of two uncles of the three
Caesars, both of whom had been given some part of his Empire to
govern in Constantine's will, and of several cousins. Whether this
massacre took place by the act of the army without Constantius, in
order to prevent a multitude of Caesars competing against each other
and threatening civil war, or whether the army merely arrested the
victims and waited for Constantius' verdict about their fate, is quite
uncertain. Certainly Constantius made no effort to punish their
murderers. Even at his most complimentary in his Panegyric Julian
can only say: 'But he may perhaps have been compelled by
circumstances unwillingly to refrain from preventing others from
committing the crime'. 2 In his Letter to the Senate and People of Athens
1 Minervina, his first wife (if wife she was), an obscure figure, was mother of
Crispus.
2Panegyric 12(29).

3 14 31 5
 Period of Confusion
written from Sirmium in 361 when he was in open revolt against
Constantius, Julian spoke in a very different vein, directly blammg
him for the murders and alleging that Constantius was filled with
remorse for them and regarded his childlessness and his ill success m
the Persian wars as a punishment for them.' But Julian's judgment
was curiously defective, though his intellect was considerable;4 he
was much prejudiced against his cousin, to ~~~~e acts as a young man
of twenty suddenly laden with vast responslbihtles we should perhaps
give the benefit of the doubt. In September 337 the three Caesars,
Constantius II, Constantine II and Constans, had declared themselves
Augusti, and at Viminacium next year (338) they parcelled out the
Empire among themselves. Constantme II mherlted the GalliC,
British and Spanish provinces (residing chiefly in Trier); Constans
received the Pannonian, Italian and African provinces (making
Sirmium his Head Quarters), and Constantius controlled the dioceses
of Oriens, Asia, Pontus, and Egypt (livmg for the most part m
Antioch). The diocese of Thrace, including Constantinople, had
originally been allotted to Constans, who, as much the youngest of
the three brothers, was nominally under the tutelage of Constantme
II. But in 339/40, facmg attack from his brother to the West,
Constans entrusted the diocese of Thrace to Constantius.
Constantius had hitherto of necessity spent most of his career as
Augustus engaged in a Persian war, either staying in Antio.ch or
occupied in actually directing the military operatIOns. In hIS milItary
activity he appears to have been conscientious rather than bnlhant.
He won no resounding victory; he suffered no crushmg defeat. But m
the year 350 he was compelled to pay .attention to events m the
Western Empire. In that year MagnentlUs, a general of barbanan
ancestry in high command at Autun (Augustodunum) m GailIa
Lugdunensis I, where the Emperor Constans was at the time reSldmg,
engineered a coup d'etat in which his troops ha.led h.m as Emperor;
he succeeded in capturing and killing Constans, and by the end of the
'3(2'5, 2.6). . .. f h'
4Nobody who has read Julian's Misopogon can doubt the l~s[ablhty ,0 IS
judgment. This extraordinary effusion of the pagan Puri~an, pur~umg ~ pohc~ the
exact opposite of Disraeli's 'never apologise, n~ver expla~n', a satire which a,t times
breaks down into direct self-defence. laced With quotatJons from the clasSICS and
appeals to pagan gods, was the very last sort of statement which a Roman E~peror
should make and was least of all calcul:;ated to appeal to the people of Antioch. It
reads as if Jean Jacques Rousseau had written Queen Elizabeth I's speech to the
troops at Tilbury.
l1ttempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (350-357)
year had gamed control of the whole Western Empire which had
been ruled by Constans. He had no difficulty in suppressing an
attempt by Nepot.anus, a nephew of Constantine, to maintain
himself as Emperor in Rome. But he could not prevent Vetranio, in
command of the troops m the Pannonian diocese, from declaring
h.mselfEmperor. Constantius, occupied with defending the frontier
with Persia, was taken at a disadvantage. In this crisis he called on a
member of the Imperial family, Gallus, son of a brother of
Constantine, to assist him. He made him Caesar and left him in
charge of the prefecture of Oriens, at Antioch, under the supervision
of a praetorian prefect, while he himself moved westward to deal
with the usurper. By the end of 350 he had reached N aissus,having
succeeded in persuading Vetranio, whose conduct suggests a policy
of Slttmg on the fence until he saw the strength ofMagnentius and of
ConstantlUs, to abdicate and retire into private life. In the summer of
35' he ~as able to gam a decisive victory over the army of
MagnentlUs near Mursa, close to the river Drave in what was then
Lower Pannonia. Sulpicius Severus (Chronicle 11.38(91-2)) relates that
ConstantlUs remained in prayer in a church near the battlefield
during the engagement and that the news of victory was brought to
h.m by Valens, bishop ofMursa and a champion of the anti-Nicene
cause, in such a way as to suggest that Valens had received the news
by supernatural agency. Gibbon of course sneers at Constantius for
this unwarlike conduct. 5 But in his many military operations
elsewhere Constantius had not shown himself averse to danger nor
did he make any attempt to promote Valens thereafter, thou~h he
used hlm as an agent on more than one occasion.
Constantius passed the winter of 351/2 in Sirmium, and in 352 he
forced the passage of the Alps and drove Magnentius out of Aquileia,
wh.ch he had made his Head Quarters. Magnentius won a victory
agamst the forces of Constantius near Pavia, but was gradually
compelled to abandon the Italian and African provinces and to retreat
into Gaul. His desper~te attempts to raise money, supplies and troops
ahenated the provmc.als. He lost a decisive battle at the foot of Mt.
Seleucus inthe Cottian Alps, and in August 353 was compelled to
commlt sUlclde. Constantius was now in control of the whole
Roman Empire. For the next four years he remained in the West, for
5.Declj~e and Fall of the Roman Empire (cd. J.B. Bury) Vol.lI, 240. For a
conSideration of the effect of Magnentius' revolt, see Brennecke Hilarius von P.
65-'71.
3 17
 Period of Confusion
(
~
e most p rt making Milan his Head Quarters. He only once visited
ome, for a few weeks, in 357. The days were long past when Rome
wa the a inistrative centre of the Empire.
~
he ch racter ofConstantius has mostly been p~inted by historians
in ark lours. Gibbon regarded all Constantme s sons as weak and
_,_ egenelj"te. He accused Constantius particularly of c~uelty: :as the
timid are always cruel, the mmd of Constantms was maccess.ble to
mercy'." He described the execution of Gallus as adding 'a new crime
to the long list of unnatural murders which pollute the honour of the
house of Constantine.'? Harnack called Constantius 'an Oriental
despot" and said that in Milan he 'actually ruled the Church, but
with a brutal despotism'. Constantius has also been accused of
inconstancy of purpose, of changing his mind and his policy as every
new counsellor influenced him. Imperator mobilis (inconstant
Emperor) is the expression of Aminianus Marcellinus. 9 And of course
the ecclesiastical historians and writers generally in both ancient and
modern times have branded him as a full-blooded Arian determined
to persecute the pro-Nicene party out of existence and to stop at no
atrocity in doing so. In recent times only Richard Klein, in his
Constanti"s II und die Christliche Kirche has defended Constantius. He
has indeed made a good case for a re-assessment of Constantius,
though one gains the impression from his book that Constantius could
do no wrong. Klein has, however, been a vox clamantis in deserto.
One point can immediately be made about Constantius. He
cannot have been altogether without culture. In the ancient world he
had a considerable reputation as an orator, or at least as aspiring to be
an orator. When Gibbon says 'he was indifferently skilled in the arts
of rhetoriC','o he is unjust. We might dismiss Julian'S fulsome
compliments on Constantius' rhetorical power and skill in Panegyric
as mere flattery,l1 but Aurelius Victor, Socrates and Zosimus repeat
the compliment.' 2 And we can sympathize with the motives of
60 p. cit. Vol. II, 244.
?Ibid. 247.
8History IV, 63.
9Harnack History IV.73.nl. For inconstancy, see Hilary Lib. con. Const. PL
10:25. 26 (600, 601).
lOOp. cit. II, 237.
11 Panegyric 26(47-8); but still this is not completely insignificant. Even a
panegyrist does not compliment Nero on his domestic harmony nor Henry VIII on
his chastity. . 15S ee above, p. 242.
12Aurelius Victor (Epitome de Caesaribus ed. F. Plchlmayr, rev. R. Grundel,
Leipzig 1961) 42. I 8 jacundiae cupidus quam cum assequi tarditate ingenii non possel, aliis
3 18
!Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (;50-357)
Constantius in executing Gallus. Gallus during the years 250 to 254.
when he was left in charge of the East, had resented the presence of
Co~stantius' praetorian prefect, had made no headway in operations
agamst thePe.rSlans, and had proved himself at once independent,
feroCIOUs and mcompetent. He may even have been meditating that
treason agamst Constantius which his half-brother Julian later
succes~fully deployed. Even Julian admits his incapacity, and his
brutality. 13 What can be done with a failed and impenitent Caesar?l4
The ecclesiasti~al writers compile a list of atrocities for which they
behev~ C~nsta?tms to be responsible. Athanasius' Apologia de Fuga
and RlStona Ananorum are full of atrocity stories about the behaviour
of troops and officials in Egypt, sent by Constantius, in persecuting
those who were loyal to Athanasius' cause between 356 and 360.
Even allowing for exaggeration, we must accept that Constantius'
troops never had any hesitation in forcing their way into churches
and suppressing popular demonstrations ruthlessly. We must,
however, remember that the frightful riots in Constantinople in the
year 342 must have impressed strongly on Constantius' memory
what can happen if a mob demonstrating in some Christian cause is
allowed to get out of hand. And Constantius had some substantial
grounds for thinking that Athanasius was no ordinary doctrinaire
blShop supported by an ordinary crowd of adherents. In the eyes of
ConstantlUs, Athanasms had committed, or had come to the verge of
commmmg, high treason. He m.. y have believed that Athanasius had
incited Constans against his brother-Emperor. He had received a
deputation from Magnentius; Athanasius' protests about his
mnocence on this occasion ring hollow. is He had celebrated the
eucharist iri a church built by Constantius in Alexandria but not yet
consecrated, an act which was for various reasons at that time
thought to be a grave offence.'" The quite unexpected murder of
Constansand the swift initial success ofMagnentius must have given
Constantms a shock and made him uncertain as to what bishops who
had had any relations with the Western church he could trust.
invideba~; Zosim~s Historia Nova 1I.44f; Socrates HE 11.28 who represents him as
per~uadm~ by hiS oratory the troops at Sirmium to desert Vetranio (an episode
which Juhan makes the best of in Panegyric 25(46, 47)).
tJLetter to Athens 4 (217-8).
t4See Klein Constantius II 2lo-II and esp. n 76 (210).
t~Apol ad Const. 6-11; 14-18; and see Girardet, in PTAA 90 and Pietri ibid. 119;
OPitz on HA 29.1-2(198), and Klein Conslantius II 87-9.
31 9
 Period of Confusion
,I
Further, no Emperor could be expected to view with unconcern the
influen e-w~'ch Athanasius had gradually achieved within Egypt.
Hi ry in fine piece of rhetorical invective in his Liber contra
Cons antium 17 gives a list of Constantius' misdeeds: it is rumoured
that e caus .' some exiled bishops to wear on their foreheads labels
prod . m' g their condemnation; he waged war a~ain.st th~ see of
Alexa ria and against its officials, secular and ecclesIastical, III order
to p event Athanasius preaching Christ; he exiled nume.rous Western
--.__ ~lfuhops; he desecrated churches in Milan and eXIled Its bIshop; he
exiled Liberius, bishop of Rome (,you wretch, I do not know
whether you showed greater impiety in exiling him or in recalling
him');l. he committed various atrocities (not specified) in Toulouse.
This is not, all things considered, a very grievous indictment. Its very
mildness suggests that Hilary would have liked to rake up worse
charges, but could not. The Collectio Avellana gives us th~ highly
coloured atrocity-stories retailed by the Luclferans MaXlmmus and
Faustus. Constantius had forced Maximus bishop of Naples into
exile; the bishop was of a delicate constitution and, his health
shattered by the experience, he died in exile; another, Rufimanus,
was murdered even before he could be exiled:
'Epictetus. that cruel and grim bishop ofCentumc~llae, forced ?im to
run in front of his carriage, and while he was runnmg a long dIstance
his vital organs burst as a result and his blood poured out and he died.
The people of Naples in Campania witness to this, because there his
bloodstains drive out devils from the bodies of the sick, thanks of
course to the creed in defence of which he shed his blood' ,19
Saint Janu'lrius had his rival in those days. .'
Lucifer of Calaris is the most ferocious accuser of ConstantlUs. HIS
charges are so wild and so extravagant that it is difficult to make a
plausible selection. Constantius, he says, has 'initiated false
accusations, persecuted the worshippers of God, brought idolatry
into the church of God, cut the throats of those who believe in the
only Son of God by the agency of his soldiers.'20 He has compelled
orthodox bishops to communicate with Arians, wishing to
171 I(PL 10:587""""9).
180 te miserum qui nescio utrum maiore impietate reiegalleris quam remiseris (5 89);
Hilary is of course referring to the conditions under which Liberius was allowed to
return.
19Collectio Avellana 25-26(13).
20De Athanasio I.VlII(I6).
320
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (350-357)
contaminate them with his OWn sacrilege. 2' He has exiled Dionysius
bishop of Milan, who could not subscribe to Arian doctrines, though
he was willing to condemn Athanasius. 22 Constantius has
slaughtered large numbers of people in Alexandria. 23 He is keeping
Christians shut up in prison, is depriving them of their property,
driving them overseas, torturing them, murdering them. 2' Apart
from exam pies of bishops in the West being exiled for their beliefs,
the stories of actual outrage and violence referred to by Lucifer all
come from Egypt; no doubt he picked them up while he was in exile.
Against this indictment there can be set a fairly substantial body of
evidence suggesting that Constantius was, by the standard of the late
Roman Emperors, tolerant and even at times merciful. Julian in his
Panegyric picks out this characteristic to emphasize. He says that he
was 'milder than his father', 25 and that he 'rules more mildly and
more humanely than the other (emperors)' .26 Even later, when he is
under no necessity to flatter Constantius. he admits that he had a
reputation for mildness when he says that 'he was not by disposition
invariably mild, even though he appeared to be so to many'.27 Julian
notes the Emperor's compassion in sparing the little son of a certain
Silvanus who had had a very brief and unsuccessful career as a
pretender to imperial status'>· It is interesting to observe that when
the Senate at Rome received a copy ofJulian's Letter to the Senate and
People of Athens setting out his reasons for rebellion against
Constantius, they protested against his ungrateful treatment of his
be~efactor. Constantius' ~onduct did indeed rouse some pro-Nicene
wrIters, such as Athanasius and Ossius, to protest (as we shall see) that
the Emperor had no authority over the church, and that people
should be permitted to worship as they chose without interference
from the State. But Ossius did not protest when Arius, Eusebius of
Nicomedia and Theognis ofNicaea were exiled for doctrinal reasons,
nor did Athanasius for a moment permit Arians freedom to worship
as they chose, and both were quite ready to invoke imperial aid when
"Ibid. u.VU(go).
22Il.VIlI(go, 91).
23Moriundum Esse pro Dei Filio II (267); cf. VIII (281. 282).
24De Non Parcendo XXII (237).
"7(19).
26II(z8)~ he says much the same thing at greater length 39(67).
27L~tters 33(13) 40, 41, oli at "to KnO' eav"t6v xnv'tu1tacnv 1tpUOV, d Kat tMK6l
1tOI..I..Ol<; "tolofi"to<;.
28Panegyric 39(68). So Constantius was not always 'inaccessible to mercy'.
32 1
 Period of Confusion
/ ,
it s (ted the . We cannot place figures such as these in the same class
as c mpio s of ecclesiastical authority against secular violence such
as Th m a Becket, Pope Gregory VIIth, John Knox and Dietrich
Bonh er.29 It is even possible to contrast Constantius' relative
\ mild ss with the ferocious coercion more than twenty years later of
\he-Emperor Theodosius, and not least with his part in choosing an
--" unbaptised layman, Nectarius, as bishop of Constantinople, an act to
which the pro-Nicene party raised no objection. 30 There is no doubt
that Julian is correct in saying that Constantius had a reputation for
mildness. Klein is able to quote Aurelius Victor, Ammianus
MarceIlinus, Libanius and Themistius in his favour." But humanity
is demonstrated more effectively in actions than in words.
Constantius was remarkably tolerant to Hilary, who repaid him by
abusing him after his death. After exiling Hilary in 356 he allowed
him to travel during his exile to Constantinople (though he would
not give him an audience nor permit a public debate with Saturninus
of Arles);32 Hilary was then able to attend the Council ofSeleucia in
359 and later to return to his see while Constantius was alive and in
control of the government. According to Athanasius,33 Constantius
at one point (we cannot determine when, but certainly before 357)
summoned Ossius to Milan and tried to persuade him to condemn
Athanasius. Ossius refused, and the Emperor then allowed him to
return to Cordova. Declercq expresses surprise at this leniency, 34 but
in fact it is quite characteristic of Constantius.
The most remarkable instance of Constantius' mildness is,
however, his treatment of Lucifer of Calads, as Klein has
perceived." Lucifer may indeed be said to have waged a kind of
pamphlet' war with Constantius. Lucifer _quite often quotes
Constantius' retorts, conveyed in some form of imperial
propaganda,36 to his taunts: Constantius calls him and his friends
29Klein makes this point effectively Constantius II 143-4'
30S 0 Klein op. cit. 152-6. N. Q. King in The Emperor Theodosius and the
Establishment of Christianity 94-5 compares Theodosius' actions with those of
Constantius, but it must be conceded that Constantius comes better out of the
comparison than Theodosius.
J10 p. cit. 149 and 0265.
32Sec C. F. A: Borchardt Hilary of PoWers' Role in the Arian Struggle 173-4.
33HA 42-45.
340ssius 445'""'9; see Athanasius HA 42-45.
35Constantius II 148-52.
36S ce De Non Parcendo 11(198) con vincent te libelli redtati a te et dati Romae episcopis
etiam catholids ad hoc videlicet ut omni in loco tua roborar; posset blasphemia.
322
Altempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (350-357)
'enemies of peace, foes of unity, opponents too of brotherly love',"
and claims '/ desire peace to prevail in my Empire'. 38 He had said
'You have insulted me, Lucifer'.39 And Lucifer is aware that he is
being treated with restraint and rather resents it: 'Why do you not
revenge yourself on me, Emperor? Why do you not condescend to
repel the insults aimed at you, to retaliate against a man who tells
lies'40 (presumably Constantius had, with ample reason, called
Lucifer a liar). Certainly Lucifer had written attacks upon the
Emperor which would have richly justified Constantius had he cut
off his head or had him strangled. His works consist of almost no
arguments in favour ofN, which he scarcely understands, but rather
of one continued shrill monotone of abuse. Constantius is a
murderer, an idolator, worse than the Jews, than the pagans, as bad as
all the worst rulers in the Old and New Testaments. He is to be
shunned as a heretic; he is not to be obeyed as a ruler. When Lucifer
produces this sentence he is hurling one of his less obnoxious insults:
'But you realize, even as you stand behind the veil in your palace, that
all the servants of God support my propaganda designed for their
sal~ation. support it with their mind, with their will. their activity,
theIr strength, their words. despising your worthless authority.'41
Lucif~r looks forward to the period when from Heaven he will
behold Constantius in the liquid flames of Hell. 42 He faintly realizes
how unbecoming to his episcopal status it is to be occupied in such
:~enzied rantings at the Emperor: 'No doubt you are saying in reply
The Lord WIShed you to be gentle because you are his bishop," and
yet you are showing yourself consistently aggressive (pervicacem) to
me. '~3 But·this passing thought is dismissed, and the violent jeremiad
continues. Yet, In the face of such open defiance of his dignity and
authonty and such blackening of his reputation, all that Constantius
did to Lucifer was to exile him to various places in the Levant
forbidding him for a period to be visited by his friends but permittin~
hIm the full use of his virulent pen. A mild martyrdom indeed!
37De Non Conveniendo cum Haeretids 1( 16 5).
38Ibid. III(170); cf. De Regibus Aposlatids I(I35); 11(138); VI(I47); De Athanasio
I.XXIX(49); De Non Po,eendo II(I97; I98), XXII(2SS).
39De Nml Parcendo XIII( 2I 9).
"Ibid. XIII(2I9).
41 Moriendum Esse 1(266).
42De Non Parcendo XXXIU(25S).
43Moriendum Esse V(276).
323
 Period of Confusion
)
Iy is not easy to estimate justly the underlying policy of
C9'nstantius. Estimates have ranged from that of Schwartz, who
~
scribes him as waging war against the homoousios,44 to that of
lein who denies that he was wholly influenced by Val ens and
/ Ursa~ius and sees his motives as rather political than doctrinal,45
formed by a desire to obtain unity in the church. It must be noted that
Constantius was a devout man. Hilary says
'You welcome bishops with a kiss ... you bow your head for a
blessing ... you condescend to dine (with bishops) ... you free them
from the poll-tax ... '46
(though he does not think that this .will d~ Constantius any good).
And that Constantius was not lackmg In IntegrIty IS shown by hIS
nominating on his deathbed Julian as his successor, in spite of the fact
that Julian was at that moment in arms against him. We must credit
him with sincerely desiring the welfare both of the church and of the
Empire. Klein is no doubt right in making the point more than once
that he was understandably anxious that bishops should not exceed
the bounds and rights of their sees and interfere with the decisions of
other bishops and synods,47 and we have seen that this is precisely the
48
charge that Ammianus Marcellinus lays against Athanasius. But it
is only by confining me meaning of ,Ad an ism' to the doctrine of the
Neo-Arians, Aetius and Eunomius, that Klein can contend that
Constantius never committed himself to a doctrine which is
recognizably Arian. 4' He certainly desired the unity ~fthe Church,
as his father had, and felt himself bound to follow a pohcy that would
secure it. But his actions in the years which we are about to consider,
351-357, and later during the closing years of his life; do not suggest
that he was only concerned with unity, political and ecclesiastical.
We shall see that he favoured one solution to the problem of the
Christian doctrine of God, that which is best called Homoian, and
that he rejected others, the Homoousian and the Anhomoian. He did
not pursue this policy consistently; he wavered both between 344 a~d
35 1 and briefly, when he was flirting with the HomOlouSlan party, In
44'Zur Kirchengeschichtc' 153.
4sConstantius II 87-9.
46Liber contra Constantium 10(587).
470p. cit. 166, 205.
48S ee above, P.241.
490p. cit. 157-8.
324
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (350--357)
358. The ancients, as we have seen, accused him of inconstancy. so But
on the whole he followed, perhaps because he saw in this the best
chance of uniting the church, the Homoian line. And he must have
died in the conviction tht he had indeed united the church round this
innocuous but vague doctrIne.
2_ The First Sirmian Creed (351)
A Council held in Antioch in 351 (or possibly in 352) protested
against the re-admission of Athanasius to his see, and probably
appointed in his place George, the learned Cappadocian, patron of
Aetius, who held strong views on the necessity of demolishing pagan
temples where possible. But there was no immediate prospect of his
being able to enter Alexandria. 51 The centre of interest as far as
doctrine was concerned had shifted, with the Emperor, farther west,
first to Sirmium and then to Aries and Milan. While Constantius was
in Sirmium in the winter of 351, a Council was held there. For the
fifth time Photinus was condemned after a debate held between him
and Basil of Ancyra, reported by Epiphanius. 52 Constantius then
banished Photinus, and he now ceased to figure in the Arian
Controversy. He was replaced by the anti-Nicene Germinius
50C[ Theodoret HE 11.3 I and from the oppOsite end of the spectrum
Philostorgius HE V.S(69).
51Sozomenus HE IV.8.4. He mentions as the leaders of the thirty bishops who
assembled for this council Narcissus (Neronias), Theodore (Heraclea), Eugenius
bishop of Nicaea, Patrophilus ofScythopolis and Menophantus of Ephesus, whom
we may regard as the continuers of the theological tradition ofEusebius of Caesarea.
For the alternative date for George's appointment, see above, p. 3 12.
s2Panarion 71.1-5(249-55). Socrates HE II.29, 30and Sozomenus HE IV .6. If give
a~ ac~ount of this C~unciJ. but they both confuse it with the later (3rd) Council of
Slrmlum of357. ThIS one must count as the Second Council ofSirmium which
produced the First Creed of Sirmium. The two historians also differ as to what
bishops attended this Sirmian Council of 351. They agree on the names of Mark of .
Arethusa. Basil of Ancyra and George of Alexandria, Valens of Mursa and Ossius,
but Socrates adds Pancratius of Pelusium and Hypatianus of Heraclea (what has
happened to Theodore?). It is most unlikely. in my opinion, that Ossius was present
on this occasion, but it isjust possible that this was when Constantius asked him to
condemn Athanasius and when he refused with im punity. Whether George had
been consecrated bishop of Alexandria by now and so attended the Council is
uncertain. In fact we cannot place much confidence in the lists given us of the
members of this Council.
325
 Period of Confusion
(Athanasius HA 74). This Council produced a creed, which must be
examined here. 53
The main body of the creed was precisely the same as the Fourth
Creed of Antioch of 341, which had already been used at least twice
in the business of devising creeds, and its first anathema is identical
with the one and only anathema of that document. 54 In the First
Sirmian Creed, however, twenty-six more anathemas were added.
They ran thus, condemning the views: 55
II That the Father and Son are two gods.
III That the Son of God, who is Christ before the ages, did
not operate under (t'mouPY'l'c6ta) the Father to create
the universe.
IV That the Ingenerate (aytvv1]tov) or a part of him, was
born ofMary.
V That the Son (existed only) in (the) foreknowledge
(of the Father) before (his birth from) MaryS. and he
was not begotten from the Father before the ages,
[and with God and all things were made by him].
VI That the ousia of God is extended or retracted.
VII That the Son is the ousia of God extended, or the
extension of his ousia.
VIII That the Son is the immanent (tv1)Ui06tOC;) or
proceeding (ltpOCPOPIK6C;) Logos of God.
IX That the Son is only a man from Mary.
X That God and man who were from Mary is the
Ingenerate (aytvv1]tov).
XI If anyone interprets the text 'I am God the first and I
am after those things and apart from me there is no
God' (Isa 44:6 LXX) [which applies to the
destruction of idols and things which are not gods1as
implying the destruction of the Only-begotten [who
is God before the ages1in the Jewish tradition.
XII If anyone interprets the text 'the Word became flesh'
53Sources for this creed are Athanasius De Synodis 27; Socrates HE 11.30. (Latin'
version Hilary De Syn. 37; see Hahn Symbole 196-9 (§I60). For this Second Sirmian
Council, see Gwatkin SA 149; Zeiller Origines 269-71; Loafs 'Arianismus' 30;
Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschic,hte' ISO; Meslin Les Ariens 268-70; Declercq Ossius
420-1.
545ee above, PP.291-2.
55The views of the authors of this creed, as distinguished from the propositions
which they are condemning, are put in square brackets.
56The compilers arC here using a kind of theologians' shorthand.
326
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (35(}-357)
Gn 1:14) so as to mean that the Logos was converted
Into flesh or in taking flesh suffered change.
XIII That accepting that the Only-begotten Son of God
was crucified means that his Godhead endured
corruption or suffering or change or reduction or
destruction.
XIV
If anyone says that at Gn 1:26, 'Let us make man',
God was talking to himself [and not the Father to the
Son].
XV That Abraham did not see the Son but the ingenerate
(ayevv1]tov) God or a part of him.
XVI ThatJacob did not wrestle (Gn 32:24-32) with the
Son In the gUIse of a man, but with the ingenerate
God, or a part of him.
XVII That Gn 19:24 ('The Lord rained down fire from the
Lord' LXX) is not to be applied to the Father and the
Son but he rained from himself. [(In fact) the Lord
the Son rained from the Lord the Father].
XVIII If anyone reading that the Father is Lord and the Son
Lord and that the Father and Son are Lord [(because
he is Lord from Lord)] says that there are two gods
.,. [we do not make the Son equal to (cmvtacrcroll6v)
the Father, but subordinated (oltOt6taYlltvov) to the
Father. And he did not come down to Sodom (Gn
18:21) WIthout the wIll of the Father nor did he rain
from himself but from the Lord, that means at the
command of the Father, nor does he sit at his own
right hand, but he obeys since the Father says 'Sit
then at my right hand' (Ps IIO(I09):I).]
XIX T"'at the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are
one Person (ltpocr<Oltov).
XX That saying that the Holy Spirit is the Comforter
means that he is the ingenerate God.
XXI Ifanyone does not say, as the Lord taught us that that
Comforter is other than the Son [(for he ;aid 'The
Father will send another, a Comforter whom'l will
ask', Gn 14:16, oddly inverted)]. '
XXII That the Holy Spirit is a part of the Father or of the
Son.
XXIII That the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are three
Gods.
XXIV
That the Son of God came into existence by the will
of God hke one of the things made.
327
 \~
\1
'I
/) Period of Confusion
"
"
That the Father begot the Son without willing it, [for
the Father did not beget the Son under compulsion,
driven by some physical necessity against his will, but
he achieved it by begetting him from himself as soon
as he willed both timelessly and without suffering
(ultl19co<;) ].
That the Son is ingenerate and unbeginning
XXVI
(uytVV'1<ov Kui livupxov), so as to teach two
unbeginning and ingenerate principles and two gods,
[(for the Son is head and beginning of everythin& and
the head and beginning of Christ is God, and so III an
orthodox way we attribute everything to a single
unoriginated beginning of the universe)].
XXVII And again [carefully defining the concept of
Christianity], if anyone denies that Christ God, Son
of God, is before the ages (1tpOUuilVIOV) and ministers
to the Father for the creation of the world, but
(declares) that he was born of Mary and
thenceforward is called Christ and Son and took his
beginnings from God, let him be anathema.
Much of this statement consists of a dispute over texts which had long
been thought crucial for the establishment of the Christian doctrine
of God, and here certainly reflects the argument between Basil and
Photinus of which Epiphanius can give us a brief impression. S7 Its
main weight certainly is directed towards stamping out the doctrines
of Photinus and beyond him those of Marcellus and beyond him of
Sabellianisrrt generally (note the use of prosopon which was not
characteristic of Marcellus but was apparently used by Sabellius). At
least fourteen out of the twenty-six new anathemas are' directed
against this kind of doctrine (IV, VIII-X, XIV-XXIII, XXVII).
Three could be said to strike at extreme Arianism (XIV, XII, XIV)",
though there is no sign in this creed that the Neo-Arianism of Aetius
and Eunomius has yet emerged into view, unless we are to regard the
frequent application of ,in generate' (uytVV'1<o<;) of God the Father as
foreshadowing this school. Most significant of all, perhaps, is the
appearance of anathemas directly and explicitly aimed at N, which
had introduced the term ousia and its cognates into discourse about
the doctrine of God (III, VI, VII, XXV, XXVI). Photinus may have
57SCC the editor's notcs in Epiphanius Panarion 71.1.5(250), 3(252) and 5(254).
58And. of course I, which was repeated from the Fourth Antiochene ofj4J.
32 8
'Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (35{}-357)
appealed to N in defending his views, and perhaps the authors of this
creed may have hoped to persuade the Western bishops that doctrines
such as those ofPhotinus and Marcellus are the inevitable outcome of
the doctrine expressed in N. The creed may even have been partly
deSIgned in opposition to opinions of Athanasius, which would by
now have become widely known. This creed marks a definite shift
towards a more sharply anti-Nicene doctrine, though it cannot quite
yet be said to be explicitly pro-Arian. It foreshadows rather than
anticipates the next creed of Sirmium, that of 357. 59 Opitz
conjectured 60 that it was at this council that Valens and Ursacius
withdrew their earlier recantations. Those reliable wind-cones may
well at this point have thus signalled that the imperial wind was
changing to an anti-Nicene quarter.
3· The Councils of Aries (353) and of Milan (355)
Now that as a result of the collapse of Magnentius' short period of
power. Constantius found himself committed to spending an
mdefimte period governing the Western Empire, he inaugurated a
pohcy of persuading or coercing the churches of the West into
agreement, or a semblance of agreement, with those of the East. It has
been much debated whether at this point he contented himself with
attempting to induce the western bishops to renounce their support
of Athanasius, or whether he demanded from them acceptance of
some doctn~al formula as well as renunciation of Athanasius. No
such clearly-acknowledged formula backed by coercion and widely
Imposed IS given us by the ecclesiastical historians writing in the fifth
century until they reach the Councils ofSeleucia and Ariminum and
their sequel in the year 359, though at least two creeds were produced
before then. But we have to remember that the Greek historians of
the fifth century were generally ill-informed about events which
took place in the Latin-speaking West. Further, almost all authorities
are agreed that most Western bishops had no deep-rooted objection
to dlSowmng AthanaslUs, who by this time can have been only a
59
1 cannot there.fore agree with Klein when he maintains (Constantius II 59-60
(and n 127» that chiS creed wasas anti-Arian as its prototype, the IVth Antiochene of
34r.
6°Note on Athanasius HA 29.1-2(198).
329
(
\ Period of Confusion
distant memory to most ofthem.· ' If all that was demanded of these
bishops by the Emperor was a renunciation of Athanasius, and
perhaps a recognition of George as bishop of Alexandria, it is difficult
to imagine why any Western bishop refused the Emperor's request,
especially as we know that the bishop of Rome, Liberius, and the
bishop of Milan, Dionysius, were willing to disown Athanasius with
or without conditions (see above P.321 and below pp. 33 I, 338-9)·
The only motive we can ascribe to those who objected and refused is
that they were also being asked to accept a doctrinal formula which
was uncongenial to them. The arguments of Klein to the effect that in
353 and 355 Constantius required no doctrinal assent from Western
bishops are not convincing.· 2
In fact Girardet has made an interesting case for concluding that
Constantius did submit a doctrinal statement for the bishops at the
Councils of Aries and Milan to sign. He refers to an expression of
Sulpicius Severns (Chron II.39(92) epistolam pravitate infeetam), and
some passages from Lucifer of Calaris detailing uot only the
requirements concerning condemning Athanasius and recognizing
George set forth by Constantius at Milan, but also a doctrinal
demand, comprising erat quando non erat, etfaetus est ex nihilo, et non est
una potentia patris etfilii (there was a time when he did not exist, and he
was made from notliing and the power of the Father and the Son is
not the same).·3 We may agree with Klein in regarding it as wholly
unlikely that Constantius required as drastically Arian a statement as
this to be accepted at either Aries or Milan. But Girardet calls
attention to a statement by Hilary concerning something which 'they
61S ee the statement of Lucifer about Dionysius of Milan and Hilary Coil. Antiar.
AVII.S(92); Sulpicius Severus Chron 11.39(92); and also Gwatkin SA 152; Zeiller
Origines 271-3; Giarardet in PTAA 71-83; Brennecke Hilarius von P. 133-146,
157""9 8 .
620p. cit. 55--6, 59""'""60. He cites Hilary's statement (De Synodis 91) that until he
reached the East after being exiled he had never heard of N. But Western bishops
did not need N to teach them that the doctrine of those in the East standing in the
tradition ofEusebius of Caesa rea was not consistent with their tradition. MesHn (Les
Ariens 270-3) had anticipated Klein in refusing to believe that Constantius
submitted a doctrinal formula to those who attended these councils. Brennecke
throughout his work (Hilarius von P.) argues in this sense also, but I find it
impossible to believe that Constantius could have been so irresponsible as to base his
whole ecclesiastical policy over four years simply on a vendetta against a single
bishop.
63Girardet in PTAA 66-83 and lucifer in De Athanasius n.30; 1.10; 11.25, and De
'10'1 Conveniendo VI (quotation from the last).
33 0
Artempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (;50-357)
laid down in a lett~r', meaning apparently some formulae put
forward by Eastern bIshops at some point in the process of getting rid
ofPhotmus whIch was designed to do more than this: it included the
words
'there is one ingenerate God the Father and one only Son God fi
God , L·19h t firom L·19h t, fiIrst-bom of all creation, and the Holy
' rom
Spirit
the Comforter'. 64
Hilary says that these statements, perfectly orthodox in themselves
were designed t? link together in the minds of the unwary th~
rejectIOn of Photmus, the alleged guilt of Athanasius and ultimately
the abandonment of the Catholic faith, and that what they really
mtended to teach was 'made Out ofnothing, there was a time when he
dId not eXISt and before he Was begotten he did not exist' (ex nihilo
factum, erat quando non erat, priU5quam naseeretur non erat). It would be
typIcal of LucIfer to transform what Hilary said was intended but not
stated. mto an accusation that Constantius actually laid down the
offenSIve words. This may well, then, have been the gist of the
formula whIch Constantius imposed at Aries and at Milan and which
caused such alarm to well-informed minds in the West
. Constantius was at Aries in the autumn of 353. It was ;hirty years
smce h~ had. been made Caesar (at the age of six!) and he was
celebratmg ?~S trieennalia, the last embers of Magnentius' revolt
recently extmgUlshed. He took the opportunity of summoning a
councd, attended by several Western bishops .• ' Liberius, who had
succeeded Juhus (ob Mar 12th 352) on May 5th in the previous year
was represented by two bIShops, Vincentius of Capua and Marcellu;
of so'."ewhere in Campania. Valens of Mursa was Constantius' agent
at thIS council. Liberius had expected that when his agents had
condemned Athanasius, as they were ready to do, the rest of the
bIshops would then on their part condemn Arius. We have no strong
~4Col~. Antiar. 11.9.4 (147. 148) unum qUidem ingenitum esse deum patrem et unum
;nuumfi lurn 1 ~eum ex deo 1 lumen ex lumine 1 primogenitum omnis creaturae 1 and Spiritum
anctu~ paracluum. These words are in fact remarkably like some of the last few
ex~~essl0ns of the Second .Creed of Sirmium of 357.
C /I S~ur~es for the Couned of ArIes are Sulpicius Severns Chron II 39(92-3)' Hilary
L'~ '. n,ttar. AVII. 1~(89-?4). (Liberius' Letter Obsecro); Uber ad Constant. i.8. For
AICe~~~ ~areer eo~sldere~ 10 ?re~ter d;cail, see ~elow pp. 338-41. See also Gwatkin
.. 3, SA 152, Loofs Anamsmus 30; OpitZ on HA 29.I-2(19~200)· Z ·11
0 rrgtnes 272-)' S' .C . . 7 • el er
'" ' ImOnetrl ffSl 2J5--'7:).Gaudemet ConcilesGalloisduIV . 18'
Pletn In Politique et Tlleologie 121-2. slee e 2,
33 1
/(\ \ )
'~~~--r Period of Confusion
reaso~\for thinking that Valens and Saturninus of Arles (who was. an
adhere~t of his point of view) would have objected to condemnmg
Arius. But in fact they did not, and it is likely that they required those
present to sign a doctrinal formula which seemed to the discerning
among them to admit an Arian interpretation, as we have seen.
Apparently the Pope's legates signed whatever they were asked to
sign. This greatly disturbed Liberius when he heard of It, and he
hastened to disown his representatives (see below, pp. 338-9). Paulinus
of Treves alone refused to sign, and was exiled. He died in exile.··
Lucifer of Calaris, who was a friend and supporter of Liberius,
now suggested to the Pope that he should request Constantius to
summon a General Council at Aquileia,·7 and LucIfer was one of the
delegation which brought this request, of which Liberius approved,
to the Emperor at Milan. At some point about now, dIfficult to
determine exactly, a council took place at Biterrae (Bezlers) which
was attended among others by Hilary who in 353 had been
consecrated bishop of Poi tiers. We do not know its exact date,
though we can conjecture 356 with some probability, and we have
no information about what precisely took place at It. The result of ~t
was, however, that Hilary was exiled by the Emperor. Probably thIS
was one of a number of local councils held throughout Gaul at the
Emperor's behest at which a doctrinal formula open to an Arian
interpretation was presented to those who attended; Hilary refused to
sign it; Saturninus of Aries, to whom Hilary shows consistent
hostility, informed upon him to Constantius, and this sentence was
the result.· 8
We do not know how many bishops attended the Council of
Milan in 355, but hardly enough to make it into the general council
for which Liberius had asked.· 9 It is impossible to reconstruct what
66Athanasius Apol. ad Const. 27.
67S 0 Declercq Ossius 430-1.
68HiJary Lib. con. Const. PL 10:2(579). As Hilary associates the ye~r of his exile
with the exilings ofDionysius. Eusebius. Lucifer (all in US) and PauIinu~ (35.3). we
cannot be sure of the precise date. He attributes his sentence to the machma~lon~ of
Satuminus, Valens and Ursacius. This reference and Jerome De ScrlptoTlbus
Ecclesiasticis 100 (PL 23:699) are the only aUusipns to the synod of Biterrae w~ich
survive. See Gaudcmet Conciles Gallais due IJftmt siecie 86. For the date see Zeiller
Origines 274. Brennecke has his own construction, op. cit. 23~4S· . signed the final document, which seems odd. See Brennecke Hilarius von P. 165--6.
69Sources for the Council ofMilan are Hilary Liber ad Constanttum 1.8; AthanaslUs
HA 31-34; Rufinus HE 1.20; Socrates 11.36; Sozomenus HE IV·9; TheodOI:et H.~
11.1-5. See also Loofs . Arianismus' 30; Zeiller Origines 273-4; SimonettI CrISt
217-220; Girardet as above, p. 000; Pietri PTA 121-2. Baronius discovered a list of
33 2
~ Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (350-357)
precisely took place. Klein alleges that Dionysius of Milan presided
and that Paulinus of Trier, though under sentence of banishment, was
permitted to attend. 70 Hilary says that Eusebius of Vercelli was
ordered, indeed entreated, to come to Milan, yet when he came for
ten days he was prevented from entering the church where the
council was held, and when he was able to appear, along with Lucifer
ofCalaris and 'Roman clergy', all had been fixed beforehand. He was
called upon to condemn Athanasius, but he replied that as there were
heretics present he must safeguard the faith, whereupon he produced
a copy ofN and declared himself ready to condemn Athanasius if the
others would sign this creed. Dionysius of Milan was preparing to
Sign the document when Valens knocked the pen out of his hand,
crying 'This sort of thing can't be done here' (non posse fieri ut aliquid
inde gereretur). There was a popular outcry; the proceedings were
removed from the church to the imperial palace, where the Emperor
and his agent' could control them more readily.7! Athanasius gives a
lively but not altogether reliable account of precisely what
Constantius is supposed to have said on this occasion when he met
opposition" to his wishes: 72
When people objected to Constantius' demands and said 'This is no-t
the church's rule (eICICATJcnacrt"ucQv ICuv6vu) " in reply he (Constantius)
said 'But what I wish, that must be the rule; when I said this those who
are called the bishops of Syria allowed it. So now either give in or you
will be exiled!' And Athanasius adds that the bishops at the time
warned Constantius 'not to destroy the customs of the church nor to
confuse the government of the Roman empire with the ordering of
the church'.
No doubt Athanasius is here describing what in effect Constantius
intended, but it is very unlikely that he used these actual ~ords and
even less likely that any bishops on that occasion dared to address him
as boldly as this. The upshot of the proceedings was that almost
everybody present acquiesced in the Emperor's demands,
abo~lt 30 names in the arc~ives of the church of Vercdli (since lost) which he
c6ruec~:ed to refer to the bishops at~ending this council. The n:t.me of Eusebius of
~erceIh IS absent. but apparently Dionysius of Milan and Rhoclianus of Toulouse
7oConstantius JJ 88-9. But he admits that Valens intervened decisively at the end
of the Council.
71Hilary Uber ad Canst. 111.1(186-7). See also Eusebius Vercelli Ep I
72HA 33.7; 34.1(202). • ..
333
 ......+- ..
) Period of Confusion
/ Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (350-357)
condemned Athanasius, and probably also signed some formula
which was not openly Arian but was patient of an Arian
interpretation. Those who refused, Dionysius of Milan, Eusebius of
Vercelli and Lucifer of Calaris, were deposed and exiled. Auxentius, a
protege of Gregory of Alexandria who did not even know Latin, was
made bishop of Milan. 73 Constantius was now able to tum his
attention to the man whom he might well have regarded as his most
formidable opponent, Liberius, bishop of Rome.
4. Ossius and Liberius
We have already seen that Ossius presided at Antioch in 324/5, at
Nicaea in 325 and at the gathering of the Western bishops in Serdica
in 343,74 and that he may have paid a visit to the Emperor at Milan
subsequently when he refused to accept his demands. 75 He clearly did
not attend the Council of Milan of 355. 76 Athanasius gives us a letter
which he says that Ossius wrote to Constantius when the Emperor's
policy in the West after the defeat of Magnentius began to be clear,
perhaps in the year 356.77 The part of it which Athanasius gives is
remarkably frank in tone. It rebukes Constantius, whose grandfather
Maximian, Ossius said, had conducted a persecution (in which Ossius
suffered), for interfering in ecclesiastical affairs where he has no right
to intrude, and vindicates the right of the church to manage its own
affairs independently of the Emperor:
'Do not intrude yourself into ecclesiastical affairs, and do not give
orders to us about such subjects, but rather learn about such matters
73For Auxemius see Athanasius HA 7S~ Sulpicius Severus Chron. II 39(92-3).
Eusebius was exiled first to Scythopolis, where he was lodged with its bishop
Patrophilus (Epiphanius Panarion 30.S; Eusebius Vercelli Ep. II.). then to
Cappadocia and then to the Thebaid. Dionysius was sent to Sebaste in Armenia and
soon died there (Basil Ep. 197). Lucifer was sent off to. Germanicia in Syria where
Eudoxius was then ~ishop. then to Eleutheropolis in Palestine and then to the
Thebaid Gerome Vir. Ill. 95; Socrates HE Ill. 5; Sozomenus HEV .12). It was becawe
they had been relegated to the Thebaid that Eusebius and Lucifer were able to attend
Athanasius' Council of Alexandria in 362.
74See above, pp. 147-8, 154,305. He is the first to sign the doccrinal statement at
Serdica, Hilary Coli. Antiar. B 1I.4{131"'""'9).
7SSee above, p.322.
76S 0 Declercq Ossius 417.
"So Declercq op. cit. 346; cf. 397.
334
'-
fr~m us. God has assigned the Empire to you, and has entrusted us
WIth the affairs of the church'.78
So much do these sentiments suit just what Athanasius thought about
the, behaVIOur of Constantius at the time that these words were
wn~ten that some have impugned the authenticity of the letter.
Klem, for mstance, suggested that Athanasius simply invented it; it is
mconSlstent, he thinks with Ossius' previous attitude to the imperial
government, when he was the trusted agent and confidant of
79
Constantine. But the letter scarcely merits this drastic treatment
All parties in the Arian Controversy were as ready to champion th~
freedom of the church when they were out of favour with the
Emperor as they were happy to accept his assistance when he
supported them,
, The only other known facts about Ossius are that Liberius wrote
hIm a letter m 353 describing his disappointment at the outcome of
the Council of Aries, 80 and that in the year 357 he was, though then
an Immensely old man, perhaps a centenarian, at the order of the
Emperor brought from Cordova to Sirmium and there, faced with
the demand t~ condemn Athanasius and to assent to the drastically
subordmatIOnIst creed just produced by the third Council of that
city, he, refused the first but gave in to the second demand.81
AthanaslUs makes three references to Ossius: at Apologia Secunda 89
he wntes:
'for a shor~ time he was frightened by Constantius' threats and decided
not to reSIst them (the ~rians), b~t the great violence and despotic
government of ConstantlUs, and hIS many injuries and blows make it
clear that he (Ossius) did not condemn us, but, because through the
7SA h '
79 t anasl~S HA 44.1-11(.20'7."'""'9), 9uotation 7(~08).
. C~nstantlus II 133-4; h~ thmks Its greeting O(JlO~ KcovO"taV't{vcp paoH•.£l tv
KVPt(P IS oddly bare. and t~inks he can detect ringing all through it Athanasius'
hatred of Valens and Ursaclus
80See below, p. 340. .
81Sources ~o! Ossius' final submission are Athanasius' Apol. Sec. 89; HiJar De
Syn. 87: ~UJpl~lus Severus Chron 1I.40{93-4); Philostorgius IV.3 (very vague) Yand
s~urce.s gIVen l.n ~he text below. G. S. M. Walker's article 'Ossius ofCordov~ and
t e Nlcene Fal.th . suggests that what Ossius really did here was to repent of his
extreme S~bel1iamsm. That the document produced by him as the e~cyclical of the
Western. blsho~s at. Ser~ica is disastrously near Sabellianism cannot be denied, but
t~at OSSl~S at SlrmlUm m 357 meant sincerely to recant his near-SabeIlian views is
s ~er c~llJectu~e unsupported by any evidence. Declercq Ossius 474-500 has an
ex austlVe reVIew of the sources; cf. Moreira Potamius 86-j.
335

Period of Confusion
weakness of old age he could not bear the blows, he yielded to them
temporarily' .
In Apologia de Fuga 5 (1-3(71)) he laments the fate of the aged Ossius,
compelied by blows and threats to sign an Anan formula, 0 .and, agam In
he suggests that it was only a temporary weakness on SSlUS part.
Historia Arianorum 45 he says that Constantius summone.d OSSlUS to
S· ·
IrmlUm and kept him there a whole year in spite of hIS. great b tage
he
until he agreed to communicate with Valens and UrsaclUs, u.
steadfastly refused to condemn Athanasius. And just before he dIed
( resumably now back in Cordova) he ~ondemned the Anan heresy,
a~d exhorted everybody to avoid it. It IS admItted now by VIrtually
everybody that what Ossius signed was the Second SlrmIan Creed of
357·'2 . . . ,
The title of the creed of Sirmium of 357 as gIven. m HIlary s De
Synodis is Exemplum Blasphemiae apud Sirmium per. OsslUmet PotamJUm
conscriptae. 83 We shall later discuss the authorshIp of thIS creed (see
below pp. 345-6), but it is most unlikely that OSSlUS, very, very old
and hitherto stoutly anti-Arian, should have wntten or. collaborated
in writing this formula. In another work HIlary agam suggests a
connection between Ossius and the writing of thIS creed, when,
giving a list of creeds produced between 325 and 358, he refers to
deliramenta Osii et incrementa Valentis et Ursacii. '4 Two other ~lluslOns
to Ossius' presence at Sirmium in 357 appear in the De SynodlS. One IS
almost kindly:
'because at Sirmium a creed had broken out consisting of a new form
ofimpiety and yet one that had long festered, through ,~~e agency of
Ossius who had forgotten his former words and acts.
82Even Declercq admits that Ossius signed this (op, cit. 502-25). Opit~ (o?te on
HA 4S in lac) thinks that Ossius communicated Wlth Valens and UrsaCIUS In 3.57
before the E~peror arrived and signed the creed after hi~ arrival. Whether ?~lUS
really recanted his submission to Arianism before h~ died must be regar e as
doubtful. Neither Hilary nor Phoebadius say anythmg about such a volte face.
Declercq accepts it as true (op. cit. 50 5-2 5). . . . . D
83' A copy of the Blasphemy of Sirmium wntten by OSSlUS and PotamlUs , e
8
Sy•. 11(4 7). . . dd") f V I and
84'The lunacy of Ossius and the mterpolatIons (or a ~tlons 0 a ~ns .
Ursacius' (Lib. con. Constantium 23 (598»; the first phrase certamly refers to Slrm;~~
11 357' but it is not dear what the rest of the sentence refers to; perhaps to the c 1
of Sir~ium 359; conceivably to the creed of Nice, which, it was alleged, Va ens
tampered with.
"De Sy•. 63(523).
"-
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (35(}--357)
And later in the same work, pointing out how little opposition there
was to N in the West, he says that nobody wanted to drop it 'except
the aged Ossius, and as for him, he was too much in love with the
tomb."6 Phoebadius of Agen, who was greatly surprised by Ossius'
assent to the creed of 357, after recalling his valiant service at Nicaea
and against Arianism and suggesting that we can hardly take his
change of view seriously, remarks shrewdly
'For if his doctrine was wrong when he was nearly ninety, I cannot
believe that it was right When he was over ninety.'87
And as he concludes this passage by a quotation from Ezekiel 33: 12
The righteousness of the righteous man shall not save him in that day
in which he shall err', it is clear that he knows nothing of a later and
final change of doctrinal allegiance by Ossius. The list of atrocity
stories gathered by Maximinus and Faustinus in the Collection
Avellana includes some awful warnings involving Ossius. Ossius had
earlier dOnounced Potamius of Lisbon as an heretic among the
Spanish bishops. But Ossius himself'summoned before the Emperor
Constantius on a complaint lodged by Potamius' gave way, agreed to
heresy, and was allowed back to Spain with the injunction to
persecute any non-Arian bishops there. There follows a long and
implausible account of how Gregory of Elvira, commanded by
Ossius to adopt Arianism in the presence of the (pagan) vicarius
Clementinus at Cordova, refused, whereupon Ossius was seized with
a fit which appeared to be (but apparently was not) fatal (to survive a
stroke at one hundred years old is a remarkable achievement!).
Clementinus refused to try the accused and Gregory departed,
8
vindicated: ' Again, Florentius, bishop of Emerita (Merida) had not
signed any Arian formula but had communicated with Ossius and
Potamius. He met an exemplary death, falling down in a fit every
time he tried to occupy his (episcopal) throne, and finally expiring as
a result of this infirmity.89
It is as unlikely that Ossius, on returning to Cordova from
Sirmium in 357, occupied himself in persecuting Supporters of the
86Ibid. 87(539); presumably Hilary means that he was senile.
87Co1ltra Arianos 23 (PL 20:30): i.e. ifhe was wrong at Nicaea and Serdica, why
should he be right at Sirmium?
88Coll. Avellana (2) 32-41(13-17), quotation 32 (15).
89lbid. 43-46 (18). Epiphanius (Panarion 73:14) says that Ossius was hurried into
signing a document which opted for anhomoion kat'ousian, which is not strictly
correct.
337
 Period of Confusion
Nicene Creed in Spain as that he finally recanted his submission to
Arian allegiance. His great age is quite sufficient explanation for his
yielding to imperial pressure without assuming that he experienced a
genuine change of heart so as to adopt Arianism or that he was
reacting against previously held Sabellian views. He did not compose
the Second Sirmian Creed of357, but he lent the great weight of his
reputation to it. He probably died in Cordova in the winter of
357/8.'0 . on, that I will not join in peace with them. But eight years ago four
The case of the other man who recanted under pressure from
Constantius at thisperiod, Liberius, is more complicated, because at
one stage in his career he made some concessions to the Arian or near-
Arian doctrine which the Emperor wished him to embrace, and it is a
matter of difficulty to determine precisely how far he went in com-
promise. The Council of Eastern bishops which met in Antioch in
351 or 352 and which probably elected George bishop of Alexandria
wrote to Liberius accusing Athanasius anew of the actions which had
caused his deposition at Tyre in 335 and requesting him to recognise
George, not Athanasius, as bishop of Alexandria. In reply to this
offensive Athanasius called a synod of bishops in Egypt which
vindicated his conduct and he then sent a representative to Rome to
protest his innocence." Liberius himself gives two different accounts
of this incident. In the year 353 or 354 he wrote a letter to
Constantius, sending it by the hand of Lucifer of Calaris.' 2
In this letter. which is known by its opening word in Latin, Obsecro,
Liberius regrets that he cannot command the Emperor's agreement,
not only about the affair of Athanasius, but about other affairs as
well. 93 The Emperor had accused him, in a communication which has
not survived, of suppressing letters from the Eastern bishops about the
misdeeds of Athanasius. We did not suppress them, says Liberius, but
on the contrary published them. But afterwards he had heard that a
synod of eighty Egyptian bishops had denied the allegations made
against Athanasius; the statement was left with Liberius by one
Eusebius before he hurried back to Africa (clearly this was the synod
called by Athanasius to rebut the offensive from Antioch and the
representative sent by him to Rome was Eusebius). Vincentius of
90S 0 Dec1ercq Ossius 528.
. 91 Athanasius Apol. ad Const. 2, 3. 5. 6-7. 14. 19; Socrates HE II.26; Sozomenus HE
IV.I; Theodoret HE 11.16.
92This is the letter Obsecro. to be found in Hilary Coll. Antiar. AVII.I-<i(89-93).
93 1(8!M)0).
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (J5(}-357)
Capua, sayS' Liberius, took this Egyptian statement with him to Aries
and also a xequest for the calling of a counc~. 94 I have behaved in no
worldly way, Liberius protests, in no way unbecoming to my office,
an office to which I acceded unwillingly. Nihil addi episcopatui urbis
Romae, nihil minui passus sum ('I allowed nothing to be added and
nothing to be substracted from the see of the city of Rome'). I have
kept the traditional faith.95 The Easterners complain. Liberius goes.
bishops from the East in Milan refused to condemn Arius' heresy and
left the council in a rage (see below p. 307). The doctrine· advocated
under colour of Athanasius' affairs is that which caused Alexander
Athanasius' predecessor. to inform Silvester, my predecessor. that h~
had excommunicated eleven presbyters and eleven deacons for
holding it. These outcast people have now set up factions (conciliabula)
with which George in Alexandria says that he is now in
communion. 96 Consider, please, that my legates suggested that they
would agree with the demands of the Easterners (i.e. to condemn
Athanasius) on condition that they in their tum would condemn the
teaching of Arius. A council (at Aries) was regularly held, and my
legates were informed that the others (the Easterners) could not
condemn Arius' doctrine but that Athanasius should be
excommunicated. In these circumstances, should not Athanasius' case
be carefully considered?97 A concern for true religion should then
persuade you to preserve the Nicene faith firmly and to concede to my
legates, Lucifer, Pancratius and Hilary, the calling ofa Council.98
This is just such a letter as one would expect from the successor of
Julius. But he wrote in a different style from exile two or three years
later when he was desperately anxious to regain his see. Then, in a
letter Stud~ns Paci to the Eastern bishops" he says that, having
receIved letters about the case of Athanasius and others directed to his
deceased predecessor, he sent two presbyters of the city of Rome to
Alexandria, ordering Athanasius to come to Rome to have his case
tried there, and telling him that if he refused he would be out of
communion with Rome. The' presbyters returned and announced
that Athanasius was not willing to come. Consequently Liberius now
"2(90).
95 3 (90, 9.1). Evidently .Const~ntius suspe~ted Liberius of being as anxious to
extend the 10fluence of hIS see (10 ConstantlUs' view, iJIicitly) as Julius has been .
"4(91, 92).
"5(92).
"6(92, 93).
99Hilary ColI. Antiar. B III 1(154).
339
 Period of Confosion
declares himself to be in communion with the Easterners and out of
communion with Athanasius. It 'is pretty clear that this is a
misrepresentation of the facts made out of an intense desire on the
part of Liberius to return from exile at all costs, and we must accept
the earlier letter as giving us the true account. IOO
Liberius' account of what happened at Aries in 353 is confirmed by
a fragment of a letter which he wrote to Ossius in 353 or 354, quoted
by Hilary.'o' In this Liberius informs Ossius that he with many
bishops from Italy had come together to request the Emperor, as he
himself (Liberius) had approved, to summon a council to Aquileia.
He sent Vincentius of Capua and Marcellus, a bishop from
Campania, to this council (he omits saying that it took place in Aries,
not Aquileia), but not only did Vincentius not achieve anything, but
he was led into deceit, leaving the Pope now very unhappy. The
legates at Aries did not even dare to report to Liberius personally but
wrote to him.l02 Liberius' representatives at Milan in 355 were
wholly unsuccessful in obtaining what he wanted. Eusebius of
Vercelli was exiled. The deacon Hilarius was flogged (we do not
know why). In the summer of 356 Constantius sent a eunuch
Eusebius with gifts to the memorial chapel at Peter's tomb in the
Vatican outside Rome. Liberius would not allow Eusebius to present
these gifts, and he returned disgruntled to his master. The
consequence of this was that the prefect Leontius in circumstances of
great secrecy arrested Liberius, and brought him to the Emperor at
Milan. Here after an interview with Constantius Liberius was
banished to Beroea in Thrace.,03 That Liberius well knew that he
was likely to be exiled is shown by his letter Quamvis sub imagine
written in 355 to Eusebius (Vercelli), Dionysius (Milan) and Lucifer
100SO Declercq Ossius 422-:--5; Moreira Potamius 77-80.
lOIColl. Antiar. B VI(I67).
102$0 Pietri in PTAA 121-2.
I03Athanasius HA 36.I-S(203) gives a largely fanciful account of what was said
by Liberius to Eusebius in Rome, and 39.1-4 describes, again with s~me
imaginative rhetoric, the circumstances ,of his exile. Theodoret HE 11.16.1-26 gIves
an alleged dialogue which took place on this occasion at Milan between the
Emperor and the Pope. It is simply a piece of pro-Nicene propaganda produced
about 358, deriving originally perhaps from Athanasius HA 35-40; the account of
Sozomenus HE IV.I 1.3-10 probably derives from the same source, and recounts the
same story about Liberius refusing the Emperor's money as does Theodoret
immediately after giving the imaginary dialogue. To both of them Liberiu~ is a
hero, not a traitor. For Liberius' c1andestine removal from Rome, see Ammtanus
Marcel1inus XV.7.6-IO.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (J5D-357)
(Calaris) who were all then in exile, saying that he is imminently
expecting to be exiled in the same cause as theirs, praising them
highly and assuring them that they are destined for heaven.'oo In the
place of Liberius Constantius caused a man called Felix to be
appointed bishop of Rome. Jerome says'o, that Acacius of
Palestinian Caesarea caused him to be chosen, but this seems most
unlikely. All the Sources agree that Felix was no favourer of
Arianism. The frightful strife which took place between the party of
Felix and the party of Liberius over the election of a Pope when
Liberius died in 366 suggests that Felix had a considerable following
in Ro~e; but he certainly did not command the support of all the
clergy and people.'oo Athanasius was on the whole sympathetic to
Liberius. In the Apologia Secunda he concludes that 'even ifhe did not
endure the affliction of exile to the end, yet he remained for two years
in exile, and he recognized that a plot had been hatched against us. "07
A little later, in the Historia Arianorum all that he says is: 'But Liberius
later when he had been exiled for two years gave in (tIIKAQ"') and out
of fear of death with which he was threatened signed' (a
compromising formula).'os We shall later consider the attitude of
Hilary of Poi tiers to Liberius' conduct.,09
5· The Third Exile of Athanasius
We are particularly well informed about the circumstances of the
Third Exile of Athanasius, because we not only have the accounts of
Athanasius himself,"° but also the very detailed and reliable
'04Hilary Coll. Antiar. B VI.2(164--6). Other sources for the exile ofLiberius are
Hi~ary Ad Constantium 1.8; Athanasius Apol. de Fuga 4.2(71); Rufinus HE 1.40. See
Ze~Uer Origines 273-4; Declercq Ossius 440-1 (he accepts Theoderet's dialogue as a
reliable report).
. IO~De Vir. Ill. XC::VIII.47;·Athanasius, more plausibly, says that Constantius' tool
In thiS case was Eplctetus of Centumcellae. backed by George of Alexandria HA
75.2(225)·
l06S?u:ces for the intrusion of Felix are Jerome Chronicon sub ann. 352 (which of
Course IS mcorrecr); Cesta inter Liberium et Felicem in Collectio Avellana 1(1-14).
107
89.3.
108 4 1.3(206).
109See below pp. 358--60.
110Ap. ad Constantium 19-32; HA 54. 71-'74, 75, 81; Apol. de Fuga 6, 7. 24.
34'
 Period of Confusion
evidence of the Historia Akephala.'" On May 9th 353, a delegation
led by Serapion ofThmuis travelled to Milan to protest Athanasius'
innocence. On May 23rd an imperial officer, Montanus, reached
Alexandria bearing a summons to Athanasius to come to the
Emperor at Milan. Athanasius refused, alleging that the summons
was forged. At the end of that year bishops assembled at Aries,
with only one exception, dutifully condemned Athanasius, and
recognized George as his supplanter. The implied threat did not
materialize until August 355, when the notary, Diogenes, arrived in
Alexandria charged to compel Athanasius to leave the city. The
Council of Milan had now taken place, and Constantius was ready to
regard Athanasius' refusal to attend it as equivalent to high
treason. 11 2 On September 4th Diogenes attempted to arrest
Athanasius in an attack on the church where he was ministering. This
attempt failed. Athanasius moved to another part of the city and
occupied himselfin baptising a number of people. Diogenes did not
nave enough troops at his disposal stationed in Nicopolis to effect his
purpose. He left Alexandria on December 23rd, re infecta.
In January of the new year, 356, the dux Syrianus with the notary
Hilarius and fresh supplies of troops entered Alexandria. On the
night of February 8th to 9th his soldiers made an attack on the church
ofTheonas, where Athanasius was. Once again he escaped, and now
took to flight. Until June: however, the supporters of Athanasius
occupied the churches of Alexandria. But onJune loth the prefect of
Egypt, Maximus, was replaced by Cataphronius, who entered
Alexandria accompanied by Count Heradius. OnJune 14th the pro-
Athanasians were dispossessed of their church and on June 15th the
churches were handed over to the followers. of George. Though
George himself did not reach Alexandria till February 358, from the
summer of 357 until the death of Constantius a policy of coercion,
which Athanasius and the Historia Akephala represent as a reign of
terror, was strictly enforced in Egypt wherever the imperial troops
could do so. The supplies of free wheat which the Emperor
customarily gave to the church for the benefit of the poor and needy
were transferred to the Arians. The dux Sebastianus was the main
actor in this persecution. It was when he was away from the city that
ItlTumer EOMIA I 664(31)--665(6). but also Martin Histoire 'Akephale' 89-97.
which is the version followed here. See also Simonetti Crisi 225-'7. and Opitz n. in
loco (p. 16"/) on Apol. Sec. 88.
t 12So Klein Constantius II 218--9 and n 133.
34 2
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (;50-357)
the Athanasians attacked George while he was in the Church of
Dionysius, in August 358. He was rescued by the prefect's police and
two months later left to join the other bishops of his party to help to
prepare a creed which would serve as a basis of agreement for the
General Council on a large scale which Constantius was planning.
On October 11th, after George's departure, the Athanasians were
strong enough to gain possession of the churches again. But on
December 24th the dux Sebastianus returned to the city and once
again dispossessed the supporters of Athanasius of the churches.
During all this period, until the news of the death of Constantius
reached hjm early in 362, Athanasius was in hiding in the hinterland,
usually among the monks in the desert, where he composed a series of
works justifying his conduct and policy and at first attempting to
conciliate, but fmally by about 358 steadily vilifying Constantius. He
managed during all that time to evade the imperial police who were
searching for him. Popular monastic literature was later to be full of
stories of his escapes and evasions. At some point in 356 or 357
Constantius sent a letter to the people of Alexandria. It was couched
in the usual imperial style, a mixture of pomposity and woolly
verbiage. ll3 It is full of abuse of Athanasius (whom he calls 'this pest',
6 oM6poC;, and 'most wicked', (l.lOx6'lP6tatoc;) (153)), and it
commends George to them. The fact that all attempts to arrest
Athanasius failed is a tribute to the remarkable and widespread
popularity which he had attained among the ordinary people not
only of Alexandria, but of Egypt.
6. The Sirmian Council of 357
In the year 357 a small. council met at Sirmium and produced a creed
which was of great significance. Who precisely attended this council
is a matter upon which authorities differ, though all agree that the
number of those present was smal!.'14 We can be sure that
1~3It is quoted in Athanasius' Apol. ad Const. 30(151-3). Kopecek (History 134-5)
conjures, a,ut of the Let~er to t1~e Bishops of ~gyPt 7 a meeting of Eastern bishops
antagomstlc to AthanaslUs. a hst of whom IS to be found there, and a doctrinal
stat~ment produ~ed ~t it, text, place. and date unknown, unmentioned by the
anCIent church hlstonans. I do not thmk that this can be done.
I 140riginal sources for th.e council ofSirmium in 357 are Athanasius Apol. Sec.
39; Apol de Fuga 5; HA 45; Hilary DeSynodis II; Phoebadius of Agen Con. Arianos 3
(PL 30; 15); Sozomenus HE IV.6. 1-16 and 12.6; Socrates HE 11.29. See also Gwatkin
343
 Period of Confusion
Germinius who was by then bishop of Sirmium, Valens and
Ursacius ~ere there. It is wholly likely that Potamius of Lisbon, by
now the leading Arian in the provinces west ofitaly, was present, and
Ossius unwilling but assenting. Sozomenus and Socrates add other
name;such as Mark of Arethusa and Basil of Ancyra, but they have
confused this council of Sirmium with that of 351 held in the same
town, and it is unlikely that more bishops than these first six named
attended, though we might add the name of George of Alexandna,
whose tenure of the see of Alexandria in the Arian mterest never
seemed to have prevented him absenting himself to attend to wider
affairs."s It is not even possible to determine whether ConstantlUs
himself was present or not."'
The creed was originally written in Latin. Hilary'17 gives us the
text of it, which is here rendered into English.
'Since there was thought to he no little difference concerning the faith,
all the points were carefully considered and d~scussed at Sir~~m. Our
brothers and fellow-bishops Valens, UrsaclUS and GermlIllUS wer.e
present. It is agreed that there is onc almighty God and Father. as IS
believed throughout the whole world, and his only Son Jesus Christ
the Lord, OUf Saviour, born (genitum) from him before the ages; but
there cannot be two gods, nor should they be preached. as the text
runs Un 20:17]. Therefore there is one God of all, as the apostle taught
[Rom 3:29, 30], and the'rest (of the passage, or of the Scnptures)
agrees and can contain nO ambiguity. But as for the ~ac~ that some.' ~r
many, are concerned about substance (substantia) whIch IS called, USIa ~
Greek, that is, to speak more explicitly, homousion, or homoeuslon a~ It
SA 161-4; Zeiller Origines 276-8; Meslin Les Ariens 270-3; Moreira Potamius
111-17; Decl~rcq Ossius 46-5. 512-); Simonetti Crisi 22~30.. . . Liber contra Arianos, probably within a year of the appearance of this
115S ozomenus' list of those present is like, but not Identlcal With, the hst of
bishops given by Socrates HE 11.29 as attending the c?un~il of.Sirmium of3.S I.,.so
much so that Martin (Histoire 'Akephale' p. 198 n 7) mamtams WIth ~om.e plauslblhty
that he, like Sozomenus, is giving a mingled account of both Strmlum 35~ a~d
Sirmium 357; but even ifhe is, it would be unwise to trust th.e accuracr of his lIst.
!16Simonetti thinks that he was either present at the council or. near It; Ham~ck
(History IV.76) thought that he was present. Klein says that at the time Constantlus.
though present, was distracted by disturbances bot~ on the ~an.ube and the
Euphrates frontier and cannot have had an opportumty of co~sldenng .the creed
produced by this council carefully (Constantius II 64), and this seems likely; t~e
council was, after all, a small one. Klein however is going t?O far when .he demes
that this creed was an expression of Arian doctrine and calls it a first .rea.ctlon to ~he
appearance ofNeo-Arianism (63. 64). I do not know what his authonty IS for saymg
(63 n IJ2) that Eudoxius of Antioch was present there.
117De Sytiodis II; see Hahn Symbole 199-201 (§16I).
344
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (35(}--357)
is called, there should be no mention of it whatever. nor should
anyone preach it. And this is the cause and reason, that it is not
included in the divine Scriptures, and it is beyond man's knowledge
nor can anyone declare the birth of the Son, and it is written on this
subject [Isa 53:8]. For it is clear that only the Father knows how he
begot his Son, and the Son how he was begotten by the Father. There
is no uncertainty about the Father being greater: it cannot be doubted
by anyone that the Father is greater in honour, in dignity. in glory, in
majesty in the very name of "Father", for he himself witnesses Un
14:28, in the form "he who sent me is greater than I"]. And nobody is
unaware that this is catholic doctrine, that there are two Persons
(personas) of the Father and the Son, and that the Father is greater, and
the Son is subjected in common with all the things which the Father
subjected to him;· that the Father has no beginning, is invisible,
immortal and impassible; but that the Son is born from the Father,
God from God. Light from Light, whose generation as Son, as has
been said already, no one knows except the Father; and that the Son of
God himself our Lord and God, as it is said, assumed flesh or body,
that is man from the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the angel foretold.
As all the Scriptures teach, and especially the teacher of the Gentiles
himself. the apostle, he took human nature (hominem) from the Virgin
Mary, and it was through this (man) that he suffered. But that is the
summary of the whole faith and the confirmation of it, that the
Trinity should always be preserved, as we read in the gospel [Matt
28: 19]. And the Comforter the Spirit is through the Son, who was sent
and came according to the promise, so that he might support, teach
and saoctify the apostles aod all believers.'
This creed quickly acquired the name of 'The Blasphemy of
Sirmium' from its opponents.' 18 Phoebadius of Agen produced his
creed, attacking it in detail. Hilary called it 'Ossius' lunacy'."9 It is
not certain who composed it. In De Synodis 11 Hilary attributed it to
Ossius and Potamius, in Liber contra Constantium 23 to Ossius alone,
associating perhaps Valens and Ursacius with him (see above p. 336).
Athanasius says nothing directly about its author when he mentions it
I t8Ccrtainly by 378, when a pro-Nicene Profession of Sirmium caused the
Arians to caIl this 'The Blasphemy ofSirmium' in contrast to the creed of3S7 (see
Gryson Scolies Ariennes 310-320(128-38»), but probably much earlier. If the title
given to the creed in Hilary's De Syn. I I Exemplum Blasphemiae apud Sirmium, is
original. then the term was current as _early as 360.
!!9Lib. con. Const. 23(598).
345
 Period of Confosion Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Two (;50---357)

in De Synodis 28.'20 The style indeed is loose and inelegant and is not since the Arian Controversy had begun, and it was to last another
at all reminiscent of Potami us' inflated attempts at grandiloquence in twenty-four years. Only now has there appeared that difference
those of his writings which have come down to us, but one would which gave Gibbon the opportunity of saying that the controversy at
hardly expect individual style to manifest itself in a document like one pOlnt was about a smgle iota (homoousios and homoiousios). But
this. It is best to assign the authorship of this creed to Valens, Ursacius, G.bbon could never resist sacrificing history to epigram.
Potamius and Germinius. Though Ossius signed it, the likelihood In spite of, indeed because of, its extreme character the Second
that he had a hand in composing it is minimal. Creed of Sirmium of 357 constituted a landmark.' It is not a
It is certainly an Arian creed, but not in the sense that it carefully compromising nor reconciling creed. It makes no concessions at all to
reproduces all Arius' chief doctrines. There is nothing about the the pro-Nicenes. It is certainly not meant to take the place ofN, but it
relation of the Son to the Word, nothing about the Son being attacks ~, no longer covertly, but directly and openly, as it also
produced out of nothing, not even 'there was a time when he did not attacks the DedicatlOn Creed of 341. It is the manifesto of a party, of
exist', unless the statement that the Father is immortal be taken to the party that stood in the tradition of Arius though it did not
imply that the Son is not. There is no hint at all that the Son is created. precISely reproduce his doctrine. And as a manifesto it was also a
The authors have no difficulty in applying the concept of begetting catalyst. It enabled everybody to see where they stood. At last the
and birth from the Father to him. But the document is clearly Arian confusion which caused Westerners to regard Easterners as Arians can
in its drastic, consistent and determined subordination of the Son to be. cleared up. This is an Arian creed. Those who support it are
the Father, in its insistence on the unique status of the Father, in its Anans. Those who are repelled by it are not. And we shall see in the
explicit rejection of the concept of substance (probably because the next chapter that there were many in the East to whom the Second
use of this word was thought, as it was always thought by Arians, to Creed of Sirmium came as a shock so that they felt as if they had
introduce corporeal notions into the Godhead), and in its careful woken out of a dream. Very faintly, like the softest appearance of
account of how the Son did the suffering, by means ofhis body (flesh hght befo~e the dawn, the solution to the Arian Controversy begins
or man but, one can be pretty sure, not human mind). It is the Son to be pOSSlbk The penod of confusion is slowly coming to an end.
who suffers, through his body. The Father is incapable of suffering.
This is a doctrine of God suffering, and the suffering is done by a
lower God who can endure such experiences. In spite of a certain
crudeness and simplification, this is a recognisably Arian creed, Arian
according to the less subtle, less philosophically-minded Western
mode, buntill Arian. It is manifestly not Neo-Arian. If Aetius and
Eunomius have by now begun promulgating their doctrines, they
have not yet penetrated as far as Sirmium. On the manner of the
Son's generation the creed is completely agnostic. Ingenerateness is
only once attributed to the Father and not made a central and critical
attribute. The use of ousia is rejected, not on philosophical but on
Scriptural grounds. It is a remarkable fact, whose significance will be
estimated later, that this Latin creed is the first document in history to
use the word 'of like substance' (homoiousios). It was thirty-nine years
1200pitz however, in loc., attributes it to Valens, Ursaciu5, Germinius and
Potamius. Moreira debates whether Potamius had a hand in it, Potamius 145--9.
Vigilius ofThapsus Dialogus contra Arianos J.2I (PL 62) 194 attributes it to episcopi
vestr; (i.e. the Adans).

347

12
Attempts at Creed-Making: Phase 3
(JS7-3 61 )
1. The Rise of the Homoiousians
The notable Second Creed ofSirmium of357 had been produced by
only a small gathering of bishops. But when not long afterwards
Leontius bishop of Antioch died and was succeeded by EudoxlUS
(probably in 358), the new bishop summoned a sy'.'od to Antioch
which welcomed and approved of this Second S,rnuan Creed. ThiS
act must have given the creed publicity in the East which it might not
otherwise have received.' Eudoxius was certainly at that period a
supporter of Aetius, the extreme neo-Arian, and, though Aetius'
chief work, the Syntagmation, was probably not yet wntten, hiS ,deas
were becoming widely known. They were not precisely the ideas
expressed in the Second Sirmian Creed, but they were sufficiently
like them to suggest that a new and radical theology, a development
of that of Arius, had now appeared over the horizon.> This new
phenomenon very soon gave rise to a reaction which was a very
significant 'one, and which we must noW examine.
lSee Sozomenus HE IV.I2.3-'7 and Historia Akephala 4.5 (p. 156, Martin) and
Martin's note p. 196 and Loafs' Arianismus' 34; the Egyptian do~ument's ~cc~unt is
muddled. Sozomenus said that Eudoxius gained this see by dIrect apphcat~on [0
Constantius. who was on the Eastern Front, over the heads ofthe other candIdates,
George of Laodicea and Mark of Arethusa. ."
2$ozomenus (IV. 12.5,6) says that the bishops attendIng thl~ Antl0chene synod
of 358 were, as well as Eudoxius, AkakiusofCaesarea an~ Ura~lUs.ofTyre, a~d ~at
the synod (whose encyc1ical, ifit issued one, has not survived) Justified the reJ~ct1on
(by Sirmium II) of both homoousios and homoiousius on the grounds that thiS was
pleasing to the West. Their only justification for this odd s~atement was the pr~sence
of Ossius at Sirmium 357. Sozomenus also says that OSSlUS and the other blsh~ps
who attended Sirmium 357 were there to end the quarrel between Valens, UrsaCIUS
and Germinius. This is curious, and may be a muddled reflection of the later
disagreement between Germinius and the other two.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (;57-361)
The name most prominently associated with this reaction is that of
Basil of Ancyra. He had been appointed to the see of Ancyra when in
336 Marcellus was ejected from it. He had held that see ever since, or
at least had succeeded in holding it more firmly than Marcellus ever
did after that date. It is possible (though not likely) that there were
periods when Marcellus was in possession of the see and not Basil.
Basil had probably attended the Council of Antioch in 341. He had
signed the creed (the Macrostich) sent to the Emperor Constans in
342 or 343. He had been excommunicated and (on paper) deposed by
the Western bishops at Serdica, and had signed the encyclical letter of
the Easte~ bishops on that occasion? Now early in 358, when winter
was still making travel difficult, he summoned a council of bishops to
Ancyra. There were twelve bishops present, among them, as well as
Basil, were Macedonius of Constantinople, Eugenius ofNicaea, and
Eustathius ofSebaste; George of Lao dicea signed the statement issued
afterwards, though he was not present at the council. The statement
which emerged from this council (it can hardly be called a formal
encyclical), and which was certainly composed by Basil himself,
marks the emergence of a new and coherent theological point of
view. This is the theology of those whom Epiphanius, quite
undeservedly, calls 'Semi-Arians', but who are usually today thought
of as Homoiousians, a designation which is more accurate but still a
little misleading. 4 Gwatkin described the group as a 'Semi-Arian
position modified by an Athanasian influence's and Ritter as the right
wing of the Eusebian party." Neither of these judgments is entirely
satisfactory, as we shall see when we examine the evidence. The
members of this school do not actually use precisely the word
6~OIOUcrtO~ (homoiousios). It first apparently occurs, in Latin, in the
Second Sirmian Creed in the form homoeusion (though in his version
of this creed Hilary does not clearly represent it as mentioning
3See above, p. 296.
4For this school ofihought see Harnack, History IV.76--?, 81, notes 81 and 82;
Gwatkin SA 736-7, AC 90'-91; Loofs 'Arianismus' 32-3; Prestige CPT 267-8;
Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 153--6; Meslin, Les Origines 279-81; Simonetti
Stud; 72-74, 166-185; Crisi 239-41, 266-7; Ritter Das Konzil von Konstantinopel
28.2--6; F. Dinsen Homoousios 137-43; Kopecek, History 129-32, 183-97; J. N.
Steenson Basil of Ancyra and the Course of Nicene Orthodoxy (unpublished thesis)·
passim. Epiphanius' judgment of this school (Pan 73 .1.4--'7 (268» is almost worthless.
sSA 247.
6Das Konzil 26.
349
 Period of Confusion
homoeousion 7 ), and the word occurs in Aetius' Syntagmation (which
we shall date to 359), there of course condemned· It certainly was
not a slogan designed to unite a party, but a convenient way of
referring to a theological group, used perhaps more by those who did
not form part of the group than by those who did. The immediate
cause of the summoning of this Council of Ancyra of 358 was a letter
written by George of Laodicea in Syria. If we are to assume that in
our records of the Arian Controversy there is only one George,
bishop of Laodicea, 9 he must be the same presbyter George who
wrote a strongly Arian letter to Alexander of Alexandria about
322 , '0 who was expelled from Antioch by Eustathius about the year
32 6 , and who later composed a eulogy ofEusebius of Ernesa. He must
have considerably modified his views by the year 358. He addressed
his letter to Macedonius, Basil, Cecropius (of Nicomedia) and
Eugenius (of Nicaea), and in it he complained that the city of
Antioch, under Eudoxius as bishop, was likely to be wholly
dominated by the doctrines of Aetius and his theology of
anhomoios.' , On this pretext Basil summoned his council to Ancyra.
It issued a long doctrinal statement, addressed to fellow-bishops in
Phoenicia 'and the others who believe as we do' .'2 This letter is of the
highest importance for an understanding ofHomoiousian theology,
and must be examined here:
The letter begins by listing a series of recent events which have been
important for those who have composed the letter: 'the things which
happened at Constantinople because of Marcellus' [presumably his
deposition in 336 for SabellianismJ; the statement offaith produced by
7 De Synodis I I .
8Epiphanius Panarion 76. I 1.4 cr. the expression in the Expositio Patricii et Aetii,
whose date can scarcely fall lacer than 360, et si quis dixerit substantiam Filii similem
substantiae Patris non nQti t blasphemat (Historia Akephala (Martin) 4.6 (15 6».
Philostorgius never mentions the word 6~Ol06crtor;. but on three separate occasions
associates Basil and his followers with 6J.looi>O'lo~ (HE III.I6; IV.9 and 12).
9Everybody seems to do so, but the conclusion is not certain. George was a very
common name; we have already seen one of Alexandria. There were, also, several
Laodiceas; three, besides that in Syria, are listed in the index of the Atlas of the Early
Christian World ofF. van der Meer and Christine Mohrmann, and in the Everyman
Atlas of Ancient Geography (1908 repro of 190 7).
'·Opitz Urk Ill. No. 13(19).
11Sozomenus HE IV.13.I-3.
12Epiphanius Panarion 73.2.1(268-9). The Letter is given in 73.2.1-II.II
(268-284). Hilary gives his account of this document in his De Synodis (PL 10)
13(490) - 28(SOI).
350
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (35?-3 61 )
the Syuod of the Dedication at Antioch [34IJ; the statement offaith
put out at Serdica [Eastern bishops' statement 343]; 13 the events which
happen at Sirmium in the case of Photinus [presumably 1st Sirmian
Creed 351]; 'the arguments which we set out when we were
questioned in each point of the faith by those in Serdica who were
dissenting from the East'14 [i.e. the Macrostich of 345, later repeated
for the benefit of the Westerners].
All scholars till recently have assumed that the reference to the creed
'on the occasion of the dedication of the church in Antioch' (to quote
the exa~t words) ;neant t~e S,econd C:eed of Antioch, which is very
often called the Dedl~atIon Creed m antiquity.15 There is good
reason for thiS conclUSIOn, because not only is this creed, with its
statement that the Son is 'the exact image of the ousia of the Father'
and its firm a~herenc.e to three hypostases, highly congenial to the
thought of Basil and hlS school, but Basil and his followers a year later
at the ,?ouncil of Seleuci~ opted for this creed, and an Homoiousian
Councd of Lampsacus m. the year 364 chose it also. Recently,
however, J.N. Steenson, m an unpublished thesis, has made an
Ingenious case for concluding that the creed intended here was the
Fourth Antiochene Creed of 341, and not the Second, mainly on the
grounds that Basil is appealing to a consistent tradition of credal
statements; and the Fourth Antiochene had been used on several
occasions in the whole history of creed-making between 341 and 358,
In th~ Macrostlch, and m the Sirmian Creed of 351, which are here
ln~ntlOned, whereas the 'Dedication' Creed (the 2nd) had not.'6 But
thlS theory ignores o?e fact and has to encounter one grave difficulty.
FlrSt, the ancients did not prize accuracy as highly as we do, nor
demand the kmd of consistency which we require. Even though
"2.2(269).
14~.3(269). The introduction also refers (73.2.8(270» to a letter from George of
L~odlcea enclosed. hut Our MSS show no such letter. It may be that this is the letter
given by Sozo~enus HE IV.I3.1-3 (see n I I above), but if so Sozomenus has
probably only gIven us an extract from this letter. See Gregory of Nyssa Con.
Eunom. 1.35(37) and Steenson, Basil of Ancyra 45-6.
15See above, pp.286-SH.
1~J. N. ~~enson, Basil of Ancyra and the Course of Nicene Orthodoxy 39-40 and
paSSIm. ThIS IS a fine study of ~ subject :vhi.ch has had no thorough investigation for
seventy years, and deserves Wider pubhcaoon. Its chief defect is an occasional failure
~f the a.uth?r to control his English. He twice uses 'compromised' when he means
compnsed (46, 63); he constantly writes 'conceptualities' for the simpler and
clearer 'thoughts' or 'ideas', and he spells 'relevant' as 'relevent' (1I8 n68)
'controverts' as 'contraverts' (II9) and 'altar' as 'alter' (141). '
351
 Period of Cotifusion
Antioch IV was reproduced several times later, ihis would not have
prevented Basil and his companions regarding the Eastern Creeds
drawn up between 341 and 351 as reproducing in effect the theology
of the Second (,Dedication') Creed of Antioch. Secondly, the Fourth
Creed of Antioch was not drawn up on the occasion of the
Dedication of the church in Antioch, but several months later; some
even think it was drawn up in 342.'7 And it was drawn up, not by all
the bishops assembled for the Dedication, but by a much smaller
group, of which in all probability Basil was not one. In fact 'the
Creed at the Dedication' can only mean the Second Antiochene
Creed of341, and it is forcing the evidence too far to apply this term
'to the Fourth Creed. Steenson's conjecture, however, that 'the
statement of faith put out at Sardica' does not mean the encyclical of
the Eastern bishops made after the debacle of 343, but the Macrostich,
which may have been composed at that point, in 343, and sent in a
slightly modified form later to the West,'8 is not improbable.
Basil begins the account of his theological position by defining
carefully why it is necessary to think of the Father and the Son both in
terms of a Father-Son relationship and in terms of a creator-created
relationship.
We are not baptized into a 'creator and a created' but into a Father and
a Son, and creator/created is one thing and Father/Son another. Ifwe
argue from our human experience of fathers and sons we can observe
certain points: i) we notice that the Son is like (<>JlO1.ov) the Father; ii)
we must not allow the thought of passibility to cnter this relationship
(as we must in the case of human fathers and sons). nor of corporeal
existcnce~ but with these safeguards we can apply the words 'creature'
(ktisma) ~nd 'creator' (ktistes) to Son and Father'9 Thus, when all
proper eliminations and allowances have been made, 'there shall be
left the single concept of likeness'. 20 Basil goes on to analyse this
argument more carefully. We must distinguish between the
relationship of creator/creature and that of Father/Son. The salient
irreducible clement in the latter is 'the begetting (yevecroopyia) of a
living being that is like in ousia, because every father is thought of as a
I7See above, P.29I.J. T. Lienhard 'The Epistle of the Synod of Ancyra 358: a
Reconsideration', 3 IS, adds the useful point that the expression 'teM:10V etC n:A.eiol)
found in this document (Panarion 73.6.6(276)) is one that occurs in the Second Creed
of Antioch 34I.
t8Steenson, op. cit. 41-3.
t9Epiphanius Panarion 73.3.1-8(271, 272).
201l6Vl11tClpaA€.Up91lcre:'tCll fvvo\(l 'tou 61loiou, 73.4.1(272).
35 2
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (35?-361 )
fat~er of an ousia which is like his'. 21 Ifwe remove this resemblance of
ousta,. then we· are reduced to the simple (and in Basil's view
unsatIsfactory) terms of creator/creature, not Father/Son. 22 God is not
m~rel~ a creator of the Son's power (energeia), but of his ousia which
eXIsts m accordance with the power; as operating power God is a
~reat~r, but not a Father. 23 But if on the other side, fearing the
Infe~tlon ~f corporeality in the thought, yo~ remove the Father/Son
~e~atlOnshlp, you are left with some sort of product, not a Son.24 And
It IS ~o use trying to. distinguish the Son by his function as agent in
creation, be~ause this does not exempt him from the category of
products (n011111utu) any more than the tongs which lift a coal from
the altar are exempted from the category of being used or created by
the fact that the user does not touch the coal directly.25
This arg~ment that God must be both Father.and creator and that the
hkeness In oUSla IS necessary to prevent the relationship becoming
merely that of creator/creature is a kind of first draft of the argument
later to be used by the Cappadocians, that when all analogies are
exhausted what remains in Common between the Father and So i
nature (physis). It is .. Iso, Basil believes, necessary as a safegu:rl
agaIns~ Sabelha~l1sm: that WhICh IS like can never be the same as that
to whIch It IS hke' (73. 8 .8 (279».
~as~l next deals with. the Biblical evidence for his theology in an
IntrICate 3.rgument whIch must be omitted here. 26 In the COurse of this
h: ~akes It clear that he prefers the term 'image of the ousia' (ehcrov tti
o\)~tat:;) to de~ne the Son's relationship to the Father;27 it is wort~
notmg .that thl~ term was favoured by Eusebius of Caesa rea before the
CouncIl of Nlcaea, and also is found in the Second ('Dedication')
Creed o(Antloch 341.28
Basil next plunges into a complicated attempt to prove that there is an
analegy between the begetting of the Son and his Incarnation; during
whIch he skIrts the edge of the precipices both of Docetism and of
~nall1sm, argU1~g that as the Son is like the Father in ousia but not
entlcal WIth hIm, so the Son when incarnate is like mankind but
21 73 .4.2, 3(272, 273).
"3(273).
" 4(273).
24 5(273).
"6, 7(273, 274).
26 5. 1-8.8(274-9).
"4(277).
28S ee above, pp. 50-51,286.
353
 Period of Confusion
(not having been conceived in a normal way) not identical with
mankind. 2 '
'For as he who was in the likeness of men and was a man yet not a man
in all respects, human in that he took human flesh, for "the Word
became flesh" [John 1:14], yet not human in that he was not born as
men are (not. that is, from seed and copulation), so the Son before the
ages is God in that he is Son of God Gust as he is man as Son of man),
but not identical with the God and Father who begot him Gust as he is
not identical with human nature) in that there is no question of
emanation and process (pathos) Gust. as [in the case of the Incarnation]
there is no question of insemination and sexual pleasure). And as he
was in the likeness of sinful flesh, in that he experienced hunger and
thirst and sleep in the flesh, passions by which bodies 3rc motivated
towards sin (It,.1apnKii:u; lClveltQ.l.). yet while experiencing these
passions which I have mentioned he was not motivated towards sin by
them, so also the Son, since he was the Son of God and "being in the
form of God" and "equal to God" [Phil 2:6, 7], had the characteristics
of Godhead and was in his ousia incorporeal and like the Father in
Godhead, incorporeality and activities (energeias). Andjust as he is like
flesh in that he is flesh and experiences the passions of the flesh, but is
not identical [with flesh], so though he is God but he is not the form of
GOD, but of God, nor is he equal to GOD, but to God, nor as
genuinely as the Father.'30
Shortly afterwards Basil says that those who deny that the Son is 'like
in ousia', (011010<; Ka,'oo,,{av) say in effect that the Son is not a Son, but
only a creature, and the Father not a Father but only a creator. 31 This
comparison of the Son's relation to the Father with his relation to
humanity _when incarnate is unsatisfactory for two reasons: it
deprives the Son of genuine solidarity with human beings, because he
is not fully (or at least not normally) human (an error which was
widely committed by the pro-Nicene writers) and the comparison
does not hold because human nature, a generic concept, cannot be
2973.9.1-'7(279, 280).
30The quotation is from 9.1-5(279, 280). I have expressed the virtually
untranslatable distinction made by Basil (following Origen and many others)
between God with the definite article,(o eeOC;) and God without it (eeor;) by printing
the first in capitals and the second in the usual type. I have a.Iso ~foll~wir:g the
example set by Steenson} omitted the words in the text supplted m thiS difficult
passage by Holl, the GCS editor.
316(280).
354
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-3 6.)
analogous to Godhead which is not generic. 32 So far Basil's statement
strikes us as a resolute but not wholly successful effort to overcome
the weaknesses of Arian theology. He accepts the idea of the Son as a
creature, though he modifies it considerably; and he has not rid
himself of subordinationism.
The theological discourse is followed by nineteen anathemas
which reveal more clearly the position which Basil is attacking. They
are, m short, the apparent Sabellianism of Marcellus of Ancyra,
rad~cal Arianism which declared that the Son is 'unlike' (anhomoios) in
ous,a to the Father (and the two are more than once grouped in the
same anathema), and, less frequently, the homoousion. 33 Some
interesting points arise out of these anathemas:
Anathema 12 (3(283)) strikes him who declares that the Son's likeness '1
to the Father consists in power (energeia) but not in ousia. Anathema 13 :j
(4(283)) damns him who declares that holding the likeness in ousia of .~
'!
the Father and the Son means that the Son is identical with the Father
or 'constituted by division or emanation or process' (x:uta Jltpo~
ICUt'o:noppoiav, ICQta na9~). This is manifestly directed against N.
Anathema I4 attacks him who assumes that the distinction between
~he ~at~er and the Son, what Basil calls Uh6tr)'ta 'trov npocram(Ov,
lmplIes that the Son is unlike in substance (ousia).34 Here a useful
technical vocabulary distinguishing what God is as Three from what
he is as One is beginning to emerge, with ousia referring to the latter,
not the former. And anathema 19 (10(284» condemns anyone who
teaches that the Father is indeed Father of the Son in authority and
substance (ousia) [in contrast to the Arians, who would say in
authority, but not in substance], yet describes him as consubstantial
(6JloOUO'1pv) or-identical in substance (tautoucrtov) with the Father.
Steenson fmely describes this theology as 'a picture of distinctly
32Steenson (op. cit. 158--9) points out the latter defect.
3373.10.1-11.10(280-4). Steenson (op. cit. 164-5) thinks that there is a lacuna
?etween anathema 14(11.5(283») and anathema 15(I1.6(283}). Steenson's argument
IS partly based. on the fact. that Hilary, though he apparently reproduces the
anathe~as of th~s ?ocument In De Synodis, yet he later (90(542-3}) says that certain
matters In the ongmaJ letter were suppressed which he had seen included in a reliable
version; and also Hilary omits the last two of the anathemas in the Greek version
al.together. It is difficult to determine precisely what document Hilary had before
him. Steenson's other objection is the striking change of subject which he fancies to
be visible at anathema 15.
34 5(28 3); but anathema 17(8(283)) speaks of the Son as coming ~K 1tatpo~
61tocrt6.cre~ and also of the ingenerate ousia of the Father, with little clear distinction
between them.
355
 Period of Confusion
subsisting Persons, the [ulness of the one perfectly imaged in the
other',35 and says that Basil taught that in the relationship of Father
and Son 'there is an energeia which insures [sic] an essential similarity',
and this energeia is the unique generative operation of the Father,
distinct from his creative activity.3. And he compares this
interestingly with Athanasius' argument that in God generation
precedes creation and that God's 'productive substance' (Kap1t6yovo<;
ouaia) which is above his will, produces the Son (Or. con Ar. 11.2).37
But it cannot be maintained, in view of the evidence which we have
already seen, that the only objection entertained by Basil to the
homoousion (which Athanasius was by now strongly defending) was
the old Origenistic, Arian and Eusebian charge that it introduced a
notion ofcorporeality.38 Anathema 13 links the error of thinking of
the Father/Son relationship in corporeal terms with that of making
the Son identical with the Father; and anathema 19 regards
homoousion as synonymous with tautousion (of identical substance).
Sozomenus (HE III:! 8) remarks percipiently that to the
Homoiousians spiritual substances could not be homoousios; only
material substances could be that.'9 And this may well explain the
precise difference between the views of Basil of Ancyra and those of
the champions of homoousios. But this does not affect the clear
conclusion that Basil thought that to use the homoousios of the Son
was, as well as involving undesirable corporeal ideas, to say that his
ousia was identical with that of the Father. When all has been said and
done, however, this Ancyran document of Basil's represents a new
and fruitful departure in the confused melee of theological opinions
to which the theology of Arius had given rise. For the Arians 'the
divine printiple in their system was energetic not substantial, and thus
not fundamentally on the level of God's being."o This assumption
Basil had strenuously challenged, and in doing so had given to his
contemporaries a specific point to which they could rally, an
opportunity for clear thinking, and for a new alignment of views
350p. cit. 149.
J60p. cit. 182, and see generally 174-195.
370p. cit. 190-2. The question of the influence of Achanasius on the
Homoiousians is considered below, P.371.
Steenson attempts to argue, op. cit.
38S0 202-4.
39Steenson caUs attention to this, op. cit. 204-5.
40Steenson op. cit. 90.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (J57-3 6I )
about the central subject which had been for so· long and so
inconclusively debated.'!
2. The Council of Sirmium of 358
Basil and his companions followed up the issue of this document by
. sending a delegation with it to Sirmium, where the Emperor now
was with his court. The delegation consisted of Basil himself,
Eustathius ofSebaste and El<iusius ofCyzicus.1t succeeded almost too
well in its design. The Emperor Constantius was persuaded to change
his policy of favouring the Homoian Arian party, whom he
apparently had hitherto regarded as a central group likely to bring
about a consensus, and temporarily to support Basil. He issued an
imperial Letter full of the usual imperial bluster, aimed at Eudoxius
and Aetius.'2 In this outburst he disowned responsibility for
Eudoxius' appointment to Antioch, condemned his ordination of
Eunomius as deacon, and declared that he had always believed that
the Son was KUT'otlaiav OflOlO<; Tq> 1taTpi (like the Father in ousia).
Eunomius was banished to Midiaeos, a town in Phrygia, Aetius to
Pepuza in the same country, Eudoxius was sent packing to his
native town in Armenia, and several others of the same persuasion
were incontinently exiled at the suggestion of Basil.' 3 Basil indeed
seems to have used the opportunity offered by his possession of the
Emperor's ear with considerable ruthlessness. He also persuaded the
Emperor to call a council to the city of Sirmium.
This fourth Council ofSirmium produced a statement of doctrine,
but this 'third Creed of Sirmium' does not survive. The only
41Compar~ the :emark of Prestige on this theological viewpoint: 'It was at long
last seen that If.scrIptur~1 term~ were cap~ble of being expounded in diametrical1y
op~osed meanmgs. phdosophlcal analYSIS was needed to define precisely how
Scn~tu~e ought to be understood. Theology does not consist in the parrot repetition
of!Ibhcal texts, but in rational thought about Biblical data' (CPT 153).
Sozomenus IV. 13.4-6; 14.1-"7 (the letter).
43Philostorgius He IV.8-lo. PhiIostorgius (IV.!) says that this was the moment
when lv!acedon!us of Constantinople changed from favouring Eudoxius' views to
supportmg BaSil, and several scholars (e.g. Loofs 'Arianismus' 34) have accepted
thiS. B~t w~ ca.n~ot be sure ofPhiJostorgius' accuracy here. Macedonius is a most
mysterious mdlvIdual: we have already seen how difficult it is to determine his exact
status and support in Constantinople (~ee above pp. 280-4). Socrates (HE 11.28) and
Sozomenus (HE IV.2o.2-8) relate variOUS atrocity stories about his persecution of
the Novatians in Constantinople.
357
 Period of Confusion
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-3 61 )

connected account of the council which we havel that of

Sozomenus,44 is meagre and gives few details. The Emperpr was ~his part of the letter is interspersed with angry expostulations inserted
y some very early hand, quite possibly that of Hilary but if not of
present,and Basil and Eustathius and Eleusius, Ursacius, Valens,
~Somehcontehmporary of his who shared his disgust at Libe'rius' action 48
Germinius and some bishops from Latin-speaking North Africa o t en t at you should k I h .
(Athanasius, Alexander, Severianus and Crescens). Some decision ~f
J,ai:h in this letter mine, r::.~r~u;~J c~:r!;.:;'y t:~~~;~n(~o~~n::~~
(which we do not possess) made at the Council of Antioch which .ra er meus commums) Demophilus (Arian bishop of Be roe a in Thrace
condemned Paul of Samosata (possibly its rejection of homoousios) in 1~ whose charge Liberius was th,en detained) has been kind enou h of
the third century, the First Sirmian Creed of 35 I, compiled at the hIS food;ess ~o set out your creed and the Catholic creed whic; was
Second Sirmian Council at which Photinus was exiled, and the Sec- exp alne. an accepted at Sirmium by many of our brothers and
ond (,Dedication') Creed of Antioch were re-affirmed, and some fellow-bIShops [that which follows is the Arian treacher and
branded It, not the renegade Liberius] by all who w y, . ( I have
statement approving of the application of'like according to ousia and . h -' . , e r e present or were
in all things' to the Son was recorded. 45 Clearly this Council marked [~t : Ix;p~~al Presence). This creed I have accepted with a free 'assent
the temporary ascendancy of Basil of Ancyra and his school of e 0 Y I ary pronounces anathema against him anathema h b
thought. At this juncture Liberius was freed from detention in ;:~;~:.:; ~o~, Liberius, and to your companions!]; I h~ve contradi::ed ~:
held b ' e conceded my agreement, I follow this creed, this is
aV[A
Beroea, having signed some statement which satisfied the Emperor y me gam anathema to you d fi h' d .
sufficiently to enable him to return to his see of Rome. But what Liberius!J.49 There follow r f " an or a t " tIme, traitor
statement did he sign? Controversy has raged upon this subject.
Some letters ofLiberius covering this period are extant, which throw
;ebtetterr~yaNl
.
at S!rmiumT'h(as d~i~ar;tc~lls ~:i~~~;r:~~:~:St~!b;~e:~di~ge
arClSSUs eo ore B '1' Ed'
C . .' ,asllus, u OXlUS, Demo hilus
light upon the question but do not clear up all difficulties. ecroplUS, Silvanus Ursacius V a IE' .P ,
Exupeiantius, Terenti~us Bassus' G d en~, Mvagnus,. Hireneus,
These letters are given us in Hilary's Collectio Antiariana. - Their Ak lei . . ' • au ennus, acedomus Marcus
a us, luhus, SurIllus, Simplicius and Iunior 50 Th 'I '.
authenticity has been questioned but they are now regarded in almost know Q" . . e next etter
all respects as genuine by scholars of all traditions. Hilary leads up U ? as V ~,a SCJO vos, IS a humble request from Liberius in exile t~
to the first by a piece of narrative: 'Later Liberius tendered wholly th~:acIus, ~ ens and Germinius to intercede with the Emperor so
now t
useless everything which he had either done or promised when, sent h' 'h . hat he has condemned Athanasius and excommunicated
1m, e mIg t return to Rome 51 H h h ..
into exile, he corresponded with the heretical Arian traitors who had with his fellow b'sh E" e says t at e IS III communion
unjustly c'ondemned that orthodox bishop Athanasius' .46 Hilary then W . - lOpS plctetus (of Centumcellae a Ie d'
. estern Anan) and Auxentius (Arian bishop of Milan) ;'h .~ I~g
quotes from a letter of Liberius, known by its opening words, Pro
deifieo timore, addressed to the. Eastern bishops. Liberius gives way I~:e~%ede for him. And this letter evokes another angry inte~p::ati~~~
entirely on the subject of Athanasius. whom he is now ready to ~ ~ 1ema p~onounced by me to the traitor along with his Arians"J 52 Th .
condemn. He had only defended him. he says, out of reverence for a~~~ . etter, finown as. Non doceo, is addressed to Vincent ofCa~ua an~
Liberius' predecessor, Julius, and he has sent a letter of condemnation Urbi~u:e~tas rbom eXlkle. I~ comp~ains that his dear Son and deacon
een ta en lrOm him b V . h
to the Emperor Constantius by the hand of Fortunatianus (bishop of (imperial secu . Y enerlUS t e agens in rebus
Aquileia).47 He then refers to a document which he had signed, and of C . nty officer) and asks Vincentius to gather all the bishops
retur:m~~:a :~:te~er. so that they ~ay petition the Emperor for his
44HE IV.I5.I-4. , e IS at peace wIth the Eastern bishops. It ends
45S 0 Sozomenus IV. I 5.3, and Hilary's statement (De Synodis 78, 79) that Valens
and Ursacius approved of the homoiousion seems to confirm this. Philostorgius'
statement that Basil and his followers at this point agreed to the homoousion (HE
IV.9) may be a muddled recollection of it. For this Council of 358, see Zeiller, 48Th '.
Origines 279-8o~ Meslin les Ariens 279-82; M"oreira Potamius "194-5; Klein
49CorerYAare"glVeVnllln square brackets in the text, in italics.
so . ' n lar. 8.2(160-.,0).
Constantius II 89-90; Kopecek History 172-6; Pietri in PTAA 169.' IbId. VII 9(170).
46Coll. Antiar. B VII.7(167-8). See A. Hamman in Hilaire et son Temps 43-50. :~ Ibid. VII. 10(170-2).
47lbid. VII.8.1 (168). VII. IO.2(I72).

358
359
 Period of Confusion
pathetically with the words 'It is your responsibility if you want me to
die in exile, God will judge between me and yoU.'53
Athanasius deals more gently with Liberius. In his Apologia Secunda
he says that Liberius suffered much for the good cause: 'And even ifin
the end he could not tolerate the misery of banishment, still for two
years he remained in exile, recognising that a conspiracy had been
formed against U5'.54 And in the Historia Arianorum he contents
himself with remarking that Liberius was banished, without a
companion, and 'later after two years' space he gave in and, in fear of
death with which he was threatened, signed', 55 but Athanasius does
not tell us what Liberius signed. Sozomenus says that Liberius was
brought to the Fourth Council ofSirmium,that of 358 dominated by
Basil of Ancyra, and in the presence of the Eastern bishops and some
local prelates he was compelled to declare that the Son is not
homoousios with the Father, and that 'under the pretext that some
were attempting to revive the heresy of the homoousios' he was
induced to sign the doctrinal statement of that council and that he
signed a confession condemning those who denied that the Son is like
the Father 'in ousia and in everything' (Kat'ml"lav Kai Kataltlivta) and
that he was then allowed to return from exile to his see of Rome. 5.
Philostorgius echoes this when he says that Li\>erius gave way to what
was demanded of him and signed a documen~ condemning the
homoousion and Athanasius. 57 Sozomenus also says that Eudoxius and
his followers in Antioch who adopted Aetius' theology used to try to
make out that Liberius had rejected the homoousion and adopted the
view that the Son was unlike (avoIlOIOV) the Father. 58
IfLiberi\ls was present at the. Council ofSirmium of 358,no doubt
he signed its creed, the lost formula of Sirmium 358, which
comprised in all probability a condemnation of the homoousio»
(whether taken from the Antiochene council of the third century or
newly coined for the occasion), the Second (,Dedication') Creed of
Antioch of 34', the First Sirmian Creed of 351, and a statement
accepting 'like in ousia and in everything else' as the proper definition
53VlI. I I(172-4): the words quoted run in Latin vos videritis si volueritis me in exilio
deficere, erit deus judex inter me et vos.
54 Apol. Sec. 89.3: Opitz in loc points out that in fact Liberius remained in exile for
three years (355-8).
5sHA 41.1-2(205). 41.3(206). from which the quotation is takeJ;1.
56HE IV.15.1-3.
"HE IV.J(6o).
SRHE IV.IS.3.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-3 6,)
of the Son'~ relatio~ to the Father. But if, as seems much more
probable, "LlberlUs did not attend'.
Sirmium 358 , a andshl g dn' eda
compromISIng document earher, m 357, while he was in exile, the
formula referred to m Pro deifieo timore, which was it? It is evident that
th~ mterpolator in that letter thought that he had signed the radical
Anan creed of357 (the 'Blasphemy'). We have seen that this is what
EudoXIUS and his friends alleged, and Brennecke has made a strong
:ase for thiS solutIOn. 59 It IS not Impossible that Liberius did sign this
creed m 357; ~e seems to have been in a state of mind which would
allow him to ~Ign anythi?g as long as he could return to his beloved
Rome. But It IS not certam that he did so. Sozomenus implies that he
had not assented to the anhomoion. If the list given us by Hilary of
bishops. who also signed the formula which Liberius. signed is
authentiC, he could not have signed the 'Blasphemy'. Only a few
bishops were present when that creed was produced, and they did not
~nclude BasIl,who figures in Hilary's list. In fact this list is a mystery'
It could not represent the bishops who were present at Sirmium 358:
because neither Eustathius of Sebaste nor Eleusius of Cyzicus are
mentIOned m It nor the Western North African bishops mentioned
by Sozomenus (unless Surinus is the same as Severianus). It could,
ho,,:ev~r, bea dIsplaced list of the bishops who attended the Council
of SlrmlUm of 351 (second Sirmium); the presence of Gaudentius and
the ab~ence of Germinius ale perhaps significant. If we regald this list
as havmg nothmg to do with the Sirmian creed of 357, then one
objectIOn to the theory that Liberius signed this is removed. There
still rem~ms the qUite strong objection that Liberius says that the
creed which he agreed to, at the suggestion of Demophilus was also
Signed 'by many of Our brothers and fellow-bishops' and p~rhaps he
says that It was signed in the presence of the Emperor, whereas it is
not certam that Constantius was present at Sirmium 357, and there
were only a few bishops there. Of course, Constantius may have been
present, and Demophilus may have deceived Liberius about the
numbers. of bishops present at the Council. Contemporar
scholarship seems to agree on the whole without very solid reaso;'
t ~~H<".has s.hown that it was virtually impossible for Liberius to have'been present
a Irmlum In June 358. The Emperor. who attended the Council was not there
~eforeJun~, and the Fourth Sirmian Creed was produced in his pres~nce. Liberius is
nown to aV<.' l'ntered Rome on August 2nd; had he left Sirmium in late June he
could IJIJot have reached Rome as carly as this. See Hilarills l'Oti P 276-88 and m'ore
gelll'ra y 2654)6. .
361
 Period of C onfosion
that the document signed by Liberius in 357 was the First Sirmian
Creed, of 35 I.'0 But this is, perhaps, because the alternative is so
distasteful. It is difficult to see wh y precisely Demophilus should have
presented this creed to Liberius, though certainly Liberius would
have signed this formula more readIly than that of 357, whIch must
have been very distasteful to him. The matter must be left open. But
there can be no doubt that Liberius condemned AthanaslUs and
signed a formula which his pro-Nicene contemporaries unanimously
regarded as unorthodox. On returning to Rome, he naturally refused
to adopt Constantius' ridiculous proposal that he should be Jomt-
bishop with Felix. The people of Rome favoured Llbenus on the
whole, and Felix soon retired into a private life."
3. The 'Dated Creed' of 359
Constantius nOw thought that he saw an opportunity of achieving
lasting agreement in the Church on the vexed subject of the Christian
doctrine of God. If he excluded the extreme Arians, represented by
Eunomius and Aetius, at one end of the spectrum, and Athanasius and
his followers, whom he probably regarded as beyond hope of
reconciliation, at the other, there seemed a firm prospect of achieving
an understanding between Basil and his party and the main body of
bishops such as Macedonius, Eudoxius, Germinius, Valens, UrsaclUS
and Akakius who were firmly against any revival of N and yet who
had at Sirmium in 358 shown themselves capable of reaching
agreement with the Homoiousians. The West; nOw that Liberius had
capitulated; he was confident of managing. For this purpose he
recalled from exile all those clergy whom he had recently bamshed,
and announced the assembly of an ecumenical council. The first place
which he thought to be suitable for the council was Nicomedia, but a
60Lietzmann, Opitz, ZeiIler, Meslin, and Declercq agree on this. For this creed,
see above pp. 325-8. .
61S ozo menus HE IV,lj.4--6. Neither Socrates nor Theodoret can bn~g
themselves to record Liberius' fall from grace, though they both menti~n his exIle
and return. Theodoret HE II. 16.1-26 is occupied by a curious and wholly imaginary
dialogue between Constantius and Liberius which is supposed to h~ve taken place at
Milan just before Liberius' exile. Sozomenus has a sum~ary of 1~ HE ~V. I 1:3-8.
Both probably derive from Athanasius HA 35-4? Whl~ Its~lf IS an Imagt.nary
conversation held between Liberius and ConstantlUs. It IS a p1ece of pro-Nlcene
propaganda of about the year 358.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-361)
severe earthquake in that vicinity crippled the town and made even
the neighbouring Nicaea, which had also been proposed, unsuitable.
The Emperor, after some negotiation with Basil, whom he still
apparently regarded as his chief adviser in ecclesiastical affairs, finally
decided to split the council and gather the Eastern bishops at Seleucia
in Cilicia and the Western in Ariminum in Italy. The Emperor
himself would appear at neither, but would remain at
Constantinople, about halfway between both places· 2
But before the double council met, Constantius decided that it
would be wise to produce a document which could be submitted to
both gatherings. He consequently summoned a few leading bishops
to Sirmium to draw up this document. We have no official list of
those who were at Sirmium when this Fourth Sirmian Creed (at the
Fifth Sirmian Council) was drawn up, but we know the exact date of
its composition (or rather ofits publication) because it was, for some
reason, dated (arid hence is usually known as the 'Dated' Creed), May
22nd, 359. 63 It was actually composed by Mark of Arethusa, but
Germinius certainly had some hand in it because, in a letter preserved
in Hilary's Collectio Antiariana written many years later to a friend
called Rufinianus, Germinius recalled that when he, with George of
Alexandria, Pancratius ofPelusium, Basil of Ancyra, and Valens and
U rsacius (to whom in fact he is addressing his words, though he
writes nominally to Rufinianus), was drawing up the 'Dated' Creed,
after a night's discussion they agreed to accept the formula of Mark
(of Arethusa) 'the Son like the Father in everything as the holy
Scriptures declare and teach'." The creed runs thus:
'We beJic:::ve in one sale and true God, the Father Almighty, creator
and maker of all things: And in one only-begotten Son of God who
before all ages and before all beginning and before all conceivable
time and before all comprehensible substance (oocr{ar;)65 was begotten
impassibly from God, through whom the ages were set up and all
things came into existence, begotten as only-begotten, sole from the
62Sozomenus HE ~V.I~.1~22. Socrates HE 11.37 is useless as a guide to the
antecedents of SeleuclajAnmmum; see also Hilary De Synodis 8.
63For comment on the 'Dated' Creed, see Loafs" Arianismus' 35; Simonetti Stud;
183 n. 109. Crisi 245; Klein Constantius II 91-2; Borchardt Hilary'S Role 165 n. 3. The
cree? its:Jf was o~iginally P?blished in Latin (as Sozomenus tells us) but only
survIVes In Greek m Athanaslus De Synodis 8 and Socrates HE II.37.
64Filium similem patri, per omnia, ut sanetae dieunt et docent scripturae, Coli. Ant jar. B
VI.3(I63)·
65Socra tes has &Jtlvoia~ (aspect) for ousias, but this is not a likely reading.
 Period of Confusion
sole Father, like to the Father who begot him, according to the
Scriptures. whose generation nobody understands except the Father
who begot him. Him we know to be the only-begotten Son of God,
who came down from the heavens· at the Father's bidding in or~er .to
put an end to sin, and was born (ysvv~e"vta) from Mary the Vltgm,
and went around with his disciples and fulftlled all, the strate.gy
(ohcovoJ.Liav) according to his Father's will; he was cruclfie~ an~ d.led
and went down to the subterranean places and fulfllied hIS mISSIon
there, and the gate-keepers of Hell (Hades) shuddered when they saw
him' and he rose from the dead on the third day and conversed wIth
his disciples and fulfilled all the dispensation (oIKovoJliav) and when
the forty days were fulfilled he was taken up into ~eaven and IS seated
at the right hand of the Father, and will come agam on the last day of
resurrection in his Father's glory to reward everyone accordmg to hIS
deeds: And in the Holy Spirit whom the only-begotten of God Jesus
Christ himself promised t.o send to the race of men, the Paraclete,
according to the text [conftation ofJn 16.7, 13f.; 14.16f.; 15.26]. The
word ousia because when it was naively inserted by our fathers
though not' familiar to the masses, it caused disturbance, and because
the Scriptures do not contain it, we have decided should be re~oved,
in.
and that there should be absolutely no mention of ousia relation to
God for the future, because the Scriptures make no mentIon at.all. of
the ousia of the Father and the Son. But we declare that the So~ IS like
the Father in all respects (3Jlo\oV KU'tU 1tIlvta), as the holy Scnptures
also declare and teach.'
This creed has been widely, and no doubt rightly,judged as a careful
compromise which would be acceptable both to the Homoran (I.e.
moderately Arian) centre party represented by people such as
Akakius and Germinius, and the Homoiousians, I.e. the school of
thought represented by Basil of Ancyra. 66 It would not ~e easy for
the extreme Arian followers of AetlUs, to accept It, for ItS
subordinationism would not be radical enough for them, and of
course it rules out the champions of homoousion, indeed positively
describes them as naive (n"'-olicn:spov). It is worth noticing that whrle
the creed itself refuses to use the word ousia, its rejection of that term
66S ee Loofs 'Ariaoismus' 3S; Simonetti Studi 183 o. 1~9 and Crisi 245--6; KI.ei~
Constantius II 91-2 (Klein hails the Creed a~ a trl?m,ph ~or .Co~s~antlUs
statesmanship). Athanasius (De Synod;s 3.2(232» Jeers at It; Whde ~m glvfg. th~
date] they caJled the Emperor eternal they deny that .the S~n IS e~er astl.n~
(airovlOV)' considenng the opening expressions of the Chnstologlcal article. thIS IS
quite unf~ir. The Creed is remarkable for the attention which it pays to the Descent
into Hell.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phas.e Three (35?-36, )
is much milder than was the rejection of it by the Second Sirmian
Creed of 357. To say that the use of ousia confuses the laity and is not
found in Scripture is not to rule out its use among the theologians.
But even so Basil had some qualms in signing this creed. Epiphanius
6
tells us ' that in giving his signature he added to the term 'like in all
respects' the note 'in all respects, not only according to will but
according to hypostasis and according to constitution (u"ap~,,) and
according to being' (to sIva,) - in other words according to ousia
without ousia being exactly mentioned. On the other hand, a curious
little appendix, also in Epiphanius, at the end of the letter of George
of Laodicea (with which we shall presently deal), added apparently
by somebody other than George, informs us that when Valens came
to sign the 'Dated' Creed he added the note 'How (or that "iii,) we
have signed on the eve of Pentecost the foregoing signature, those
who are present know, alld the pious Emperor, to whom we have
borne witness both orally and in writing'; and also that Valens wished
to sign to the term 'like the Father', but not to the term 'in all
respecrs', and that the Emperor observed this and compelled him to
assent to the term 'in all respects'. It was indeed this that constrained
Basil to add his own gloss to the creed there and then. 68 These
qualifications added in very different interests might have warned
Constantius that in attempting to reach a compromise creed based on
a consensus he was walking a tightrope and that to achieve what he
wanted he would have to USe force or fraud or both. They may also
have strengthened his resolve to arrange the ecumenical council in
two different places. Valens would be kept apart from Basil by much
space of shadowy mountain and sounding sea.
With this 'Dated' Creed the Letter of George of Laodicea is usually
associated. The authorship of this Letter, which Epiphanius gives us
directly after the document composed by Basil after the Council of
Ancyra of 358, 69 is not certain. The document composed by Basil in
358 ends with the words 'The memorandum .of those who were of
the party of Basil and George is finished', ,0 and the next document
(the Letter) begins without a title. But the words could equally well be
divided thus: 'It is finished' [i.e. Basil's document of35 8J and the next
67Panarion 73. 2 1.7(295).
68Ibid. 73.21.5, 6.
69Panarion 73. 12.1-22.4(28 4-5).
7°tx~TJpWaTJ trov m:pi BaaiMlov Kai reooPYlov 0 6JtoJ.1vTJJ.1attaJ.16~. Holl supplies a
title 'EJttat6~TJ fecopyiot) to the next document, but it is not in any MS.

Period of Confusion
words would then be the title of the Leller, 'The Memorandum of
those who were of the party of Basil and George'. We do not in fact
know who wrote the Letter. But just before transcribing Basil's
document of358 Epiphanius has said that he will set dow? 'how each
wrote a letter, Basil one, and George of Lao dice a along with Basil and
his followers another. '7 I There is therefore a strong presumption that
this Leller was written by George, or by Basil and George jointly.
Certainly it exactly echoes the doctrine of Basil' s Ancyran document;
it is an Homoiousian Manifesto. It is usually assumed that this Leller
was written as a direct result of the production of the 'Dated' Creed,
between May 22nd and the period when the Council ofSeleucia met
in the autumn, in the year 359, and was intended to make it clear that
Basil's party had not deserted their original ideas because Basil had
signed the 'Dated' Creed, but on the contrary they regarded that
Creed as quite compatible with their theological standpomt. This
dating of the document which we shall henceforwar~ refer to as
George's Letter is highly likely. One is, however, left with a lurkmg
J
suspicion that everything said in George 5 Letter. and e:ren the
epilogues dealing with the glosses put by Valens an~ Basil, could
apply to the Third Sirmian Creed of 358, and If any eVidence turned
up linking George's Leller to the Creed of 358, not that of 359, It
would not be surprising.
George at once plunges. without preface or greeting, into an
argument about the substantial, real independence of the Son,72 'The
word ousia is not found actually in the Old or New Testaments' , he
writes, 'but the meaning is expressed everywhere'.73 Paul of Samos at a
and Marcellus admit 'Son' only as far as the teeth, but in fact mean
Logos only. But those who condemned Paul of Samosata [Antioch
26H] wished to declare that 'the Son has hypostasis and is genuinely
existent (U1tllP'X-roV) and is in existence (ow)' and is not a mere utt~ranc.e
(tnlllu) but an ous;a, distinguishing himself from that whICh IS
'without self-sufficient existence' (leaa' tauf6v avunapKfov). The
fathers called the Son otls;a in order to show tha~. though he was Logos
as interpreting and executing the will of the Father, he was more tha~
that. God's words are not ousiai but 'uttered powers' (A£KtlKUl.
"Ibid. 73.1.8(268).
72 12 .1-8(28 4-5).
73u. I (284).
74 12.2, 3 (quotation's from 3) ( 28 5).
366
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (35?-361)
tvepY£lUl)= 'But the Son, though he is Logos. is not an uttered power of
God. but because he is Son he is an ousia.'75 This hypostasis the Fathers
called ousia. 76
In this Letter George is concerned, more even than Basil was in his
statement made after Ancyra 358, with particular heretics whose
views he wishes to counter. He has indeed the Second Sirmian Creed
of 357 in mind, but even more those who are currently being
attracted by the theology of Aetius, and, as we shall see, he quotes
later some of their utterances.
We oppose. he says, when we hold that the Son is like the Father in all
respects, those who teach that he is only like in will and power, 'but
th~t in being (KaTa ") sIva.) he is unlike (UV6!lOlOV) the Father'. 77
They say that he is not begotten from God. but only a creature
(ICtiO'j.ta) differing from other creatures· in that he is greater in
grandeur (li.EySO£l) in that'all other things were made by him, and in
that he alone was made directly by God. 7'
The next section continues this attack on heretics who are more likely
to be Aetian or Eunomian Arians than the compilers of the Second
Sirmian Creed of 357, little though George may have relished that
document. After a side-glance at Sabellians who identify the Father
and the Son (perhaps homoousians),7. he accuses his main target, the
Neo-Arians, of preferring 'Ingenerate' and 'Generate' (UytVV1]TO, and
ytVV1]TO,) rather than 'Father' and 'Son'so and of describing the Son
as unlike (anhomoion) the Father in ousia, 'just as they thought that
they were condemning the Church by means of the letters which
they extorted from the venerable bishop Ossius'.'1 This may simply
refer to the Second Sirmian Creed of 357, of which Ossius was
reputed to be an author,.2 but it may suggest that before permitting
Ossius to return to Cordova the authorities at Sirmium induced him
to sign some letters recommending others to accept this creed. It
75 12 .6(2 85).
7612.8(285). It is not clear who 'the Fathers' are. They could hardly be the Fathers
of Nicaea 33 years earlier. George may be referring to Eusebius of Caesarea or to
Origen or to the compilers of the lost statement of Antioch 268.
7713.1-4(285-6). quotation 2(286).
78 13 ·3, 4(286); the disinclination to describe the Son as begotten is. reminiscent of
Neo-Arianism rather than an earHer form of Arianism.
79 14 . 1 • 2(2~6).
8° 14 .3- 5(286--7).
" 14.7(287).
82S ee also. PP.345-6.

Period of Confusion
certainly suggests that George did not see any ma;erial ~ifference
between the writers of this creed and the neo-ArIans doctrIne, even
though the creed did not exhibit a pointed contrast between
Ingenerate and Generate nor describe the Son as unlIke the Father.
But Easterners, George continues, recently commg to .Sl~;nlum
contradicted these dangerous statements and opted for ousla. God
inspired the Emperor to call a council which would prevent the
heretics 'design of canonizing "unlike". ~c~ordmg to. bemg and
origin' and 'like (only) according to wIll, and whIch ~ctually
promulgated 'like in every respect', and this term of course mcludes
likeness according to ousia. 84
Next, George produces a fIrm declaration about the di~tinct existence
of all three Persons of the Trinity. 'N obod Yshould be disturbed by the
word hypostases, because the East~r~ers (o{ a~a"t~A.1.Koi) use hyposta;:!
to express the subsisting and eXlStmg propnencs the :ers~n~. .
?f
Each Person, including the Holy Spirit. can be descrIbed as subslstmg
(6Ijlt<Tt0l,) in such a wa Ythat in speaking of three hypostases they do
86
not mean three ultimate principles or three gods.
For the first time in the controversy a clear distinction has been. made
between the relation of the Son to the Father and the relatIOn of
Christ incarnate to our human nature." In this argument only a few
passages need detain us: . .
'The Easterners confess that there is onc Godhead embracIng all things
through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Whik th~y confess ,one G.odhead
and one Kingdom and one ultimate prmClple (cipX~v), still they
devoutly recognize the Persons (n:pocrOO1toov) in the propnety of. then
hypostases perceiving the Father as existing in his fatherly sovereIgnty
(uv9£vtI'1) and confessing the Son, not as a part of the Father, but
simply begotten and existing from the Father. perfect ~rom perfect.
and recognizing the Holy Spirit. whom the holy Scrl~~ure names
Parac1ete. as existing from the Father through the Son.
8314.8(287). It is not easy to reconcile this statement with th~ 'D~ted' Creed, f~r it
actually excluded the use of ousia, whereas the statement ofSumlUm 35 8 cert3mll
included an approval of'like according to ousia'. Yet not only Ste~nson but Loo s
('Arianismus' 32-3) and P. Hadot (Marius Victori~us 276) before h~m.had accepted
this. Simonetti's explanation (Studi, 183 n. 109) IS not very convmcmg.
84 15 .1-4(287"""8).
85ta C; Uh6t lltac; troY n:pocrcOn(Ov \Xp8O'toocrac; Kat 6n:apxoooac;, 16.1. 2(288.
quotation from 2.
86 16.2(288). . IC I' M
87 16.3,4(288--9); this part ends with a reference to the baptlsma ~onnu a In att
28:19 (6(289)).
368
------~~"i'-:·:'"·:yE"~-·)"":*"Y~T
I
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-361)
George soon after alludes to a longer treatment of the likeness of the
Son to the Father, and here he apparently means Basil's treatise
composed after the Council of Ancyra of 358, but perhaps a longer
form of it which is not in our hands. 88 George goes on to elaborate
the analogy which we have already seen set out in Basil's work
between the relation to the Son to the Father and the relation of
Christ incarnate to our human nature. 89 In this argument only a few
passages need detain us:
In one of these George says that 'the Person (hypostasis) of the Son is
like the Person (hypostasis) of the Father; he is Spirit from the Father
and as far as the aspect (evvOlu) goes the same, just as he is the same [as
we are] as far as the aspect of flesh goes; yet not the same, but like,
because the Spirit which the Son is is not the Father. and the flesh
which he assumed is not [flesh] from semen and sexual pleasure.'9o
This statement could be· said to support the theory advanced
originally by Harnack but adopted by many others since his day that
the Homoiousians held a 'generic' doctrine of the Trinity, which the
Cappadocians later borrowed. Then in several passages George insists
that the Son does not act 'in sovereign power' (uvgevflIc&<;) as the
Father does, but 'in the ministerial capacity' (01tOUPYlIC&<;) and yet that
his likeness to the Father does not consist simply in will and activity
(or power), but in authentic substance or existence'"
Almost all the rest of this Letter is occupied in challenging those
whom George clearly regards as his most formidable enemies, ·the
Neo-Arians. He rejects their insistence that the prime category in
which to think of the relationship between the Father and the Son is
that of IngenerateJGenetate (aytvVIlfo<;jy£VVl]f6<;); this is a wrong
classification, because it places the Son in the same order as all other
products (Y&W~fa)"2 The words 'Father' and 'Son' imply a
relationship and each part of that relationship implies the other, the
whole involving a sharing of nature (fij, IjlUa£Ol<; f1jV OilC£lOf1]fU) and
this does not apply to the terms 'ingenerateJgenerate',,3 It is in terms
88 17. 1(289); see above, p. 355 n.33·
89 18.1-8(290-1).
9°18.1(290).
) 9118.3-8(290-1); cf. Kat'atno"to dVal Kai ocp80"taVal Kai unapX8lV, 8(281).
9219.1-2(291-2).
93 19. 3- 5 (292). There is not the faintest hint of a contrast or confusion of
(&;}Y8VVl\t6C; and (&;)YEVTJt6C; here, which Prestige thought to play an important part
in the Arian Controversy.
 Period of Confusion
of Father/Son that the New Testament speaks, and we were baptised,
not into the Ingenerate and the Generate, but into the Father and the
Son. 94
George at this point begins quoting from some Arian source which
we cannot identify.9s It is not Aetius' Syntagmation, and it does not
suggest the Homoian theology of Germinius, Valens, Ursacius and
Akakius. It is much more like the doctrine of Eunomius. It is
interesting to observe, however, that George ascribes this doctrine to
those who have just signed the 'Dated' Creed (or possibly the
statement ofSirmium 358) along with Basil. 96 Evidently the party of
Basil, as we have already had reason to suspect, did not distinguish
between the doctrine of the Second Sirmian Creed of 357 and the
doctrine of the nascent school of Aetius and Eunomius.
These people obnoxious to. George argue in six short quotations
which he gives that it is wrong to. say that the Son is like in ousi'a to. the
Father because though he can be said to be like in will and activity, and
though he derives his ousia from the Father, he is ingenerate (agennetos.
and also. agenetos (without beginning of existence» and the Son
generate (gennetos), so that the Son must be regarded as 'of a different
ousia' from the Father. 97
George finally places before his opponents the fact that though they
stand for 'like in will, unlike in ousia', they have just signed a creed
which declared that the Son is like the Father in all respects, and this
term necessarily includes likeness in ousia. 98
This important document of the Homoiousian party, along with
Basil's statement issued after the Council of Ancyra of 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 theological associates of Basil of
Caesarea were of this persuasion. The tradition of Trinitarian
theology which was destined ultimately to prevail already existed in
94 2 0..1-5(29 2-3),
95 2 1,2--6(293-4) .
96 2 2.1-4(294); George accuses them of being in their 'Anhomoian' doctrine
inconsistent with declarations to which they had previously set their hands.
97St&pOUO"l.O~ (heterousios). 21.4(294); this term was the watch-word of the
Eunomians. They did not use anhomoios (though it occurs once in the Thalia), as
their opponents claimed. because they believe that there were some ways in which
the Son was like the Father, though not in ousia.
98 22.1-5(294-5).
370
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-361)
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 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 sti\[ to make important advances
of their own.
Did the theology ofBasil and George owe anything to the work of
Athanasius, which by 358/9 was available and capable of exercising
an influence? The nearest approach, as we have already seen, to the
central . Trinitarian ideas of Athanasius manifested by the
Homoiousians was in their conviction that likeness in ousia necessary
implied a community of nature between the Father and the Son; and
we have seen George using an expression very like this (tii.; '1'6"'00';
tijvoIK.,ot'lta).99 Steenson discusses this question usefully, but finds
that he has to come to an open verdict. 100 On the whole it does not
seem likely that, even though Basil and George are much less
troubled by the pro-Nicenes or Sabellians than they are by nascent
N eo-Arianism, they were influenced by or had acquaintance with the
theology of Athanasius. Their approach to the theology of the
Trinity is really quite different from his, as their persistent
subordinationism and their entire disuse of the concept of the eternal
generation of the Son show. It is all the more remarkable that their
theological ideas converge towards those of Athanasius in some
important points. Perhaps we have here the explanation of why a
consensus on the subject of the Christian doctrine of God eventually
emerged iIi the fourth century.
4. Constantius' Final Solution
Neither of the twin councils followed at first the path which
Constantius had designed for them, and neither finally went the way
99See above, P.369.
100B if A nerra 23~4I. It has been suggested also that Athanasius was
. ast./ o. .
acquamted WIth an HomOlousian. document akin to Basil's statement after Ancyra
3~B, but. mor~ expanded (perhaps that which Hilary may have known). See
Simonetti Studt 17J n. 53, DInsen Homoousios 140, Steenson, Basil of Aneyra 265-8.
Some have. even thought that Marius Victorinus knew this document, but this does
not seem hkely; see Steenson op. cit. 277-9.
37 1
 Period of Confusion
in which Basil and his party on the one hand and the majority of the
Western bishops, on the other, who were no friends of Arianism, had
hoped that they would go. The Emperor discovered that he could
only persuade bishops to accept formulae which he regarded as
necessary by using pressure and threats and even on occasion trickery.
No effective consensus yet existed among the bishops in the East, and
no understanding among the bishops in the West of the theological
problems which the leading Eastern theologians were trying to
solve. IOI
The Council of Seleucia was as much a debacle as that of Serdica
had been sixteen years before. l02 When the bishops assembled,
amounting to about 160,'03 a number of prominent churchmen
remained in the vicinity but took no part in the preliminary
proceedings because they were under accusation in church courts for
various alleged misdemeanours: Basil of Ancyra, Cyril ofJerusalem
(who was involved in a feud with Akakius of Caesa rea which appears
to have had nothing to do with doctrine), Macedonius of
Constantinople, Patrophilus ofScythopolis and Eustathius ofSebaste
in Armenia.' 04 The conduct of the council had been placed by
Constantius in the hands of two imperial officials, Leonas a civil and
Lauricius a military officer. Those present could be roughly divided
into two parties as far as theological opinion was concerned: one was
the Homoiousians, whose most prominent representatives were
Eleusius of Cyzicus, George of Laodicea, Silvanus of Tarsus and
Sophronius of Pompeiopolis (either the Cilician or the Paphlagonian
town). The other party was the Homoians, whose leadership lay in
the hands of Akakius of Caesarea, George of Alexandria, U ranius of
Tyre, and Eudoxius of Antioch. No representative of the extreme
IOIFor the events of this period see Gwatkin SA 174-83. AC 92-104; Harnack
History IV.78-9; Locfs 'Arianismus' 36-7; Zeiller Origines 284-6; Meslin Les Ariens
285--91; Klein Constantius 11 9I-'7~ Kopecek History 199-215; Simonetti Crisi
JIJ-J8.
I02The original sources for this council are Hilary Contra Constantium (PG 10)
590-600 and Coli. Antiar B VII.r(I74-S); Athanasius De Synodis 12.1-4(239-40).
29.1"'"'9(257-8); Socrates HE 11.39. 40; Sozomenus HE IV .22.1-25; Philostorgius HE
IV.II (very summary); Theodoret HE II.25.4-II.
I03Socrates HE 11.39; Theodoret reckons 150.
I04Hiiary of Poitiers. by his own account, was present at Seleucia (Con.
ColtStantium 12(590»; Sulpicius Severus corroborates this and gives a litde more
information about how and why he came (Chronjea 11.42(95--6».
37 2
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (J57-361)
Neo-Arians was present, unless we count the slippery Eudoxius
among their number.1 os
The first day was taken up with futile accusations and equally futile
suggestions about a new credal statement. Some wanted to re-affirm
N, merely omitting the homoousion. Finally the majority of those
present subscribed formally to a re-affirmation of the Second
(,Dedication') Creed of Antioch 341, though not the party of
Akakius. The only significant incident on the second day was the
production by Akakius of a creed which he was anxious that all
should adopt. On the third day Basil of Ancyra and Macedonius of
Constantinople joined in the debate, against the protests of Akakius'
party. However Akakius on this day was able to proffer his new creed
to all present. It began by referring to the confusion produced by
varying opinions and by the presence of some who were under
accusation, paid a compliment to the imperial officials, expressed the
writer's readiness to accept the Second (,Dedication') Creed of
Antioch 341, rejected both homoousion and homoiousion, and also
anhomoion as unsuitable and commended 'like' (homoios) simply, after
the example of Col I:IS, and then continued:
'We confess and believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of
heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible;
And we believe in our Lord Jesus Christ his Son, who was begotten
impassibly from him before all the ages. God Logos God from God,
only-begotten, Light, Life, Truth, Wisdom, Power, through whom
all things came into existence, things in the heaven and things on the
earth, whether visible or invisible.
We believe that at the end of the ages in order to abolish sin he took
flesh from the holy Virgin Mary and became man, suffered for our
sins. rose again, and was taken into heaven, and is seated at the right
hand of the Father, and he is coming again in glory tojudge the living
and the dead.
We also believe in the Holy Spirit, whom the Saviour our Lord also
called the Paraclete. when he promised that after his departure he
I05Epiphanius Panarion 73.23.1-8 (296--7) gives us an interesting but not
altogether reliable analysis of the state of parties in the East at this time. He ascribes
considerable importance to the feud between Akakius and Cyril. It has been
conjectured that it was during the Council of Seleucia that the strongly Arian
'Confession of Pat ric ius and Aetius' (Hist. Akeph. 4.6(154-8» was circulated. The
extreme Arians had no satisfactory mouthpiece at Seleucia, because Eudoxius
would hardly have dared to ventilate there doctrine as extreme as this. For this
doctrinal formula see below PP.577"'"'9.
373
 Period of Confusion
would send him to the disciples, and he did send him; tbrough whom
he also sancitifes those in the Church who believe and who are
baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit.
Those who preach anything else except this creed arc alien to the
Catholic Church. And that the creed recently put forth in the presence
of our pious Emperor at Sirmium [i.e. the 'Dated' Creed] is to the
same effect as this one those who have examined it know. 106
Except for a rather longer reference to the Holy Spirit (but one which
made no theological advance whatever), this was a wholly
characterless, insignificant creed (though it may have represented the
kind of doctrine which the Emperor at that moment favoured), and it
is not surprising that it did not find favour with the majority of the
bishops present at Seleucia. A confused debate followed, during
which the party of Akakiu~, on being asked in what sense the Son was
'like' the Father, answered 'only in will, not in ousia' (which was by
now the stock Arian answer). Next day (the fourth) Leonas, seeing
that it was impossible to reach agreement between the contending
views, tried to dissolve the council. But the Homoiousians insisted
upon assembling again in order, as they alleged, to hear the case, as a
kind of court of appeal, which Akakius could make against Cyril
whom he had deposed from the see of Jerusalem, as well as the
evidence against some others who had been deposed. Akakius refused
to attend, whereupon, in the manner of most fourth-century
councils, the assembled bishops proceeded to depose, on paper at
least, a list of those of whom they disapproved: the chief among them
Akakius, George of Alexandria, Uranius, Patrophilus and Eudoxius
of Antioch. They then elected a man called Anianus as bishop of
Antioch in place of Eudoxius. He was promptly arrested by Leonas
and Lauricius and subsequently banished by the Emperor. This
singularly unproductive council then broke up.
Hilary adds a little more information about the Council of
Seleucia. The first impression which he gained was that about 150
bishops present favoured homoiousion (similis essentiae), 19 favoured
heterousion (dissimilis essentiae) and only the Egyptians (with of course
the exception of George of Alexandria) held fast to the homoousion.
He believed that the Homoiousians were orthodox (according to his
I o6This creed can be found in Epiphanius Panarion 73.2S. 1-10(298-9); Athanasius
De Synodis 19,1-9 (257-8); and Socrates HE 11.40. The version of Epiphanius is the
fullest. It is printed in Hahn Symbole §I6S. 206--7.
374
Attempts at Creed-making: Phose Three (;5J-361)
standard) at least in words; they believed that the Son 'was Son from
God, that is from the substance of God'. The Anhomoians denied
that the concept of 'substance' can be applied to God, or that God
could generate; generation was simply creation and nothing more.
The Son was created and was derived from non-existence. 'That is
why the Son is not like the Father'.107 Hilary also adds some odd
information about the views of Eudoxius, which will be dealt with
later. l08 He must have consorted at this council with several Neo-
Arians, who were at that time more or less patronised and protected
by Eudoxius; the extreme views which he gives here were not
prominently voiced at the council. But there must have been many
undercurrents of opinion, some of which Hilary picked up. He also
says that there was a fourth view (i.e. neither homoousian nor
homoiousian nor heterousian) which insisted that the Son was like the
Father, but its exponents, when interrogated, declared that the Son is
like the Father qua Father, because God can make anything like
himself if he chooses, but he is not like qua God, not in his
substance.,09 This might be regarded as the view of the Homoians,
though, as we shall see, "0 it could be reconciled with the Neo-Arian
theology. Hilary elsewhere gives us the text of a curious letter which
he says was written by the 'orthodox' bishops at Seleucia after the end
of the council warning the Westerners gathered at Ariminum to hold
out against Arianism. In fact all that the letter does is to address
Valens, Ursacius, Germinius, Justus, Gaius and several others
otherwise unknown (whose names appear to be Greek rather than
Latin), assumed to be part of a delegation from Ariminum to the
Emperor; it warns them against the heresy of denying that Christ is
like the Father and alleges that Constantius is equally anxious to dis-
courage this error, and explicitly names Aetius as the author of the
doctrine which it repudiates. '1 1 The letter could have been sent from
an Homoian group as readily as from an Homoiousian; its origin and
precISe purpose are obscure. Athanasius' account of the Council of
Seleucia is unsatisfactory and adds little to our knowledge of it. He
does not mention any of the Homoiousians, but he says that the
majority of those present accepted the conclusions of N, 'but they
I07Con. Constantium 12 (590-1).
I08S ee below, PP.583-4.
'·'Hilary ibid. 14(592-3).
II oSee below p.634.
III Hilary ColI. Antiar B VII. 1(174-5).
375
 Period of Confusion
only excused themselves from using the homoousion, alleging that it
was suspect because of its obscurity.'l12 . sentiments:
On the dissolution of the Council of Seleuc.., each of the
dissenting parties sent a delegation of ten bishops to meet the
Emperor at Constantinople, where he now resIded after returnmg
from military engagements on the Persian front. The Homman
delegation, however, which was headed by Akakms, arrIved first and
secured the Emperor's ear.113 Constantius had already been In touch
with the bishops at Ariminum for some time, and to the e,:ents whIch
took place there in the council parallel to that of Seleuc.. we must
now turn. 114 There were 400 bishops present. llS They ?,et In no
conciliatory mood towards the Emperor. The representatives of the
party nOw favoured by Constantius, Valens, Ursacms, Germmms,
Gaius and Demophilus wanted the bIshops to adopt a creed
equivalent to the 'Dated' Creed produced, earlie~ th~t year (though
probably without the clause 'in all respects after hke), but the great
majority of the bishops would have none of It. They expressed
themselves as unwilling to countenance a new creed and as faIthful to
112De Synodis 12.1-4(239-4°). quotation from 4(240)· He refers here to Geo~~)e
of Alexandria as (, 8trox9&iC;41t6 rile; ohcou~VllC; (,who was ch~s~d out of the eart .
This can hardly refer to George's departure from Alexandna In the year 3 58, b~t
must surely be a brutal reference to his death in December 361 at the hands of t . e
Alexandrian mob. This supports the view that this work was written. not in 359 but
in f?3l
For what happened immediately after the Council ofSeleucia (though ~n the
Council itself Socrates is more informative than Sozomenus, w~o largely relies on
him (Sabinus ofHeradeia is behind both» Sozomenus HE IV .23 IS more useful than
Socrates HE [1.41. . . .. < bl d r tl
1140
riginal sources for the Council of Arlmmum (which 10 Lac~ assem . e. a It e
earlier than' did that of Seleucia) are Hilary, CoIl~ctlo Antlarrana A
V(r)-VI(J)(7 8- 88 ); B VU.,(r76-7); Athanasius De SynodlS IO.I-1I.'('J7/8),
55. 1--7(277-8); Socrates HE 11.37; Sozomenus HE IV.17.!~I9.I2; Theodoret ~E
11.19.5, 20.1-:-3; Jerome Adv. Luciferano~ 17-18; SUlpl.CIUS S~v~rus ChronlCa
11.4 1-45(94-9) who is relying on an eyewItness, the S~msh GavldlUS. The ~hree
historians follow Athanasius, but his account is not as s~tlsfactory as that ~fHtlary.
Sozomenus gives uS a little more light on the proceedmgs of the delegatIOn from
Ariminum to Constantius than does Socrates, but both mistakenly assume that
Liberius was involved with the Council of Ariminum. In fact he was not present,
nor did he send a representative, not even Vincentius ofCapua (see a statement by a
later synod presided over by Damasus at Rome Theodoret Il,E Il.22.9~. ~hoebadlUs
of Agen's Contra Arianos was written before t~e Counctl of Anmmum, ~nd
Gregory of Elvira's De Orthodoxa Fide, thoug~ wntten after~ards, cells us n~thmg
about the Council. For a careful but highly conjectural analYSIS of the proceedmgs at
Ariminum, s~c Y.M. Duval in Hilaire et son Temps 5 1- 103. .
IlSS ozomenus HE IV.I7.2. Sulpicius says that only 80 were Arlans.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (35?-36,)
N, and they wrote quite a long letter to the Emperor conveying these
Having told him of their opinions about creed making, they went on
to inform him that they had excommunicated Valens, Ursacius,
Germinius and Gaius for their inconstancy in doctrine, asking the
Emperor to take no notice of the opinions of these men concerning
removing the proper elements of the faith [presumably they mean the
use of ousia and of homoousion J; they requested that he would require
them to change nothing, but to let them depart to their own sees and
pray for his welfare. 1l6
They then sent a delegation of ten of their number (consisting of
bishops, led apparently by Restutus or Restitutus of Carthage, of
whom we know virtually nothing; they were matched by ten of the
Arian party, among them Valens) to interview the Emperor. This
was, of course, not what Constantius wanted. He had at some earlier
point sent them a letter warning them not to make any decision
affecting the Eastern bishops. Anything which they may have
determined in that respect he declares by his imperial power to be
null and void: 'a decision which our edicts now declare to be deprived
offorce and application can have no power'; they are to send ten men
to his court. 117 He kept them waitin% without seeing them for some
time· at Adrianople and then, still without having admitted the
delegation from Ariminum to an audience, replied directly to that
council in a letter. It was a polite letter, simply informing them that
he is too busy at the moment to attend to their delegation and asking
them to wait a bit longer to hear his reply. 118 The bishops' reply to
this letter 'Yas polite in form but brusque in content. It said that they
would not tolerate this postponement; they affirmed in the strongest
language that they would never rescind their decision about doctrine.
Wint.er was coming on. They asked permission to return to their
homes and churches" 9 Constantius was even less inclined than
"·Hilary Coli. Antiar A V(I-')(78-85); ibid. [X(r-J)(96-7) gives the actual
resolutions which are reported in the letter.
I 17Hilary Coil. Anliar VIII.I, 2(93-4): the words quoted run thus in the original
(2(94)): non enim ullas vires habere poterit definitio cui nostra statuta testantur nunc robur et
copiam denegari. This letter must be a different one from that which is next referred
to, because this requires the bishops to send a delegation and the next acknowledges
that the delegation has arrived.
118 Athanasius, De Synodis 55.2-3(277-8).
U9lbid. 55-4-7('78).
377
 Period oj ConJusion
before to agree to their request, but he saw ~he n~cessity of acting
quickly to prevent the bishops at Adrianopl: dissolving ~he. council of
their own accord. He moved the deleganon from AnmInum to a
small place called Nice in Thrace, apparently in order to impress the
delegates with the resemblance of its name to Nlcaea, and then by
means of his agents began bringing pressure upon them .to accept the
creed which he favoured, hinting that refusal would Impenl their
tenure of their sees and lead to banishment. He sent Valens back to
Arminum with orders to persuade the bishops there to sign the
desired formula. The delegation from Seleucia was apparently
detained in Constantinople, where the Emperor was at the nme.
Jerome, in his far from plausible attempts to relieve the Western
bishops from the blame of having signed an unorthodox creed, tells
us something of the method whereby Valens succeeded in his
enterprise. Valens first publicly declared, in. the presence. of Taurus
the pretorian prefect, that he was not an Anan an~ heartily dl~hked
Arian doctrines. '2 • In the course of the proceedings MuzonlUs, a
bishop of Byzacena (the Eastern province of Roman North Africa)
suggested that a document of doctrinal importance should be read
out, and, on all agreeing to this, Claudius bishop of Picenurn in Italy
read out a series of anathemas to which Valens, 'IS well as everybody
else, was required to assent.
They ran thus:
'If anyone denies that Christ the Son of God was born before the
ages... . eulesiarum arcae, et reeens adhuc rei memoria est (18(181». Virtually all of these
If anyone denies that the Son is like the Father accordIng to the
Scriptures ...
If anyone denies that the Son of God is, eternal with the ~ather ...
If anyone says that the Son of God is denved from non-eXIstence (de
nullis extantibus) ...
If anyone says that there was a time when the Son did not exist
'121
Next Claudius, in order deliberately to test Valens, added this
anathema.
120Dialogus adversus Luciferanos (PL 23) I8(I80~.. .
1211bid. 18(180); Sulpicius Severus has a not dissimilar though more sumJ?ary
account Cllronica 11.44(97-8). He says that Phoebabius of Agen and Servatlo of
Tongres led the resistance of Arianism. but that even they were in the end persuaded
to sign.
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-361)
'If anyone were to say that the Son of God existed indeed before all
ages, but not before any time at all (sed non ante omnino tempus), so
that anything existed before him .. .'
Jerome asserts that Valens assented to all these propositions, and to
others unspecified which Claudius put to him.!22 By this time the
delegation from Ariminum at Nice had consented to. sign the
required creed. The news of this event, and the conviction that the
imperial authority could not, after agreeing to these anathemas,
interpret the·creed in an Arian sense, allied to their intense desire to
return to their sees, caused the great majority of the bishops at
Ariminum at that pbint to sign the required doctrinal formula. A
positively servile letter survives which they then wrote to the
Emperor, thanking him in an adulatory manner for bringing them to
the conviction that once usia or omoousia was omitted from the
statement of faith all would be well and harmony would prevail, and
asking once more for permission to return home. 123 Permission was
given and the council broke up, their earlier brave resolutions all
abandoned. The Homoiousian delegation from Seleucia in
Constantinople took longer to come to the same decision, and it was
only after a session lasting most of the night of the last day of 359 that
the Eastern bishops of this persuasion gave in and signed the creed
I 22Ibid. 18(I8l). Jerome is emphatic that the information which he gives here is
reliable: quod si quis a nobis ./ictum putat, scrinia publica scrutetur. Plene sunt certe
propositions are in fact susceptible of an Ariari interpretation. Most Arians had
probably bY.now abandoned the doctrine that the Son was derived form non-
existence and held that he came from the will of the Father. which was eternal, at
least in predestining the existence of the Son. Only.the doctrine of the eternal
generation. and perhaps the introduction of a compound of ousia could have
repelled an Arian as flexible as Valens. Socrates justly says of both Valens and
Ur~acius 06t01 yap de! n:po~ totJ~ ~'J1'l1cpa'toijvtar; ~lttKA1VOV (HE II.n). For various
Anan glosses on terms designed to exclude their views, see Hilary Call. Antiar. B
VIll.2 (r76-7).
123~iJary Cofl. Ant jar. A VLI-3 (87-8). The remark of Ambrose in Ep 75.15(3°)
on .A:lminum bears out, as far as it goes, the interpretation given here. M. Duval
(H~/~"e el s~n Temps 63-'71) assigns the bishops' final letter to an Arian group
wrnmg durmg the course of the council. not at the end. but this seems to me
unnecessary. To most Western bishops the insistence on ousia in N would have
seemed strange and not necessarily connected with Tertullian's unius substantiae, as it
would have see~ed to Hilary before 355. The bishops would have thought
orthodoxy suffiCIently safeguarded by the anathemas which Valens had been
induced to sign. See Brenneck, Hilarius von P. 295, 319.
379
 Period of Confusion
which is usually known as the Creed of Nice. This creed '24 is to all
intents and purposes identical with the 'Dated' Creed, so. that
Constantius had won his way in having this document, ongmally
designed by the twin councils, accepted formally by both. But there
was one significant change in the Creed of Nice. Its last paragraph
ran:
'But the word ousia because when it was naively inserted by the
Fathers. though not familiar to the masses, caused di~turbance. and
because the Scriptures do not contain it, we have deCided should be
removed, and that there should be-absolutely no mention of ousia for
the future, because the Scriptures make no mention of the ousia of the
Father and of the Son, nor should one hypostasis be applied to the Person
(prosopon) of the Pather and Son and Holy Spirit. But we declare that the
Son is like (homoion) the Father, as also the Holy Scriptures declare and
tcach. And let all the heresies which have already been previously
condemned, and any others which have recently grown up opposed to the creed
set out here be anathema.
J better-known Aetius, his teacher, to share in the rewards. But the
The words placed in italics in this statement represent additions made
to the 'Dated' Creed. But more significant was the fact that the words
'in all respects', which appeared in the 'Dated' Creed after 'like the
Father' were omitted in the Creed of Nice. A formula of f31th had
been formally accepted by something that could be at a stretch called
a General Council, and that formula was capable of recelvmg the
assent of Homoian Arians such as Valens, U rsacians, Germinius and
Akakius, and even at a pinch could be acceptable to Neo-Arians like
Aetius and Eunomius. The frail hope of the Homoiousian party 'like
the Father in all respecls', had been destroyed.
:;
8. The Aftermath of Nice
Early in the year 360 a council was held in Constantinople presided
over by Akakius, who was noW Constantius' chief eccleSiastical
adviser in the East. The bishops mainly came from BIthyma; MarIS of
Chalcedon is mentioned. But Ulfilas bishop of the Goths was also
there.'2' Its main function was to signalize the triumph of the
124Preserved in Athanasius De Synodis 30 and Theodoret HE IL2I. It is given in
Hahn Symbole §l64(20S-{i)· . .
125For the proceedings of this council, apart from the creed which It a~opted, ~ee
Socrates HE 11.42 and Sozomenus HE IV ,24.1-26.1 (much fuller); cf. Philostorglus
HE IV.12(64).
Attempts al Creed-making: Phase Three (357-361)
Homoian party by a wholesale attack on those who were likely to
disagree with it. Almost all the prominent supporters of the
Homoiousian theology were deposed by the council and exiled by
the Emperor, but on charges which were not doctrinal but ranged
over a wide variety of misdemeanours. Basil of Ancyra (whose
ruthless conduct towards his opponents for the short period when he
had the Emperor's ear had made him particularly vulnerable) fell a
victim, and so did Macedonius of Constantinople (who died in exile
not long afterwards), Eleusius ofCyzicus, Eustathius ofSebaste, Cyril
of Jerusalem, Silvanus of Tarsus and Sophronius of Pompeiopolis.
Eudoxius succeeded Macedonius as bishop of Constantinople,
leaving the see of Antioch vacant. Meletius was sent to succeed
Eustathius at Sebaste (where he encountered fierce local opposition);
a man called Athanasius went to Ancyra; and Eunomius, not yet
notorious for his Neo-Arian views, was made bishop of Cyzicus. As
Eunomius had- been honoured, one would have expected the much
contrary happened. Aetius had published his Synlagmation in the
autumn of 359. Philostorgius says that Aetius while at
Constantinople at the end of 359 challenged Basil, who was later to
be bishop of Cappadocian Caesarea, and was already in deacon's
orders, to debate the Trinitarian subject publicly, and that Basil and
his friends reluctantly agreed and were signally defeated in the
encounter.'26 This may have been the reason why Aetius attracted
the Emperor's attention. Constantius did not encourage public
debates on theological subjects; he had refused to allow Hilary to
debate the current issue with Saturninus of Aries; and he had earlier
roundly condemned Aetius in an imperialletter. '27 After examining
Aetius personally in a brief interview he banished him to Phrygia. It
has reasonably been conjectured that Constantius regarded Aetius as
politically suspect as weIl as doctrinaIly unsound, because Aetius had
been a quite close friend of the disastrous Caesar Gallus. '2 • George of
Laodicea seems to have escaped the general deposition. This may be
because he ostentatiously changed sides to join the Homoians at this
point; presumably he had originally deserted the early Arian
126HE IV.I2(64-S); c( Theodoret HE IV.27.12.
127See above, P.357; for Hilary's offer to debate see Sulpicius Severus Chronica'
II.4S(98-j».
128For several interesting details about Constantius' movements and motives at
this period, see Klein Constantius II 93--6.
 Period of Confusion
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-3 61 )
theology to join the party of Basil of Ancyra. Basil of Caesarea later
in a letter described the Creed of Nice as 'the creed promoted from ;:~t~;: ~~I:::361, h; ;a~equired to take part in a session ofsermon-
Constantinople by the party of George.'12' But it is possible that
Basil is referring to George of Alexandria, and that George of ~~ur~ 0t Antr:~~.oFi:s; A~t~:~~n~:~~~rie~~~~:~~;;';:~~:i~fa~
Laodicea was left alone because he was known to be dying. He died in en e etlUs were .to pre~ch upon the crucial text, Proverbs 8:22 It
360. This Council of Constantinople in 360 formally promulgated was. then that MeletlUs dehvered himself of a critical discourse which
the Creed of Nice, word for word as it had been agreed to by the twin
ISgiven us by Epiphanius. '
councils, and it now for a short period became the official ecumenical After a cautious beginning MI' I
' I
Chnsto ' e etlUs p unges boldly int
creed of the Church, replacing N, and thenceforward the standard ogical d.octrine: the Son is 'th . bl . 0
I bI e mscruta e mterpreter of the
creed of the majority of the Arians. 130 d'
.nscr~ta e. a perfect and abiding product (1.vv~~a) from him who
One more incident relevant to the history of doctrine which IS per ect an who abides in his identity, not an emanation fro
occurred during Constantius' reign and in his presence must be Father, ?r somet~ng cut off and divided. but impassibly and :t:~~
recorded. Meletius l31 had been appointed to the see of Antioch on pro~eedl~~from hlm who never deviates from what he possessed a
Eudoxius transferring to Constantinople. Meletius had previously pro uct _ 1 e the Father and accurately reproducing the i ...
been bishop of Beroea in Syria, and of Sebaste in Armenia.''' He (xapa"t~pa) of the Father' ... it is not the case that 'he b'd mpress
who is diffi b d ales ill one
himself came from Armenia originaily and there owned an estate at a cre?t ~t oe~ not subsist independently, but he is the
pro duct w h 0 IS actlve and who p. [, d I
place called Getasa, to which he used to retire on those occasions this '134 Wh MI' er orms an a ways preserves all
. en e euus reaches the point of expo d' h .1
when he was exiled. 133 As bishop of Antioch, the protege of the
Homoian party, it was incumbent upon him at an early point to
~roverbs ~:22 he.says that Christ is the im~ge (ikon)':f:: ;a:h~:u~~t
owever as a lIfeless Image of ali' ,
declare publicly his doctrinal allegiance, and about a month after his prod d b vmg person, nor as a power
uce y art not as the effect (altot...."~a) of power b t th
enthroning as bishop of Antioch, at some point probably in the oIEspflng ofhlm who b hi' ( L ' U as e
Sctipt b h h egot m 1ovv~~ato61.vv~"avto,).135The
ure says ot t at God created him and that he b hi
129Ep 51.2(4-5) 'ttlr; 1t{crteror; 61to trov Kepi n:mpYlov (btl> KrovCTtavtlvou1t6A£ror; cobnt.radictory statements, but 'created' signifies ~~~~ :hi:~t ~s
KOJucr8Ei011t;. The Chronicon Paschale (PG 92:736) gives a list of those who were su Slstent and enduring' and ' b ' .h IS
present at the enthronement of Eudoxius in Constantinople, including a George. attribute of the Only-be~otten' ~~~~:eans t e choice .and peculiar
But this is much more likely to be George of Alexandria than George of Lao dieea. s
We have no reason to think that Basil and Eleusius and Macedonius did not sign or ~arnings about trying to s eak too :u: mon ends With elabo~ate
eventually assent to the Creed of Nice. yet they were deposed. A declaration of ~lvine mysteries which are "beyond usJ37 and to pry too far mto
allegiance to the Homoian party would hardly have saved George of Lao dice a, who
had been so promment a supporter of Basil's cause, from deposition. i?IS was certainly not an Homoousian discourse, as Philostorgius and
tlOThe Creed of Constantinople is given by Athanasius De Synodis em represent it, nor was it a completely Homoiousian one It
)0.1-10(258-9) and more fully by Theodoret HEII.21.)-6. For the use of this creed makes no mention of the Son's nor the Father's ousia from be' :
J~si~:d ~~~;~ ~~:tn;;:ea ;~~s:C:O~ily Hom~ian statement efc~e~~~~
by later Adans see above p. 126.
IllFor this incident see Gwatkin SA 248; Schwartz, Gesamm. Schrift. )5. 'Zur

linked the Son's creation with t~is. ~~::~e :~::~~!a:~er, and it

Geschichte' 161-3; Simonetti studi 76-7, Crisi 342-5; Klein Constantius II lao-I.
The original sources are Epiphanius Panarion 7).29.1-33.5(363-8); Socrates HE
11.44: Sozomenus HE IV.28.6-7; Theodoret HE II.) 1.8; Philostorgius HE V.4: and ~~~e denvmg purely from the will of the Father; there Was a~~~~ t~~
if ~~ subor~matlOmsm m it. The stress on the inscrutability of God
frag 33(2)0) Historia Akephala 2.7(146, 148).
Il2It is possible that Meletius' superseding ofEustathius at Sebaste took place at an
earlier period, that he had found the opposition there too strong and, retiring, had no mg ese, would have been offensive to Neo-Arians. Th~
then fallen back on being bishop of Beroea. Sources for his early career are Il4n .
Ammianus Marcellinus XX.I I; Socrates HE 11.44: Sozomenus HE IV.28.3; t Fa,naTlOn 73.29.4-']'(305).
Philostorgius HE V.I; Theodoret HE II.) I; Jerome Chronicle sub ann. 360. "IbId. 31.5(306).
'J6Ib'd
tllSee Basil ofCaesarea Ep 99.),5.6,27. Epiphanius Panarion 1).34.1(309) says I . 31.5-<i(306-?); the phrases quoted . h ..
that Meletius came from the Pontic region, but this is most unlikely. ICui J..lov1llOY and to £~aipstov TOU ... are In t e oogmaJ to tVU1toO'tQt6v tS
IJ7Ibid ( J.l.ovoysvouC; Kai i.l)(a~ov .
. 32. 1-33.5 307-8).
 Period of Confusion
authorities realized that they had backed the wrong horse. A council
was hastily summoned and Meletius was exiled, though not on a
charge of false doctrine. We cannot doubt that what to Constantius
and Akakius and George was the unsoundness of his doctrinal views
constituted the real cause of his banishment, though the fact that in his
short period in charge of the see of Antioch he had readmitted to the
ministry several clergy, probably of Homoiousian views, may have
contributed. Almost no ancient authority imagined that he had been
exiled for any other reaSOnS than doctrinal ones 13 ' Schwartz, who
always tended to see doctrine as a mere mask for political motives and
forces, attempted to represent Meletius as a man of consummate
shrewdness and cynical self-seeking who always managed to come
out on the right side. But this is an extraordinary interpretation of the
evidence. Meletius was in the course of his career exiled three times;
he cannot possibly have known in 360 either that Constantius' death
was near (the Emperor was then aged 43), nor that nearly twenty
years later an Emperor would appear who would support his cause.
We may reasonably ask, with Mark Anthony, 'Was this ambition?'.
Certainly from the moment that he preached this sermon he became
something of a popular hero, and was able for the next twenty years,
whether in Antioch or in exile, to command a considerable following
in that city. He was for the moment replaced in the see by Euzoius,
one of the early companions of Arius who had shared his exile with
him. Euzoius was an Arian sang pur, that is to say he was tolerant
towards both the continuing Eustathians and the followers of
Meletius, allowing each body their own church to worship in, but
was an inveterate enemy of the Neo-Arian school, whom he must
have regarded, not without justice, as a dangerous and unnecessary
deviation from the pure doctrine which he was commissioned to
preserve and teach.
In February 360, Julian, Gallus' half-brother and Constantius'
younger cousin, who, having been sent to command in the Gauls
with the title of Caesar, had showed himself unexpectedly able both
in financial administration and in military affairs, was hailed as
Augustus by some of his troops, who took this means of ensuring that
they should not be transferred to the Eastern front where Constantius
needed them for the war against the Parthians. Julian accepted this
tJaE.g. the Historia Akepllala 2.7 'he would not agree to their evil ideas' (nolente
eorum rnalae ment; consentire).
Attempts at Creed-making: Phase Three (357-3 61 )
title, thereby declaring himself equal in authority to Constantius, and
therefore not obhged to accept his appointments to the office of
praetonan prefect nor compelled to send him troops on dema d
Constanuus heard of this move when he was i C d n .
Caesa b d . n appa OClan
rea, ut rna e no Immediate move to counter Julian's action
He spent the summer..nd autumn in and around Edessa, but returned
to AntlOch for the wmter. In fact he must have spent most of 361 in
~ntlOch, whence presumably he could control affairs on the Eastern
ron tier but was also m a position to hear news from the West
qUIckly. Juhan made no Overt move to challenge Constantius'
authonty m the East for some time, though he certainly intended
ultimately to do so and began making preparations for a move to the
East. Durmg the su~mer of 361 however he crossed the Alps with an
ar~y, mtendmg d~rectly to attack Constantius. Constantius at last
~earzed that Juhan s challenge was serious and in the autumn of 361
e eft AntlOch and began moving towards Constantinople, which he
m~st defend agamst the usurper. During the journey however he fell
~enously III and I~ November at Mopsucrene in Cilicia he died, after
avmg been baptized by Euzoius. On his deathbed he had the large-
mmdedness to bequeath the Empire to Julian.
Constantius' death not only meant the collapse of his ecclesiastical
pohcy. Italso sealed the fate of George ofAlexandria. George had not
shown himself a zealous pastoral bishop. He had spent most of his
eplscopa~e hitherto far away from his see taking part in hi h
eccleSiastical POhtlCS, in councils and plans and d .. gd·
. . epOSItlOns an
appomtments. Alexandna had seen very little of h' Ad' dl
whenev h d'd " h' 1m. mItte y
er e I ViSIt IS see he tended to be met by a rioting flock
and he depended for his security on the support of Roman spears. Bu;
eve; when he was present, he had shown no desire to mitigate the
VIO ence which Constantius' officers used in opposing the art of
Athanas~us. In addition, he had evinced a peculiar zeal in a;tac~n
a:d pUlhng down pagan places of worship. 139 What happened whe g
~ e ~~ws .of Constantius' death reached Alexandria can best h~
escn ed m the words of a first-rate local, almost contemporary
Source, the Historia Akephala:14o '
I 39S ee chapter 16 PP 348-9' R P C H .
Compare also Sozo~en~s HE I':; 30 '2(~8~) .~nson ~/udl"SI in
Christian Antiquity,
because h d h'" e partlcu ar y annoyed the pagans
and heint;o':::ce~oa~~::~~l~i~~ as:~r:~;i: a~~ holdi?g their t,raditionai festivals
their statues and dedications and th x 0 gfYPht I?to the CIty and confiscated
140 2 ,8-10(14 ). e Ornaments 0 t elr temples',
8
 Period of Confosion

'd arrived in Alexandria in the month of

'So George. as has been ~'d' [Nov 26th] and remained in the city
Athyr, on the the ~'rtlet Ba~ n th~ fourd, day of the [next] month
in safety for three ays... u a d th death of the Emperor I3
the prefect Gerontius announce t ~ d the whole Empire [Nov.
Constantius and thatJulithia~ alohne ~~n rooefAlexandria and everybody
h h h rd s t eCltlzens
30th]. W en t ey e~
.
Ire and arrested him at once and put him Eusebius Of Emesa and Cyril of
raised a cl~mo~r agatnst ~eoh~ twen -seventh day of the month, for
in fetters 10 prISon ... until t h ty. hth day of the month [Dec. Jerusalem
twent~-four days. Thenlon t t ~~::~~l:~opulace of the city brought
24th]. m the mo~mg a mas. h him the man who was with him, the
George out of prISon, and wit . I building which is called the
Count. in cha~g~ll~~ t~:m'~!t~:nd paraded their corpses thro ugh
I. Eusebius of Emesa
CaesarlUm , an • a camel but men dragged
.ddl f h city· George s was on , The two figures who have been chosen to form the subject of this
the mt e 0 .t e I d hen they had maltreated their corpses
. Dracontius' with ropes, an 'hwh [ 'clock] they burnt them.' chapter have only this is common, that while they must be placed at
in this way. about the sev~nt our one 0
different ends of the spectrum of fourth-century theological opinion,
We cannot directly accuse the followers ofbAlet~~~a~~: (~ynh~h:~t~~ neither of them can be readily fitted into a conventional category.
. I d . d m nO way responsl l' Neither is a manifest supporter of the homoausias and yet neither can
m A exan rta an C sti atin this murderous riot, but
:~:~~~~!I~~~a~~~~~:~~ns~op~t. iheir ~olicy was that of the poet
be described as a rank Arian. They therefore illustrate well the variety
and diversity of opinion which prevailed in the Eastern Church in the
Arthur Clough: mid-fourth-century and bring home to the reader how unwise it is to
divide theological opinions at that point into 'orthodox' and' Arian'.
'Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive
Eusebius of Emesa 1 must have been born about 300 in Edessa.
Officiously to keep alive'.
Syriac, no doubt, was his native language, but he learnt Greek early
and well. He studied under Patrophilus in Scythopolis and then in
Palestinian Caesarea under its famous bishop Eusebius, for whom he
conceived a lifelong admiration. He certainly could read the Old
Testament in its original Hebrew. About the year 330 he went to
Antioch and there joined the circle of those who disapproved of
Eustathius of that city. Euphronius, who was bishop not long after
I The indispensable source for knowledge of Eusebius of Emesa lies in two

books by B. M. Buytaert, who must be given credit for bringing this writer as fully
to light as possible in modern times, L' Heritage litteraire d'Eusebe d'Emese and Eusebe
d'Emese, Discours conserves en Latin (consisting of Tome I La Collection de Troyes
(Discours I-XVI) and Tome II La CoIlection de Sirmond (which is Sirmond's
original edition re-edited and re-numbered». The Greek fragments in my text are
quoted from L' Heritage 62--g6, the Latin remains from Discollrs. Some material will
also be found in PG 86.1.532-62. The chief ancient authorities on Eusebius are
Socrates HE 1.24,11.9: Sozomenus HE III.6.I--'7 and 14.42 and Jerome De Vir. Ill.
XCI.. But several more references to him in antiquity have been collected by
Buytaert, L'Heritage 4--61. On Eusebius generally, see Grillmeier CCT 303-6,
352.-60, and Simonetti erisi 193--'7.
 Period of Confusion
Eusehius of Ernesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
the deposition ofEustathius, wanted to ordain Eusebius priest, but for knowledge of Origen or O· .
some reason Eusebius left Antioch and went to Alexandria, where he through the thought of Eu bngemfsmC at all except at second-hand
continued his study of theology and philosophy. About 335 he f se IUS 0 aesarea He sh .
o concentrating especially on att k. . .. ows many SIgns
returned to Antioch, where Flacillus (Placitus) was now bishop, and suggestion that God hates created t~C mg th~ relIgIon of Mani, his
it was probably now that he was priested. He was present at the different God,3 and that God has l;g~oOr t 4 at the Son is a Son of a
Council of Antioch of 341; he delivered a eulogy on Eusebius of attacked the doctrine of M 11 dy. He also on occasion
Caesarea shortly after the death of that prelate (339 or 340). At some e US
that Christ's kingdom w:rlcd h of Ancyra, especially his theory
point (it is difficult to determine when, either 341 or 343) he refused Ad . . . u ave an end 5 and th
OptlOmsm ascribed to Paul of Sam 6' e .errors of
to be appointed to the see of Alexandria, which the opponents of detected referring oblique! t h zsata. He can occaslOnally be
Athanasius at Antioch were anxious to fill, but not long after his mentions ousia or hypostasi;nOt e omoousion, though he _never
refusal he was appointed to the see of Emesa (modern Hams). But these in translation 7 He is or any word which might represent
when he presented himself at Emesa he was met with hostility by the dogmatically or arro . anxlOUS to aVOld bein th h
anti A . . g aug t to speak
local population who, we are told, disliked his learning (an objection that I have decided a;d sp~ t o~ehPOlbnt he WIltes: 'Certainly I think
to bishops not unknown in Anglican circles, but they probably en neIt er eyond (the r ·t f) S .
nor th at of nature'.s He carefull avoid Iml 0 cnpture
mistook his expertise in astrology for sorcery). He was compelled to party-cries of the day and hardl Y skmos t of the slogans and
retire and to take refuge with his friend George of Laodice a in his see. . . ' yeverattac sanyoneb G
sense IS mdeed one of his distin uishin . . y name. ood
George led his friend to Antioch and from there Flacillus and others consciousness at all of th g g charactenstlcs. He shows no
used their influence to have him reinstalled in Emesa. On this ·h e eXIStence of Neo A·· H·
w hlC was much admired in anti . .. . -. namsm. IS style,
occasion he had to face another accusation, this time of Sabellian of histrionic questions and sh t qUIty, IS mdlvldual, rhetOrical, full
heresy (possibly because he was not thought to be sound on the . or sentences and cond .
mOvlng argument. It is reeo nisable' . uces to a sWlft-
doctrine of three hypostases), but he survived it, and remained bishop perhaps even in an English g. en
fevh m the Latm translation, and
of Emesa for the rest of his life. He accompanied the Emperor . verSlOn 0 t e Latln He . .
It, on the self-emptying of the Son; . re IS an example of
Constantius on one of his Parthian campaigns (either 342-50 or
357--<io, with the probability inclining to the latter). It is likely that he 'He abandoned all this he hid h· I
died in the year 359 (perhaps while returning from the Eastern estate, he walked alon~ with u I~ gory, he too~ on himself Our mean
Front). His friend George of Lao dicea wrote a eulogy ofhlm after his us: he was spat on by us, sent:~ceeda~e along WIth us, .slept along with
went. '9 y us, as far as hIS human nature
death, upon which both Socrates and Sozomenus drew for
information. Some not inconsiderable fragments of his works His theology cannot be d ·b d
survive in Greek and Armenian and Syriac, but the greater part of though it has SOme 'A' , ~sc~ e as characteristically 'Arian'
what is known is extant only in Latin translations. the Father he is neare;l:: l:~ts m. it. ~n the relation of the Son t~
His great theological exemplar is Eusebius of Caesarea, whom at anaslUS t an to Anus. He frequently
J De Quinque Panibus VIII f l . ' . .
one point he calls 'that blessed man'! though he by no means
conce.mp.oraries, could not or ~o~~~' It 15 d~k~ly t~at Eusebius, like many of his
reproduces every trait of his master's theology. He shows no MarcIOmtes. not IStlngUlSh between Manichaeans and
2From Adversus Sabellium IV [26) 122; I cite the Greek, Armenian and Syriac . 4De incorporali et Invisibili Deo XX [
dIscourses XXI-XXIV (r0 3fi') f Ii 32J 98 and passim; see also the next fo ,
texts, following Buytaert. by an Arabic number with an asterisk, the Latin by a
:De Fide. J~I [24193, [3 0 ) ~;.c. or attacks on Manichaeism De FWo I [3] 4~~
,

Roman number followed by an Arabic number in square brackets and then another j'
to indicate the page of Buytaert's edition in the Discours. The Latin' Discours' are De Arb""o I [40J 41" h .
'De Fide III [ J8 ( ''per:psDeFJ/io II [28J 63.
numbered in large Roman figures consecutively through Tomes I and II, but the IV [ J 9 5 agaInst a second inge '
Arabic figures denoting pages which follow the Roman figures (after the figures in 17 114, I IS (identification of Fath ~e~ate , nonnatum), Adversus Sabellium !
;De Filio ~I [45J 78. er an on to be rejected). ·1
square brackets denoting sections) refer to pages and begin again in Tome II at
No. I. The account of Eusebius' career follows mainly Buytaert L' Heritage 62-94. . De Openbus Bonis XXIX [26 J
PotJphar's wife tempted Joseph D R232; cf: th~ very vivid depiction of how ·,1

I
e esurrectlOne 1 XVIII f38J 33-4.
38 8
389
I
,/
I
 Period of Confusion
defines this relationship in terms of nature (not, as Arians waul?,. of
creatureliness nor of will alone). 'God born from God took on us (;:~.
our nature) he writes.'o His nature was from God." We have 'de
from God by communication, he by nature. 12 He is 'God from Go :
not God from man, not God by being exalted to be Son by nature,
t ebody who was promoted to being God because of h,s
no som '13 And
behaviour, but somebody who is from (God) by nature.
while Eusebius hardly ever denies directly th~t the Son was created,
he comes very close to doing so: No created th~g can ~e compared to
the Only-begotten." There is no conceIvable time or s~ace
distinguishing the Father from the Son. It is not enough to say the
Son before the ages', because this is not what the fourth Evangehst
meant in his first chapter, 'Not tha~ he has come into eXistence n0.w,
as some witless people want (to interpret); "was" says the evangelist,
positing no interval of time because he is from the Father.'" The Son
is indeed subordinate to the Father, but not in times nor spaces, only
'in rank and in honour'.16 and on John 1:1 again, 'Because the t~:
(God and the Logos) are placed side by side, why do you drag I
inconsequential points? Whether it is time or age or any other created
thing that you drag in, it is not introduced: (m the text).17Perhaps
strongest of all is the saying 'For it was fittmg th~t he who was not
m'ade should come down to those who are made. ,. The hght of the
sun was created Ifactus) on the fourth day, 'But· the Son was not
(created) on the first day, nor on the fourth, nor in any day, nor m an
hour nor in times nor in ages."· We are sons by grace, but he by
natu;e,20 Eusebius insists upon the incomparability of the Son: 'and
he is Only-begotten in that he alone knows the On~ and 1S
consequently only-begotten by his knowledge; further he 1S Only-
lOIn a sermon extant in Armenian on the Transfiguration 39*-44* [17] (Latin tr.
77:~De Filio If [301 64, cf. Adversus Sabellium IV [22] 118 ex Deo autem propter
12De Imagine V [7) 132; cf. [II] 134. he is k'mg b y nature,
naturam. ' no t by election .
13De Galice IX [30] 23S.
"De Fili. II ['4] 54.
"Ibid. II [15] 54.
'-De Fide III [28] 95.
17De Hominis Assumptione XVI [7] 366. . [6J 294. De Calice IX [6] 2r8, 219.
18Part ofa sermon surviving in Syriac 33*-34* (Latin tr. *71).
"De Fide III [25] 94· . " . . iJ
2°149* 14. a Greek fragment on GalatIans 4.4-11 by nature 1$ K (/) cr£roC;.
390
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
begotten also in love because he alone honours him who begot him,
alone loves, alone knows him. '2' 'The Son is the only-begotten of the
Father, not one among the mass, but "through whom all things are",
not after everything but before all, not honoured apove all others,
but "he who made everything". '22 He also insists that the Incarnation
did not mean a diminishing of God, quoting Phil 2:6 'he who was in
the form of God', he says that 'was' (constitutus) does not imply that he
began to be in the form of God or once was not SO.23 The Son did not
reduce himself to become man nor convert himself into a man, but
remaining God assumed man; 'it was not an act of conversion but of
compassion, not a fall but a rescue'.2. He denies, too, that that Son's
being 'highly exalted' (Phil 2:9) was a reward for his obedience. 2. As
the Son alone knows the Father, so he alone knows the Father's will:
'but he knows it not by hearing it spoken aloud nor by finding it
thr~ugh mental activity, but his Own nature possesses knowledge
which gives him recognition' (of the Father's will).2' None of these
opinions can be reconciled With Arianism unless We are to deprive
that term of most of its meaning.
On the subject of the generation of the Son, Eusebius is agnostic, as
were many of his contemporaries, citing, as they did, Isa 53:8. We
must not, he says, curiously examine how the Father generates the
Son; we do not even know how we ourselves are generated.27 The
Father generated the Son impassibly. No human model taken from
plants or the sun or elsewhere will suffice to explain this generation; it
2
lS better to say nothing. • This generation was not by process
(passio = pathos) or division or scission. 2• Sometimes he expresses the
doctrine in terms ofan image. The Son is the true image of the Father,
m whom 'tbe truth oflikeness is found'. So 'the Father is King. The
Son also IS Kmg, but not as a nval, but the Son is not King to him who
begot him, but he is subordinate and obedient. For the nature of the
21 De Fili. II [3 I] 65.
22Ibid. II [r7J 56.
"Ibid. II [r8J 57. 58: cf. III [I9J 90 91.
24De C?lice IX [3 2 ] 236 (non casus seisalus); cf. De Fide III [10] 86, and [19] 90, 91.
"De FIde III [3 0 ]97.
26De Imagine V [5] 130; cf. De Imagine V [26J 144, 145, De Apostoliset Fide i XIII
27 De Fide III [26] 94.
28Adversus Sabellium IV [19J 116, II7.
"De Filio II [13] 53.
"De Imagine V [7J 132: cf. V [9J 133.
391
 Period of Confusion
Son is not a destruction of the monarchy, but rather the offspring of
the Ingenerate in his glory'. 'For the Son is the true image, not
artificial, not deceiving, not invented but like in power.'30 The Son is
the imitation and form (figura) of the Father, 'living God from living
God', generated not of passion, scission nor anything comparable to
human birth (Isa 53:8 cited). You cannot even say of the generation
that it was 'before times, before ages'. 31 But Eusebius (like his
namesake of Caesarea) never went as far as to speak of an eternal
generation.
On the subject of the Incarnation Eusebius' doctrine is perhaps at
its most interesting. His ideas approach most closely to those of
Asterius, but he cannot be said exactly to reproduce his. The
Godhead suffered in Christ's suffering indeed, but he emphasizes
more than Asterius that it was not damaged by the suffering. Quite a
long passage relevant to this subject survives in the original Greek.
Eusebius wants to establish that the soul of Jesus Christ (which he
almost certainly regards as divine and riot human) could not be
damaged by what the flesh suffered. The Lord could not have faced
death because for him death was 'the withdrawal of the divine power
from the flesh. The Power did not receive the nail so as to cause fear'.
Even our own souls do not suffer when the flesh suffers because the
soul faints and retreats. 32 Therefore 'he who created the soul and
formed the body, it is he who suffers what (happens to) the body,
especially ifhe receives to himself the suffetings of the body'" (i.e. the
divine Logos directly endures suffering, no interposition of a human
soul is envisaged, though it is not directly denied). 'That which was
arrested was arrested; that which was crucified was crucified; but he
who had power both to dwell in (the body) and to quititsaid "Father,
into thy hands I commit my spirit" without those who were hastening
his death compelling him'34 (i.e. the Logos was in control and was not
conquered). But on the basis of this originally Arian concept of the
incarnate Word he builds a psychological theory which largely
deprives it of that insight which conventional Arianism did possess.
'The Power was not able to receive the sufferings_of the flesh'. You
cannot say, he contends, either that the (divine) Power disappeared or
"De Imagine V 17J 132: cf. V 19J 133.
31 De Calice IX {8] 219. 220; cr. IV Adv. Sabellium [16] 113, 114 (the Father is the
fons et principium, and though the Son is good he yields in goodness to the Father; all
the same the Son is incomparable).
321.9* .
33lbid. [I) 10*.
"Ibid. 12J 10*.
392
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
~aS3~~tinguished or was no longer in existence. It certainly did not
dIill~'It ~id not receive the nail. (Succeed in) transfixing a soul, and I
w admIt (the same in the case of) the Power' 36 H
elaborate his conviction that soulish substance (tho~gh h edgoes on to
th t )' . I ' e oesnotuse
e en~ IS SImp y ~capable of experiencing corporeal pain. But it
was capable
k b . of a certam sympathy with the flesh . 'The Powerwasnot
;~c , ut It was hurt (ii).YTJcrtv). Certainly hurt follows on injuries'.
. at then does It mean ~o say that Christ died for our sins? 'The spirit
retIred, the body remamed deprived of spirit' (dnvoov). Then he
essays an analogy, denved from two Johannine sayings 'the bread of
~Od came down from heaven' and 'this is my flesh' (6:33 and 51). Did
t e.flesh of the ~on of God come down from heaven? No. What the
~aymgs mean IS Smce the Power which took (flesh) came down from
eaven, ,what t?e Power possesses has something corresponding to it
~~va).oYl~ttal} m the flesh. Therefore, conversely (dvttcrtptljlov) what
he flesh su?,ers has so~ethmg corresponding to it (dva).oyi~&ta,) in
t e ~owe~. 38 ~ll the lllsults and injuries done to the body 'have a
~;la"onshlp to him who dwells in it' (dvacpBptta, 611:' tOY tvollcoovra).
you throw a stone at the Emperor's picture, you insult the Emperor
If you tear the Emperor's ~arment, you are attacking the Emperor. 3~
Eu;ebi~s is here reproducing an analogy used earlier by Asterius 40
. d n t e next discourse, Eusebius elaborates his theory of ;he
m estructlbillty of the psychic:
Things ~nlik~ a.ccording to nature cannot be associated: if I sa that a
camel flIes, thIS IS unnatural and incredible so 'that p hY
tern I h" . ower w 0 IS pre-
e por~: w .0 IS;corporeal in its na ture, who is impassible in its rank
:~e .. pOsmon m t e scale of being}. who is with the Father (npo, tOY
. t pal (In I:I), who IS alongside the Father (napa t&natp() h'
hIS nght hand wh " l'f . , w olSat
, . . 0 IS ~ gory, 1 I were to say that this incor oreal
nature suffers -It IS an llltolerable thought 41 Y d P
angel .th d d . ou cannot amage an
soul c WI a swor ,an you cannot damage a soul with a nail. The
annot be cut or burned, because it was created like that.42 You
393
 Eusebius if Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
Period of Confusion
unchanged by the Passion, what occurred to it was not damage, nor
e power to death and you cannot cause the indestructible diminution, but insult. 50 When the Son during the Agony in the
cannot put th 'h' 1 . 43
.
sou1 to d·Ie. It would means anm I atlOn.
Its
h . Garden asks that the cup may pass from him, he was not asking to be
. . ion of Arian doctrinc.44 emp aSlze excused the Passion, but he did this simply to show his obedience to
Eusebius can also, m the best tradlt h C . L"'e d'led' God was
f h P . andte roSS. '1' , his Father's will and that he was not following his own. 51 And, like
the paradox 0 t e aSS1~n d' 'he who was in glory was subject to all Arians, Eusebius attacks the idea that Christ was 'a mere man'
crucified; the Judge wasJU ge , . .
I' G 0 d d'Ie.
.msuts~ d 45 And he expands thIS further. (homo purus). 52 And again, like all Arians, he maintains that the Son
h hole Sanhedrin of the Jews that he exists in order to do what the Father could not do without disaster:
'Stephen confessed before t ~ ~od Understand and see if these are 'The Father did not generate the Son because he was insufficient, but
who wa~ crUCIfied by them [; themselves compel you to confess because those things which were created were insufficient to endure
appropnate to a man .' ., the act
crucifie~ wJ~'w~~:ng with the pagans slanderously
the power of the lngenerate. therefore he speaks through a
that he who was Mediator',53
For he IS not a man, ,as t e . L'r. . h looked like man mdeed
' . sentlflg theIr own lLC, e ill Eusebius then in his doctrine of the Incarnation does not move far
call h1m, mlsrepre . h . God But perhaps you w
ft d mIracles because e IS . 'f
and he per orme h ' f i d,n But you must know that 1 beyond the conventional Arian doctrine, that this taking of flesh by
"Ifh . G d how was ecruO Ie . . d the Son of God meant' that God suffered, that there was no
say. eiS o. 'fi d't ouldnothavebecomeplainthatheha
he had ndotbbeedn cSruo~~esu~e;:d as man and raised the dead as God' ,46 intervening human soul to protect the Godhead from suffering. But
assume a 0 y. his strong emphasis on the impassibility of the soul (divine or human)
kes his osition a little clearer: he does not deny that
Elsewhere he rna P d b ried and rose again. But he does and its immunity to damage or diminution, which is not present in
Christ was crUCified, dead an u . ld not do so 'The Asterius nor in much later Arianism, leads him to water down this
deny that the nail pierced the ,~~d~e~; ~~~~aining that 'he felt doctrine. He certainly did not, any more than other Arians, envisage
Power did not see corruption. that the nails pierced the Power, the Word of God as taking an entire man, with human mind as well
sympathy' (compassus est) you mea~ d the power you are in danger. as human body. For his Jesus Christ was certainly omniscient; he did
0Br eVifen pierc;~nt~~a~~~: ~:~;Pleltemisery (tristi;ia), not for hims~f, not ask questions in order to gain information. 54 In this Eusebius was
ut you m . concede this' Christ felt sorrow .Lor more like later Western Arians. The earliest Arians, such as
but for the flesh, yes, EuseblUs c~n " t up But this is not the same Athanasius of Anazarbus, would have pointed to Christ's ignorance
the flesh because he waS d~~m:. t~;a~s:t~r h" asks in what sense was as a sign of the imperfection of the pre-existent Son.
as saying that the power e t e:r. r seem's to be present but Eusebiu. is also typically Arian in his refusal to allow divinity to the

~~::~fr~!~~~~;'~~:i:~~~~I:~~(~~:~;~~~d~!:£~:L~~~~~:l
Holy Spirit. Here perhaps he was doing no more than reproducing
the theology of his namesake of Caesarea. He allows indeed that the
Spirit existed before the Incarnation. 55 But he can write 'Worship the
endured have an apphcatlon to . reJeru~ 'were assed on to one Ingenerate and the one Only-begotten, and do not despise the
h' h his attackers dared agamst hiS body P . d
w IC h P '49 The divine nature remalne
(transmiltebantur) t e ower. 5°[42174.75: quantum ad naturam specIal I niltil laesusest; quantum enim ad id quod ausi
8 sunt ;niuriam irrogarunt. C( De lncorporali et lnvisibili Deo XX [2179 (the sufferings of
43(3l 14*. The Larin translation of much of this can be found in I [35--'7] 3 -40; II the body do not-touch the immortal soul). and [29] 96, 97 (the Power inhabiting the
[!rIol 4!r52, [34-51 68""70 , [37170 . body of the incarnate Son gave his saliva and clothes capacity to heal).
44See above, Pp·39-40 ' . * SIDe Calice IX [18] 227.
45A sermon extant in Syriac 35* (Latm tr. 72 ). "De Fide III [2J 80.
35 *. 36* (Latin tr. 73*)'
46 "De Fide III [32198.
47 De Filio II [37l 70 . s4De Homil/is Assumplione ii XVII [4J 373.
"Ibid. [38171. 72. "De Fide II [231 60.
49[4I1 73. 74'
395
394

Period of Confusion
one Spirit' [but do not worship him].56 At o~e point his discourse
progresses in an upward direction, first dealmg wIth the human
body, then the human mind, then to angels and then to the Holy
Spirit, andnot long after he ascends one step higher, to t~e Son 'from
whom the Spirit received'.57 The Father does not work ~ the Son as
he did in the prophets: 'For in the prophets the Holy SpIrIt wa~ active;
but the Son had no need for the Spirit because it is he who gIves the
Spirit. 'sS . mentions ousia or homoios kat' ousian (like according to ousia) once. He
In as far as he has any Trinitarian theology, that IS any attempt to
distinguish what God is as Three from what he is as One, he is nO
pioneer. He reproduces one old formula, probably culled from
Eusebius of Caesarea. 59 'The only thing proper to say is that the
Father really is, and the Son really is, and the Holy Spirit ... the
Father ingenerate and alone ingenerate; the Son only-begotten and
alone only-begotten, and the Holy Spirit is too, and he is s.cnt from
the Son according to the Father's wilL'6o There IS a dlstmctIOn
between the Father and the Son, the one is ingenerate and the other
only-begotten,61 but there are not two Gods. 62 Just as the Father is
pre-eminent and above all nature because he is ingener~te, so the S~n
is believed as above all in this, that he IS the offsprmg (progenies
ytvv'1l1u) of the Father. 63 The angels have a rank, ~?t a place, which
marks their pre-eminence in honour, and the Spmt IS before then.'
and the Spirit offers you to the Son, but the Son wIlldeclare (enarrab.t
de) the Father.64 'The Father is entreated; the SpIrIt IS sent ... there IS
one who goes, there is one who sends, the Father; the Son ~ntreats,
the Father sends, the Spirit is instructed.'6' In the next dIscourse
Eusebius tries again to distinguish Father and Son without h~vmg a~y
term to distinguish them, unable apparently to use hypostaSIS or ousta.
All he can say is that the Father is the Father and the Son the Son and
that there are not two Gods, but one. 66 His ascription at the end of a
'.De Fide III [40]IOJ.
57De Imagine V [16] OS. 139 [231 143 (quotation from the last).
S8Ve Quinque Panibus VIII [S} 199·
59S ee above, pp·52-3·
.oDe Fide III [20]91.
.llbid. 1211 91, 92.
.'Adv. Sabellium IV [141 IlJ.
"Ibid. \21 I 1J8.
"De ApoSlolis e. Fide XIII [71 2 95.
• 'Ibid. [291 J 12.
MDe Apostofis et Fide ii XIV (21) 33 8.
Eusehius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
discourse runs 'Now to the ingenerate God through one only-
begotten Son be glory, honour, power and majesty in one Holy
Spirit'.67
Both Altaner and Quasten describe Eusebius of Emesa as 'semi-
Arian'.6s If this means anything other than that he was a follower of
the theology of Basil of Ancyra and his school, the term is so vague as
to be useless. If it means that Eusebius was an adherent of Basil of
Ancyra's school of thought, it is manifestly incorrect. He never
shows no sign of reproducing the interesting doctrine of the intimate
connection between generation and creation in the Son's relation to
the Fath~r which distinguish:d that school. Eusebius is certainly not a
conventional nor typIcal Arlan. Though his motto appears to be 'No
na~es, ,no p~ck-drill', and he is anxious to avoid the controversy
whIch IS ragmg around him, he covertly distinguishes himself in
many ways' from conventional Arianism in his doctrine of the
relation of the Son to the Father. He carefully avoids saying that the
Son IS created or made, that he was produced from non-existence
that his production depended wholly on the Father's will. He insist;
that he was begotten incomprehensibly and out of all relation to
time, though he never says that he was eternally begotten. He does
not at all emphasize the imperfection or limitations of the Son, pre-
eXIstent or mcarnate, and he allows that the Son has perfect
knowledge of the Father. Whether or or not the Son has a human
soul does not enter his head; he does not go out of his way to deny a
human soul to Jesus ChrIst, but clearly It does not occur to him that he
had one.
On the other hand, he is not a pro-Nicene theologian either. His
doctrme of the Incarnation rests on basically Arian premises, i.e. that
the Son took a body but not a mind and his Godhead was thus
dIrectly affected by human experiences and sufferings. He can in
co~sequence sometimes appreciate the scandal of the cross as no pro-
Nlcene wrIter every could. But even here he seems anxious to break
away. The Godhead did not feel bodily suffering, only the body did
that. The Godhead perhaps could feel sorrow for the body, but
endured no more than msult, no damage. Eusebius says nothing
whatever about hypostasis or ousia. Nobody could gather from his
67De Arbilrio I 14I} 43 .
68Altaner. Palrologie 201; Quasten Patrology 111.349.
397
 Period of Confusion
writings that the creed N had ever existe~. He has no word for what
God is as Three in contrast to what he IS as One, scarcely sees the
necessity for one. His is not a seriously Trinitarian theology. He
subordinates the Son sharply to the Father, though he allows that he lS
divine by nature. He regards the Spirit as an inferior Being, not
apparently to be worshipped, lower in status than the Son as the Son
is lower than the Father. . .
Eusebius is not an Origenist, or, to be precise. to c~ll him 3?
Origenist would not add anything to our understandmg of hIs
position. As regards the soul and the general contrast between the
intellectual and the corporeal he is a Platonist. But he IS far removed
from Origen's doctrine either of the Incarnation or of the Trlmty.
Any Origenist ideas he may have had :",~re derived from his master,
Eusebius of Caesarea, whose faithful dIsCIple he IS m most (but ?ot m
all) things, and not least in his careful attention to the text of SCripture
and in his knowledge of Hebrew. He is even more sober and cautious
than Eusebius of Caesarea in using allegory. He IS above all, as
Buytaert says, a man of good sense and in many ways an admIrable
character. He is assuredly a standing warnmg agamst throwm~
around irresponsibly labels like 'Arian' or 'orthodox' or 'Seml-Arlan
when dealing with this period.
2. Cyril of Jerusalem
Cyril was probably born in Palestine, perhaps in Caesarea, about
313.69 He was probably made deacon about 330 by Macarius, bishop
of Jerusalem, to whom Arius refers contemptuously m h~s Letter to
Eusebius of Nicomedia, 70 and certainly priested by Macarlus su~cessor
Maximus. Maximus had taken part in the condemnation of
Athanasius at Tyre in 33 5, but at Serdica in 343 had left the Eastern
bishops andjoined the party that supported Athanasius and Marcellus
69For literature on Cyril of Jerusalem see Gwat~in SA 744. AC 693; Harnack
History IV. 70-1;]. Lebon 'La Position de Saint Cynlle de Jerusalem da~s les lettres
provoquees par l'arianisme'; W. Telfer Cyril of Jerusa/~m an.d .Nef!Jeslus of Emes~
19-<>3. 199; A. A. Stephenson 'St Cyril of Jerusalem s Tnmtanan Theol~g!.
Simonetti C,;si 206-9. 530; F. L. Cross St Cyril ofJerusalet!l: Lectures on the ChrtSt,a~
Sacraments (Introd. Greek text, ET by R. V(. Church~; ~rt 'Cyrillus vonJeru~ale~
in TRE 8 (261-6) by E.). Yarno!d (1981, WIth fullerblbhography); R. Gregg eyn!
of Jerusalem and the Arians' (Arianism 85-105).
'OOpitz Urk III No. I. 3(2).
398
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
and excommunicated the leading Easterners. Maximus died about
the year 348, and there is some confusion concerning the
circumstances under which Cyril succeeded him as bishop of
Jerusalem. Rufinus says of this affair:
'At Jerusalem however Cyril received the episcopate after Maximus;
the circumstances of his ordination were uncertain, and he began a
career of vacillation sometimes in belief, more often in allegiance'.71 .
Jerome, who, we must remember, was prejudiced because he had
quarrelled (exhibiting his frequent and most unsaintly habit offailing
out with his friends) with John, Cyril's supporter and successor in the
see, gives a more detailed account Oflhis incident:
'Maximus was bishop ofJerusalem after Macarius died. After him the
Arians took possession of the church, that is Cyril, Eutychius. Cyril
again, Irenaeus, Cyril for a third time, Hilary, Cyril for a fourth time'
and he goes on to relate that when Maximus died Akakius promised to
make Cyril bishop if he would renounce his ordination as presbyter
by Maximus and serve as deacon in the church. Cyril agreed, and was
then instrumental [presumably by Acacius' help] in deposing
Heradius 'whom Maximus on his death-bed had put in his place', and
in consequence Cyril was made bishop of ]erusa~em. 72
Socrates says 'Akakius and Patrophilus thrust out Maximus of
Jerusalem and put Cyril in his place', 73 and Sozomenus echoes this.74
Theodoret on the other hand in his first mention of Cyril in the
Church History tells us that Maximus succeeded Macarius and Cyril
Maximus with no hint of either dissension or Homoian sympathies;
on the contrary, he describes Cyril as 'a keen champion of the
apostolic doctrines' (i.e. Nicene orthodoxy).75 We should have no
difficulty, however, in deciding which of these accounts is the more
reliable, especially when we remember that Jerome was writing the
Chronicle as early as 380, and he could have supplemented it with
information gained later when he was in Jerusalem. Cyril, whatever
he may have been earlier, from 348 onwards was not a supporter of
,,71 Hiero~olymis vero .Cy~illus post lv!aximum sacerdotjo confusa iam orajnatione suscepto
abquando In fidel saeplus En communlone variabat HE X.2. This is in fact as good a
summary account of Cyril's career as any.
72Jerome Chronicle sub ann. Constantius XII [?U3] PL 27: 502-3.
"HE 1I.38(1!7-8).
"HE IV.2C>-1(169-7o); cf. 5.1.
"HE IL2S.6.
399
 Period of Confusion
the cause of Athanasius nor, we may infer, at that point 'a keen
champion of the apostolic decrees'. T~~odor~t, with ~he benefit of
hindsight, is anxious to whitewash Cyril s earher affimtles, as anxIOUS
asJerome was to expose them. IfMaximus, as seems likely, ordained
Heradius alone on his death-bed, it was in the fourth century a hIghly
irregular though not completely unprecedented action, motivated
perhaps by his knowledge that Heradius alone in that area was pro-
Athanasius and pro-Nicene. It is not surprising that AkaklUs, who
was formally the metropolitan of the see ofJerusalem, took action to
quash this ordination and to instal Cyril as bishop ofJerusalem, at the
cost of his disowning Maximus as far as he could.
In 357 or thereabouts, however, Cyril fell out with Akakius,'6 and
was at the latter's instigation deposed by an ecdesiastical synod. The
ultimate cause was probably a dispute about jurisdiction between the
sees of Caesarea and of Jerusalem (the latter having been given an
incentive to enlarge its authority though no actual increased
jurisdiction by a canon of Nicaea 325 which mentioned its
honourable status). But the actual charge was misappropriating
church furniture which Cyril was alleged to have sold for the benefit
of the poor of his see and which found its way into disreputable
hands. Cyril was slow to answer Akakius' demand that he should
explain himself and when he was finally condemned he appealed to
the Emperor. But he was deposed and went to Tarsus where Silvanus
the bishop (certainly one of Basil of Ancyra's followers) was
sympathetic to him.77 He appeared at the Council ofSeleucia in 359,
was acquitted by the Homiousian majority at that council, as Akakius
was deposed. But this availed him as little as it did Anianus." He was
deposed arid exiled in the general condemnation early in 360. Not
only was his doctrine by now uncongenial to Akakius who held a
controlling position in ecclesiastical affairs, but Cyril had apparently
further offended Constantius by selling a garment (again for
eleemosynary purposes) which Constantius had originally presented
to the church in Jerusalem.'· On Julian's accession Cyril returned,
and was able to promote, or at least support, more than one candidate
76 1 put together here Socrates HE II:40(127) and Sozomenus HE IV 25.1-4; cf.
Theodorct HE II.2S. 7.
77Theodorct HE 11.25.7. 8.
78SCC above p. 374; Theodoret HE II.2S.9. 10.
79Theodoret HE Il.27.I. 2. The earlier charge related by Sozomenus may be a
doublet of this.
400
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
for the see of Caesa rea when Akakius died in 365 or 366.'0 In 367 or
368 howe."er, the Emperor Valens, rendered more suspicious and
apprehenSIve for hIS throne than previously by the recent rebellion of
Procopius. which had won unexpected support, decreed that all
bIShops exlled by Constantius in 360 were to return to exile. He could
trust apparently none but Homoians, who agreed with his theology.
Cy~1 agam went to exile, and probably his nephew Gelasius too.
Cynl had probably returned by 378, when Valens was killed in battle
agamst the Goths, for Sozomenus says that at the accession of
TheodoslUs all the churches in the East were in Arian hands except
Jerusal~m .. By thIS tIme Cynl had, with many other original
H~molouSlans, Jomed th~ pro-Nicene party as far as theological
opmlOns were concerned. 1 The Council of Constantinople of 382
went out of Its way to emphasize the regularity ofCyri]'s ordination
and the orthodoxy of his. views.' 2 Cyril continued unmolested in
possession of his see of Jerusalem till his death in 386, or, more
probably, 387.• 3
Only three surviving works can with any confidence be ascribed
to Cyn!. The Catecheses, addresses delivered to catechumens in
8°~his-is what we might conclude from the confused narrative of Epiphanius,
PQnano~ 73:23.7(296) and 37.1-6(312), but Jerome's account of frc ueot
alt~rnatlon~ In th,e see ofJerusalem between Cyril and others must be given p~oper
weight. EplphanlUs, w!t0 came from Palestine and was writing earlier than Jerome,
makes out that EutychlUs ofEleutheropolis was Cyril's enemy, though he does not
say that he wa~ a nval for the see ~f Jerusalem, which Jerome indicates. Gelasius
nephew ofC:ynl, was at some point In this melee probably made bishop of Caesa rea'
pushed ~Y his ~ncle. ~ozomenus HE IV.3O-3 says that on Cyril's departure in 36~
Herenmus ob~alned h?s s,ee, and. then Heraclius and after him Hilary, but that Cyril
returned on TheodoslUs accession. This seems a likely account of the succession to
~h~ see ~etween 360 and 378 and is not wholly incompatible with Jerome's
Inlormatlon.
.81.Socrates HE V:8 and Sozomenus HE VII.7.3 say that he had abandoned an
ongmally Macedoman pos~tion. As will become evident, this could not be correct
because :v.hatever else Cynl may be accused of, depreciation of the status of the
~olY Spmt c~nnot be attributed to him. Probably these historians really mean that
l~ h~d heJd with the Homoiousians. Sozom.enus' statement about Arians possessing
a t e sees (HE VII.~.2) cannot be entirely correct, as is evident from the
correspondence of BasIl of Caesarea.
82Theodoret HE V·9·J7. Lebon (op. cit. 191) cites this as evidence of Cyril's
constant adhe~ence to Nicaea. But Yarnold (op. cit. 261-2) more convincingl
~uggests that It sho,:",s that both Cyril's ordination and his orthodoxy had be~
Im pugned .. Yarnold I~ wrong, however. in attributing this suspicious vindication to
t he Councd of 38 I, Instead of that of 382
83See Yamold. op. cit.262. .
401
 Period of Confusion
Jerusalem in the year 3So, a Letter to the Emperor Constantius, written in
351 to describe the appearance of a cross in the sky above Jerusalem
which he took to be miraculous, and a short Homily on the Paralysed
Man, whose date is not known. 84 The question of whether Cynl
wrote the last five Catechetical Lectu~es which are usually
distinguished from the others as Mystagoglcal Catecheses, has been
uch discussed and is by no means settled. 85 These five, however, do
::'ot offer useful material for determining Cyril's positIOn ~ the search
for the doctrine of God, so the subject of their authorship need ?ot
concern us . 'Thl's means that virtually our sole
. source
I 'of hi
mformatlOn86
on Cyril's theology is a work produced qUite ear y m s care~r.
Early in his Catecheses Cyril sets out the ~reed which he beheves
and which he expects his catechumens to believe. As he goes through
his course of instruction he refers to various articles of a creed which
can be filtered out and put.together but which is cU~lOusly deVOId of
interesting or significant features and does not even mclude the clause
'he came down from heaven'. The earlier creed. however, IS, worth
reproducing here. It is a purely Christological statement, lackmg the
first article and any following the second m a normal creed. It runs
thus:
'Believe then in the Son of God, the one and only. OU~ L~rd Jesus
Christ, who was generated as Light from Light, who 15 lik~ m all
respects to him who generated him; who does not possess eXIstence
within time but has been generated before all ages eternally and
incomprehe~sibly from the Father, the Wisdom of God and t~e
Power having independent existence (tvU1t60'tUtov) [He SIts at God s
right hand through all ages and not merely after his earthly work j,. he
is sovereign along with the Father. and is t~e cr~ator of every thin?
through the Father, having nothmg lacking 10 the rank of his
Godhead, and knowing him who generated him, as he 15 known by
him who generated hj'rn.' And the statement ends with a confiatlon of
In 10:15 and Mtt 11:27. 87
84Telfer op. cit. 35-8 is useful for dating the Catecheses. ..
85Telfer op. cit. 39-40 and Ya~old op. cit. 261-:-3. who take opposae VIews,
resent a succinct account of the views for and agamst. ..
p 86Jerome De Vir. Ill. CXII says that he wrote his Catecheses in adulescent.a, which
must be an exaggeration. f th C h
"c atecheses IV ·79v-·
('8) N .B. In the text used here books I-XI h 0 'b e ' atec f eses
h madvertence or careful planning cf. XI.8(3 00 ).
occupy volume I and books XIII-XVIlI Vol. II, and in Vol. II t enum enog 0 t e
pages begins again at 1.
402
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
This creed is manifestly anti-Arian in many places. It explicitly
embraces the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son; it is at one
point deliberately anti-Marcellan. But at no point does it make
mention of ousia in connection with the Son's relation to the Father
(except in as far as it attributes independent existence to the Son's
hypostasis, a doctrine which N apparently directly denied). Nobody
could imagine that it is a disguised form of the creed of 32 5. Without
going further we could say that it is a clear piece of evidence that
during the period of confusion which we have been surveying in the
last few chapters of this work we must hot make the mistake of
classifying the doctrine which we can find people professing simply
into 'orthodox' (i.e. pro-Nicene) and 'Arian' (i.e. everything else).
The closest affinity' of this formula is perhaps to be found in the
thought, not of Eusebius of Caesarea, but of Alexander of
Alexandria.
A further investigation of Cyril's thought makes it perfectly clear
that he taught the eternal generation of the Son. God, he says, was
never childless (lilta1C;) nor did he become a Father by changing his
mind, 'but before all substance (hypostasis) and before all sentience
(aluSlju.CJl<;) before times and before all the ages God possessed the
status of Father.' And he did not become Father by coition
(UUllltA.OK~<;), nor by inadvertence nor emanation nor diminution nor
88
alteration. The perfect Father begot the perfect Son. 89 And in
another densely Christological passage he says that Christ is:
'the Son truly, the Son by nature (cpUUIK6v), without beginning
«(ivapx ov); he did not achieve promotion to Sonship from a servile
status, bu.t as Son eternally he has been generated by a birth which is
beyond investigation and comprehension ... he is not something
different as existing from what he was when generated; but he was
'generated Son from the beginning, Soq of his Father, in everything
like him who generated him, generated as Life from Life, Light from
Light and Truth from Truth. Wisdom from the Wise and King from
the King, God from God and Power from Power.'90
The Son had no beginning; he is 'Son of God before all the ages'. And
Cyril interestingly applies to him the text Isa 53 :8, in order to prove
. 88Ibid. VII.S; for this statement that God was never childless nor generated by
89 214 .
90XI.4(294). It should perhaps be noted that Stephenson wanted to erase as later
interpolations every OCCurrence oflivapxo~ applied to the Son in Cyril (op. cit. 237).
403
 Period of Confusion
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem

his eternity not as it had usually been used up till then, to show the
mysterious~ess of his generation. He also uses Ps 2:7 i'Thou a~t mi
but the Father who exists eternally and ineffably generated the Son, a
single son who has no brother; and there are not two ultimate
n this da have I begotten thee'} to prove the eterna generatIOn 0 principles (archai), but the Father is the Head of the Son, a single
SOh : .' h Y d "to-day" (does) not (mean) recently but eternally; Origin (archl).'97
C fISt. t e wor '91 G d .s spirit so thlS
"to day" is timeless, before all the ages. 0 I d' '.
The readiness to use hypostasis of the distinct existence of the Son, the
. I WI'thout any
be -ettin is spiritual, not Ph YSlca. . me latlOn nor
int~rval ~f time; and he was begotten perfect, wlthouht anbY to nee~ doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son and the complete
absence oflanguage using ousia all resemble the position of Alexander
. d
achieve perfection gra ua y.II 92 As true God the Fat er egot
d ' 93 He did not beget 1m before the Council of Nicaea.
who is true God and Son by nature not a. option.. air'
him as mind produces a word which dISSolves mto the . Cyril is anxious to avoid Sabellianism, whose chief contemporary
representative is in his eyes Marcellus of Ancyra. In one of his rare
'We acknowledge Christ begotten not as Word put forth (logon identifications of the exponent of a view which he is attacking he
h 'k ) but as Word subsisting inde.pendently (enhypostaton), speaks of 'another head of the dragon which has recently arisen in
prop
.. Or!noton s, oken by the lips and dissoI ved , but bego tie n from
..the
~:;~;; ete:ally and indescribably and in hypostasis' [i.e. subSlStmg
Galatia'.98 He warns more than once against the doctrine of Sa bellius
(without naming him) which envisaged a 'Sonfather' (ulonatchp).
distinctlyJ. 94
'but believe that there is one only-begotten Son of one God, God the
The Begetter, he later says, knows ~hat he h~ ~egoltte~oae~d ;~: Word before all ages, the Word not uttered (prophorikos) and
Be otten knows who has begotten hIm, but no 0 y e se . dissolved into the air, nor the Word likened to things without
Be:etter does not have a father nor the Begotten a brother, independent existence (anhypostatois), the Word who is the Son,
nor are there two Ingenerate nor two Only-he.gotten but :~e maker of all rational beings (logikon), the Word who listens to the
Father and himself speaks.'99
in enerate (liytvvrrro~) Father is one, and the Son IS one, etem y
be~otten from the Father 'not begotten in times but begotten before This condemnation ofMarcelJus is significant. The Catecheses cannot
ages; not promoted by improvement (tIC npoICon;jc;), but begotten as have been written after the year 350 because they refer at one point to
that which he is now'. 95
the existence of Emperors in the plural (i.e. Constantius and
And finally comes an entirely clear statement: Constans).lao It was seven years, or perhaps less, since the Westerners
at the Council of Serdica had resoundingly vindicated Marcellus'
'He begot him eternally, and begot him much mo;eswiftly than our
words 01' thoughts 96 ... in the case of divine acnVIty gen~ratlon IS
orthodoxy, and Athanasius among them. We have no reason to think
. Iess, an d ... he did not transfer the Son fromh nan-eXlstence to that Athanasius had made any public renunciation of these views
time h d t . ted' since 343· This does not suggest that Cyril regarded himself at this
existence, nor did he introduce into Sonship one W 0 a no CXlS ,
time as either indirectly or in a disguised form a partisan of
Athanasius.
91S(294-6). But at XI.II-12(302. 304. 306) C yn'I de plores attempts to discover
We have already seen that Cyril defined the union of Father and
" (29 ) R Gregg notes how constan tly Cyril polemicizes against the
how the 8Son is begotten. early
_ ). his Son as one of 'nature' (cpurrlc;).'OI Cyril recurs to this point often.
Arian7 doctrine
. . of t h e Son ae h"'
levmg G,0 dhead
, by progression (tIC TtPOICOttll<; m
article 'Cyril of Jerusalem and the Anans . Christ, he says, must not be thought of as 'appointed' Son, but Son by
93 9 ()aa).
"14()06, )08).
94 10(302).
"XV.27(194-2).
1
)()a6). . b . h' h actually had a beginning, 99IV.8(9 8): this is one place where he refers to UI01tUtciJp; another is at XV.9( 4,
96This could be taken as implymg a egetcmg w 1~. d S . t C rille' 7- )
95
16
166) uWltatop(a, where he also condemns the ex ouk onton of Arianism, and another
but I think that Lebon is correct in conclu~ing ('L~ P~i~:lpO:rt ~es~~:ed ~o emphasise
20 8 XI.I6()08, ) la), and anather XI.17() (0).
that this is only a rather awkwa.rd expression on yr lOoXIV.14( 124).
the timelessness of the generation.
101'S on by nature' at XJ.4(29S) quoted above on p.ooo.
 Period of Confusion
nature, 'for the rank of deity and birth from the Father does not admit
an equal'.102 He is not a Son 'by bei~g prom.oted by appomtment,
but because he is generated by nature. 103 He IS also re~dy to call the
Father 'fount' (ll'1yij) of the Son: 'the Father is the timeless ongm
(arche) of the Son, incomprehensible, without beginning'. The Fat?er
is 'the fount of the river of righteousness of the Only-begotten (a
striking phrase), 'he who begot him in a ~anner which he alone
knows' .104 But with this immensely hIgh estimate of the relation of
the Son to the Father we are startled to fmd Cyril occasionally
expressing a decided beliefin the subordination of the Son. He sp~aks
of 'God who begot, and God who is begotten; God of everythmg,
but claiming (elllYPuqJoJ.lSVo., middle voice) the Fath~r as ~IS God (~r
'claiming God as his Father,).'05 And .he can wnte, the Son IS
subordinated to (OllOtUcrcrOJ.lSvo.) the Father .. , he will be
subordinated not because .at that point [1 Cor 15:28] he begms to
submit to (lleI9uPxillv) the Father (because he always does that whIch
. is pleasing to him invariably), but because. that IS the pomt when he
obeys.'lo. Cyril is not after all so extraordinary an exceptIon among
the exponents of Christology in the mid-fourth century.
When he comes to speak about the Incarnation, Cyril insists that
the divinity and the humanity of Christ were both real, the one
invisible the other visible. His flesh was really like our flesh: 'he really
slept in ,the boat as man, and he walked on t h e water as G0.. d'107
There is no sign anywhere in his work that he saw the neceSSIty ?f
postulating a human mind or soul in Jesus ~hrist. He does not, 10
Arian fashion, deny that it was there, but It SImply do.es not occu~ to
him to discuss the subject. When Christ asked a question concernmg
the paralysed man it was not because he was ignorant; he was, CyrIl
clearly believes, omniscient. I os He tends to play down the scandal of
the Cross; the Son of God could not have been really weak or
helpless:
'He came then to his suffering deliberatdy, rejoicing at the
I02X1.2(290, 292).
IO'X.4(264).
I04XI.20(304)·
I05XI.rS(3 12).
IO'XV.30 1I.19S.
I07IV.9(IOO); cf. Homilia in Paraiyticuffl 6(410, 412).
108Hom. in Parai. 3(406. 408).
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
achievement. smiling at the reward (an:cpcivcp), rejoicing at the
salvation of mankind.'109
And the only reason he can give for the necessity of Christ dying
consists in some puerile and unconvincing fulfilments of predictions
made in the Old Testament. I 10 On the other hand, the reason which
he gives for the necessity of the Incarnation is very sound and does not
in the least suggest the desire to safeguard God which was so
prominent a feature in fourth-century Christian thought. 'This is the
reason, then', he says, 'since nobody was able to see the face of the
Godhead and live, he took the face of humanity, in order that we
might see this and live'.' 11 We could not bear the unveiled sight of
God: 'Since then man wanted to listen to someone o£ the same
appearance (llUP'OIlOlOllPOcrrollOU) as himself the Saviour took a nature
with a psychology like ours (t6 61l010llu9t.), that men might be the
more easily educated'."2 It is obvious that for Cyril the Incarnation
was not in any sense a degradation or dilution of God .
On the subject of the Holy Spirit, Cyril is perhaps more
remarkable than on any other point. He describes the Spirit's
functions but also comes closer to defining his status than anybody
else in the mid-fourth century. The Spirit is 'undivided, multiple in
power, active in many directions but himself not split up' and he is
'honoured with (the same) dignity of status (t~. a~(u. t1llii tet(Il'1tat)
as the Father and the Son'; with the Father and the Son he 'sanctifies
and brings apotheosis to everybody; he has spoken in the Law and the
Prophets, in the Old and New Testaments.'113 Only the Holy Spirit,
along with the Son, can fully see God. ll4 He is ab.ove and not
comparable to angels of any rank. I IS The Father gives (everything)
to the Son, and the Son shares it with the Spirit. II. He is 'honoured
with the Father and the Son and at the time of the holy baptism
included in the Holy Trinity.' I 17 But Cyril deprecates unnecessary
IO'Cat. XII1.6(SS).
l1°XlII.S(60, 62), 9-3S(62"96).
11IX.7(.6S).
112XII.14(16, IS): cf. XIV.S(1I4).
IIJIV.16(106, lOS).
114VI.6(162).
11 'XVl.23 (234),
I 16XVI.24(23 6 ).
II7XVI.4(208); the reference may be an appeal to the practice of Christian
bapti,sm. or possibly (though less probably) to the baptism of Jesus by John the
Baptist.
 Period of Cotifusion
speculation about the Spirit, especially curious inquiry about nature
(Physis) and hypostasis; 'if (this term) was in Scripture, we would have
used it; but we should not venture (to use) what is not written.'"·
This looks like a disavowal both of the supporters of N and of the
favourers of a doctrine of three hypostases. On the subject of the
divine status of the Holy Spirit Cyril is however unambiguous:
'The same Holy Spirit, living and distinctly subsisting (6'1'£O"t6,) and
always present along with the Father and the Son, and not speaking or
breathed out and dissolving into the air from the mouth and lips of the
Father and the Son, but subsisting distinctly (&vUlt6crtatov) himself
speaking and working and managing and sanctifying; yet the single
undivided harmonious, saving strategy towards us from the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit is there.'"9
Cyril does his best to distinguish the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit in the Trinity, without the benefit of a single word to indicate
what God is as Three in distinction from what he is as One. The Son,
he says, only just (l1ovovooXI) falls short of identity with the Father,
but instead of indicating identity he says that he is in the Father and
the Father in him, and he does not say 'We, I and the Father, are one'
(tV sO"llEv) 'so that we may avoid alienating (them), nor bring about
an amalgamation of Sonfatherhood' (crovat.01'1'liv o!01tatopia<;); and
he goes on to give a list of the points in which Father and Son are one
_ Godhead, sovereignty, unity of will (there is no ola<j>Olvia nor
olllO"taO"I<;) and creative activity.'20 The points in which the Father
and the Son are distinct are that the Father was not incarnate, did not
suffer for us; that we must avoid saying that there was a time when
the Son did not exist and that this implies his eternal distinction from
the Father; if we honour the Son, this is not to call him Father, nor do
we honour the Son by calling him one of the Father's creatures: 'but
let one Father be worshipped through one Son, and let not the
worship be divided."2' The ,Son is 'like in all respects to him who
generated him ... God from God, and the attributes (xapmC<1lP&<;) of
Godhead are unchanged in the Son ... and, to speak summarily, we
must not divide nor must we make an amalgamation. '122
, "XVI,'4('l6).
, 19XVII.s('S6).
"'XI.16(l08, 310); cf. XVI.4(.08).
'''XI.17(lI0). . Sabelhamsm (op. CIt. 362). No statement could he much further from the truth In
122XI.I8(3 12). Cyril goes on to reject a number of other positions, that the Son IS
alien to the F~ther. that the Father was first Father and then Son, that in producing
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
It is remarkable that Cyril never uses the word ousia nor any ofits
cognates to express the relation of the Son to the Father.'23 An
isolated fragment of an anonymous Arian author remarks that those
who accuse Cyril ofJerusalem of having suppressed the homoousion
because of the simplicity of those many pagans who came to be
baptIzed m Jerusalem as a consequence of their amazement at the
shining Cross observable as a meteorological phenomenon in the
heavens are slandering him. '2'. This suggests that Cyril's shunning of
the word ousta was noted by his contemporaries. Cyril uses the term
hrp~stasis, however, ,to mean 'substance'. in spite of his expressing his
dIslIke of speculatIOn about hypostasis and its absence from
Scripture. '25 He can put the objection, 'But someone will say, if the
dIvme substance is incomprehensible, how is it that you are
discoursing on these subjects?', and in the same passage speak about
the hypostasis, i.e. the total substance, of trees whose fruit has hard
shells.'2. He say~ that we can never explain the hypostasis of the Holy
Spmt, once agam meaning perhaps his substance.'27
Cyril ofJerusal~m; then, deliberately avoided using any language
about God whIch mvolved employing ousia or its cognates. Was he
m spite of this, a disguised Homoousian? The very strong language i~
which he speaks about the unity of nature between Father and Son
his clear rejection of almost all the doctrines peculiar to Arianism and
the determination with which he ascribes full divinity to the Son
have led some people to think so. In particular Lebon,l2S in a long
Wisdom and Power he thenceforw~rd lacked wisdom or energy, that in begetting
God he ce~s:rl to be God, that he diminished or deprived himself thereby, that the
Begotten IS If! any way Jacking; both, in fact, are perfect.
123N . d d .
or 10 ee 10 any other context. The fact that Mystagogical Catech'eses
V. 15(308) ~efers to the ousia (substance) of the Son might indicate that the work is
no:t b~ Cynl, b~t ~e c~ntext is ~e discussion of 'Give us this day our daily (Gk
ep/olIsJOn) bread; th.ls might ha~e mduced him to use it here. I accept, with many
others who have WrItten on Cynl, that the occurrence ofhomoousios at the end of the
Letter to Constantius is an early interpolation.
124Philostorgius HE frag. 25a p.22I.
12SS ee above, PP.407-8.
126Gat VI.S(160).
'27XVI.S(.10); cf. XVII.7(>?'),
128And,. ~ne c?~ld ~dd. Telf~r and ~arn.old, in as far as they express any opinion
about Cyril s Tnmtanan doctrme (whIch lS not far in either case). Lebon believed
that ~e ~hurch of. Cyril's day had of course rejected subordinationism, as it had
350, w~th ~he.exc~ption of Athanasius. every single Eastern theologian accep~ed
subordmatlOOlsm m one form or another.
 Period of Confosion
and carefully written article to which we have already referred more
than once, argued that behind Cyril's language w~l.ch ~as not
explicitly Homoousian one could detect an actual pomlOn Idenncal
with that expressed finally in the Creed of Constantmople of 38J.
Lebon, writing in 1924, suffered from the illusion (apparently shared
by Telfer) that there existed from the beginning of the controversy a
large body of opinion which knew and always had known that the
Christian doctrine of God was that there were three Persons
(hypostases) united in one substance (ousia) , that what God is as One
was always distinguished clearly from what he IS as Three, and that
Cyril in a cryptic form acknowledged. this. Where he appears to
admit subordination or refuse ontological umty, Lebon suggests,
Cyril was referring, and knew that he was referring, to the 'Persons',
or atleast to the function of the 'Person' of the Son, but where he was
referring to the 'nature' of God, or of the Father and the Son, then he
meant the essence or substance of God which all the three equally
possessed, and in which they were united in a numerical, .and not
merely a 'generic', unity.'2. Lebon was a scholar of ablhty and
integrity, and he admitted that Cyril fairly conSistently Writes of the
Son as 'like' (homoios) the Father, but never as 'like-in-substance'
(homoiousios), but he does not think that this excludes numencal
unity.130 He relies for his argument particularly on. a p~ssage which
we have already looked at, where Cyril lists the pomts ill which the
Father and the Son are one,'3' and on another, where Cyril says that
the only-begotten Son is 'sharer' (KOlVCJlv6C;) of the Fa:her's ~odhead
with the Holy Spirit.,32 To say that the Son IS sharer of the
Godhead, he thinks, is going well beyond saying that he is merely
'like'.133 . the alleged numerical unity of substance.'" Stephenson himself
. This account of Cyril's thought, however, will not stand scrutiny.
Cyril never uses the word ousia; his comparatively rare uses of the
word hypostasis as 'substance' do not include any suggestIOn that the
three have the same hypostasis, though he believes that they have the
same nature. If Cyril had seen fll to use the word ousia, it is morally
certain that he would have said that the Father and the Son (and
probably the Holy Spirit also) were 'like in ousia' (01'0101 Ka,' o"olav);
129Lebon, op.cit. 364-81 in particular.
130E.g. op. cit. 371-6.
131Cat. XI.I6(308, 310). see above p. 408.
"'VI.6(I6.).
133Lebon op. cit. 381-2.
Eusehius of Emesa and Cyril ofJerusalem
this was the watchword of the party of Basil of Ancyra, which he
later joined. The points in which Cyril declares Father and Son to be
one (Godhead, sovereignty, unity of will, creative activity) do not
necessarily imply a numerical unity of substance, in fact the third
rather makes against his suggestion. To speak of the Son and Spirit as
'sharers' of the Godhead is not to subscribe to the theory that they
possess a numerical unity of substance. We have already seen'34 that
Basil of Ancyra and his followers, who certainly had no doctrine of
numerical unity and explicitly repudiated the homoousios, had a
doctrine not unlike this one. To suggest that Cyril, who never
distinguishes clearly between 'personal' and 'essential' relations in the
Godhead, and had indeed no word in his vocabulary to express the
concept of 'Person', in fact, or in equivalence, did retain and believe
in this distinction, is the device either of those who have never
carefully examined his work or of those who are determined at any
cost to uphold a theory of original 'orthodoxy'. A. A. Stephenson, in
a perceptive article on Cyril's theology, argues well against Lebon's
theory.'3S As well as pointing out that the passage detailing the
respects in which Father and Son are one does not effect what Lebon
wanted it to do,'36 he adduces several passages from Cyril's
Catecheses which are clearly 'subordinationist' in character: the Son
obeys the Father's will and acts as his agent;'37 the Father reserves
'supreme authority' (a"Bsv"KTJ t~ouoia) for himself,'3. and the Son
owes his separate subsistence (tvUlt6o,amc;) to the Father'39 who is
the Son's source and origin."o If, as is quite clear, Cyril does not
distinguish between nature and Person, this evidence cannot be
dismissed as referring only to the Person of the Son without affecting
believed that Cyril held a 'generic' conception of the unity of the
Trinity derived from Origen and Eusebius of Caesarea, and that
behind his language lies an originally Aristotelian analysis: no
Immatenal species can have more than one instance, because what
distinguishes members of the same species is their matter. He thinks
134S ee above, PP.369(0.
135'St Cyril of Jerusalem's Trinitarian theology'.
1360p. cit. 235.
13'Cat XI.22, 23(316, 318).
138XJ.22(3I8).
"'IV.7(9 6).
140XI.I4. 20(308, 314). For aU this see Stephenson op. cit. 236-7.
141Stephenson op. cit. 141.
4II
 Period oj ConJusion
that Cyril believed in three hypostases. 'As subsistent species
belonging to the same genus, Father, Son and Holy Ghost will be
unique', and there is room for a sort of hierarchy in the Trinity,
which in fact Cyril postulated. 142 This means of course that
homoousion could apply only to material things (an argument we have
heard before), but homoiousion could cover immaterial examples." 3
If this argument holds, it can only apply to Cyril at a later stage in
his development than the point at which he produced the Catecheses,
for when he wrote that work he carefully avoided any theological
language which included ousia or its cognates. It may well be an
explanation, however, of how later he was able to join Basil's group.
He does not fit, in 350, into the category ofHomoousian. He cannot
precisely at that point either be classified as an Homoiousian (or
'Semi-Arian') because he does not espouse the term 'like according to
ousia' and he shows "no sign of the interesting combination of the
concepts of generation and creation of the Son which is characteristic
of Basil of Ancyra. In fact it is difficult to imagine the Cyril of 350
accommodating himself to any doctrine of the creation of the Son.
He was, however, in doctrine probably an accommodating person,
and it is possible that he later decided to join Basil's party because it
represented the nearest approach to his own theological position,
while it did not precisely reproduce it. Just as he never actually names
the Arians as his theological opponents, though he often argues
against them, so it is likely that some of his attacks on Sabellianism
and the concept of the 'Sonfather' are aimed not only at the long-
dead Sabellius, nor only at the doctrine of Marcellus, but at the
homoousion and the creed N, even though he never mentions either.
The Cyril <if 350 was still a long way from being pro-Nicene, in spite
of his high doctrine of the natural unity between the Father and the
Son and his uncompromising views on the divinity of the Spirit,
which render him something of a pioneer in pneumatology in the
fourth century. If we look for his intellectual ancestors, we cannot
name Eusebius of Caesarea, though some have done so. Eusebius
disliked the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son even more
than he disliked the homoousion, because he thought that it implied
two ultimate principles. And Eusebius firmly refused to regard the
Holy Spirit as divine. Eusebius favoured the view that the Son was
'42Ibid. 238"""'9, quotation on 238.
143Ibid. 239 n I.
412
Eusehius oj Emesa and Cyril ojJerusalem
the image of the substance (e!lerov tii, ouain,) of the Father. Cyril on
the contrary warmly embraced the doctrine of .the Son's eternal
g~neration, firmly maintained the divinity of the Spirit, and neither
elkon nor ousia appear in his vocabulary. Cyril's ancestors are
Alexander of Alexandria and beyond him Origen, however and
wherever he may have found these antecedents.
Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril of Jerusalem provide an interesting
study Just because they do not fit readily into any conventional
category. Eusebius has certainly retained some Arian traits but he
cannot be called a typical Arian, any more than he is a 'Semi-Arian'.
Cyril has no Arian traits at all, but cannot be called a typical pro-
N.cene. Both have m common their rejection of the party cries and
theological slogans of their day. We might describe them both as
'Origenists', and 'Origenist' is a label which has been and still is freely
d1Stnbuted by scholars among the theologians of this era. But it helps
!1ttle toward~ a serious dissection of the controversy, any more than
Seml-Arlan does. Except for Marcellus of Ancyra almost
everybody at this period borrowed parts of Origen's doctrine,
AthanasIUs, Anus, Alexander, Eusebius of Caesarea, Asterius and
many others. Almost nobody (with the possible exception of Marius
VlCtonnus) was."n Origenist in the sense of consistently following his
thought and .reJectmg what clashed with it. The two figures who
form the subject of th1S chapter remind us usefully of the diversity,
the fluctuatIOn of opmIOn whIch lay behind the sometimes
app~rently monolithic parties during this period of confusion. They
remmd us that orthodoxy was achieved, not by the defence against
the attacks of heresy of a doctrine which had always been known, but
by a process of tnal and error in which the error was never confined
to a single party or outlook. but made some appearance in all.
4 13
 Part III
The Rival Answers Emerge
 14
The Doctrine of Athanasius

I. The Dates of Athanasius' Works

Before we approach an analysis of Athanasius' doctrine, it is essential

to consider the dates of his writings relevant to our investigation,
some of which have been in the past and still are disputed. By
common consent the earliest of these must be the Conlra Genies el De
Incarnatione. Because there is no overt reference to the Arian
Controversy in this book some scholars have been anxious to place it
before the outbreak of the Controversy, i.e. before 3 IB or at the latest
323. But this is a difficult theory to sustain: in 31B Athanasius would
have been a very young man, perhaps no more than 21 years old;
even on the extreme assumption that Athanasius was born before 297
and that the Controversy began ouly in 323, he would have written
the work at a young age. In the ancient world very few young men in
their twenties wrote theological works (any more than they do
today), and it would be difficult to explain a silence of nearly twenty
years between his first work and the next. At one point in the book he
says that he does not have theological books readily at hand,' and at
another he remarks that the Roman senate decrees 'that some
emperors shall be regarded as gods quite recently, and perhaps even
up to now'. 2 The uncertainty expressed here does not suit a period,
3 IB or 323 or earlier, when the Eastern Empire was ruled by a pagan
Emperor and when nobody could have foreseen confidently

lContra Gentes I.I3ff.

2Ibid. 9.50. A recent article by M. Slusser, 'Athanasius, Contra Gentes et De
Incarnatione'. argues for a date in the early thirties for this work. His argument from
references to other countries by Athanasius is a good one, and we should perhaps
place this work as early as he suggests. But there is no need to see in it, as Slusser does,
hidden references to Arianism. At that point the coalition of Arians and Melitians
had not yet taken place, nor had Athanasius realized the value of an anti-Arian line
in justifying his conduct.

417
 ..
The Rival Answers Emerge
Constantine's ultimate control of the whole Empire, nor have
conjectured that Constantine would fo:bid the Senate to deify him
(in fact he did not do so and they did deify him): The remark IS more
suitable to a time when ConstantIne was stIll alIve but when he was
increasingly making his support for Christianity felt. Finally, a
marked dependence of the whole of this work on the Theophany of
Eusebius of Caesarea, which we have placed towards the end of his
career (perhaps 335, but not later)3 argues for the late rather than the
early date for the Contra Gentes et De Incarnatione. It is perhaps best to
place it during Athanasius' First Exile, in 335 or 336. The fact that It
does not refer to the Arian Controversy does not rule out a date as late
as this. Athanasius, whatever he was to claim in his later polemical
writings, had not been exiled because of his opposition to the
doctrine of Arius, and knew it. The period was one when
theoretically the Arian Controversy had been resolved. Neither
Eusebius of Caesarea nor, as far as we know. Marcellus referred to
Arius in their writings which fall within this period. Athanasius can
have seen no great reason to refer to this controversy. It had
apparently not yet occurred to him that his best defence against the all
too damaging accusation of misbehaviour in his see was to move the
attention of the public from the issue of episcopal administration to
that of soundness of doctrine.
The work called Orationes contra Arianos survives in four books, the
fourth of which is now universally allowed to be by some other hand
than that of Athanasius. Kannengiesser in his Athanase d' Alexandrie
has argued that the third book is not by Athanasius either, but this
position can hardly be described as established. Kannengiesser had,
however, rhade it likely that we must recognize that the third book
was written later than the first two. There is only one reference to the
word homoousios in the first three books (1.9). The work must be
placed before the period when Athanasius began to tum his attention
to defending that term, i.e. about 356, and indeed cannot be placed
very near that date. In these Orations he is quite content to allow the
idea that the Son is 'image of the substance' (eikon tes ousias), a term
which occurs in the 'Dedication' Creed of 341 and in many other
later sources (e.g. 1.26), and the same applies to 'like in all respects'
(1.40). The expression 'precise image' indeed occurs several times in
this work, but it is directly rejected in the later De Synodis 36.6 (343).
JS ee above. P.47 n 94.
418
, ,
The Doctrine of Athanasius
By about 357, i~ fact, he w!ll not tolerate these expressions. There is
one ref~rence 11l 1.,0 which conceivably could indicate a date.
AthanaslUs says that Arians with whom he is arguing 'appeal to the
protection and the threat ofConstantius'. This means of COurse that
the book Was wntten aft~r 337, but that is no great discovery: nobody
has ever suggested that It was. Wfltten earlier than 339. In that year
AthanaslUs was m exIle, havmg been driven from his see by the
agency of ConstantlUS. From 345 onwards until 356 Athanasius was
nommally on good terms with Constantius, and he is unlikely to
have wntten as brusquely about the Emperor as this. After 357 he
would . perhaps have written even more violently. It
looks as I~ we should therefore place the composition of the Orationes
contra Artanos between 339 and 345, perhaps envisaging their
production as a fairly long-drawn-out process over that period.
!I.e have already seen that there is doubt about the date of De Morte
A",. It might have been written early, 336-337, or much later, in the
middle three-fifties. Our decision will partly depend on how we
reconstruct the chronOlogy of the career of Paul of Constantinople.
But thiS s~ort work m fact does uot contribute much to Our
understandmg of Athanasius' doctrine anyway.
With one exception, there is a general agreement, varying only by
a year or two, about the rest of the writings of Athanasius relevant to
OUr theme. The Encyclical Letter to all Bishops must be placed in 338 at
a pomt when Athanasius is leaving Alexandria for Rome. The Le;ter
to the Monks must be connected with the De Morte Arii and placed
accordmg to our placing of that work, but, like that work, its
theological conten~ is not significant. De Decretis we can date to 356
or 357; It IS a first direct defence of the Council ofNieaea undertaken
when the uneasyten-~ear peace between Athanasius and Constantius
(Whom AthanaslUs nghtly recognised as an Opponent of N) had
broken. dow.n (th~ alternative date 350 is too early for this). The De
Sentent,a DlOnyslI follows directly on this work, because it is
defendmg a predecessor in the see of Alexandria against belittling the
homoousios. The Apologia ad Constantium, a mild, deprecating work
should be placed somewhere in 3S6 or early 357; Athanasius has no;
yet given up hope of coming to terms with Constantius. The
4See above. p. 280. If ~e identify the weighty work about to appear mentioned in
the, Lelter!o th~ Monks With the His/oria A,ianorum we must place it (and De Morte
A~~) ~a~e; If, with Kannengiesser, we separate the Letter to the Monks from the HA to
w IC It appears to be a preface, then we can pJace it early.
4 9
'
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Apologia de Fuga was written between the .middle. of 357 and the
beginning of35 8 (Leontius of Antioch, WhOI~ mentIOned In It (I an~
26) is stilI alive). The Encyclical Letter to the BIshops oJEgypt, protest
ing against his ejection in 356, must be placed early In that year;
The Apologia Secunda, whose tone is. far from mild: may reflec
Athanasius' increasing exasperatIOn wIth ConstantlUS In late 357. or
early 35 8.5 The fiercely polemical Historia Arianoru~, denouncmg
and vilifying Constantius, must be dated to 358; the vIolence shown
by the Emperor's troops in Egypt early in that year has rende:ed
reconciliation with Athanasius impoSSIble. The Letters to Ser~plOn,
dealing with the subject of the Holy Spirit which had been ventIlated
by nobody earlier, should be placed between 359 and 361. The Tomus
ad Antiochenos is certainly to be placed m 362, after th~ CounCIl of
Alexandria of that year. We put the Epistula ad AdelphlUm m 37 0 or
371, and the Epistula ad Epictetum in.371. If we a:e to regard the
Epistula ad Aftos Episcopos and the EplStula ad MaxImum as genume,
we must date them to 369 and 370/1 respectively. The Epistula ad
Iovinianum must be placed in 363. The Festal letters date themselves.
The exception to this relatively agreed list of datmgs IS the De
Synodis. Various indications in this work suggest that AthanaslUs was
writing part of it at least in October 359, after the break-up of the
Council of Seleucia and before the Council of Anmmum had ended
in a debacle. The opening words have been thought to reflect thIS
situation: 'Information concerning the present much-advertl~e~
council has perhaps reached yoU.'6 Some have held that AetlUS
Syntagmation was an answer to De Synodis; this work of AetlUs was
produced in December 359. References to George bIShop of
Alexandria in the De Synodis are ambiguous. In chapter 12 he IS
described as 'chased off the earth' (litOlX9Eie;cbto tiie;oiKouI'eVl]e;) WhICh
suggests an allusion to his having been lynched in Decem?er 361 , b~t
chapter 12 alludes to him as 'thrown out of Alexandna (eK.p1.1]9Ele;
altO tiie; 'A1.E~ClvapdCle;) and plentiful abuse follows but no mtImatIon
5The attempt of A. H. M. Jones in 'The Date of the, Apologia ~ontra Arianos of
Athanasius' to date the Apologia Secunda much later than Its conventlOnal date by the
reference (or apparent reference) to an Augustal Prefect in cap. 83 does n,ot rest upon
firm foundations. It entails assuming either that all the MSS of thiS w,ork are
mistaken or that some of the records cited by Jones are mistaken (or defiCIent). In
cap 89 the reference to the surrender of both Liberius and Ossius compels us to place
it at earliest in the end of 357. But the rest of the contents make a date as late as 367
(the earliest Jones' theory can allow) very improbable.
6 I. I &€p9am: J.lEV taror;: Kal nap 'OJ.ldr;: fJ aKo1) n&pi 'tiir;: Kai vUv 9PUAOUj.ltVT)C; auv6oou.
420
The Doctrine of Athanasius
that he is dead. The first reference therefore could be no more than a
wild exaggeration of what the second intends, but it could represent a
revision of an earlier mention not of his death, but of his expulsion.
Athanasius described in some detail the first proceedings of the
Council of Ariminum (caps. !)-I!, cf. 32) during which those who
favoured Arianism were deposed and N re-affirmed, but says nothing
about the later acts in which all the bishops signed an Arianising
creed. This may be because when he was writing chapters!)-I 1 he did
not know the outcome of the council. But it is more likely that he did
know but chose to make no allusion to it, because his later reference
(cap 32.1) to the deposition of the Arians at Ariminum comes directly
after chapter 31 (1,2 (259, 260)) in which he reveals that he knows of
the baptism of Constantius On his death-bed and his death. Chapters
30 and 31 of the work give us the text of the Creeds of Nice and of
Constantinople. The first Sentence of the whole work could be
translated differently to run 'Information concerning the council,
which indeed is now much talked of, has perhaps reached you',
suggesting that though the council is in the past it is stiII in the news. It
is noticeable, too, that whereas at the beginning of De Synodis
Athanasius classifies the followers of Basil of Ancyra along with all
other Arians as equally heterodox, in the later chapters he
distinguishes them from the others and is more sympathetic towards
them. The most satisfactory conclusion then is that De Synodis was
written over a period from late 359 to 361; perhaps a first draft was
published towards the end of 359 and the work was later somewhat
hastily revised and published again in 361.
2. The Theology of Athanasius: the Father and the Son
The eminent German scholar Eduard Schwartz maintained that
Athanasius was motivated purely by political considerations and that
his theological opinions and pretensions were no more than pretexts
to cover his desire for power. Certainly Athanasius had a desire for
power; he suppressed ruthlessly whenever he could any opposition to
him within his diocese; he aroused the sharp suspicion of the Emperor
Constantms as one who in effect challenged his imperial authority in
Egypt, and towards the end of his life he had reached a position in
which his power, not only ecclesiastical but also political, was
virtually beyond challenge, no matter what measures the Emperor
421
 The Rival Answers Emerge
The Doctrine of Athanasius

(of whatever theological complexion) might take. But it would be a

great mistake to follow Schwartz's opinion. The appearance of ~or him both skopos and content of Scripture, in Old and New
Niccolo Machiavelli's II Principe was more than a thousand years in edstaments, are the two modes of existence of Christ as Son/Lana
an ,as lncarnate 10 For hi t G d' I ' ' 6. S
the future in Athanasius' day. Schwartz was as mistaken in presenting static but d ' .. h m, 00, 0 Sre atlOn to the world was not
Athanasius as a kind of Medici prince as was Jacob Burckhardt in to reveal y~:,:~, Tehwasd~o remote ?od who required a lesser god
presenting Constantine as a kind of Bismarck, cynically playing off . e Ivme OUsza he says . , d . ,
(ICap1toy6vo,) 12 As h b £j' , IS pro uctlve
against each other people of different convictions in the game of . as een requently observed Ath .
approaches the central theological problem of. his 'da £janaslUs
power-politics. In the fourth century everybody took theology
seriously, difficult though it may be for modern scholars to realize soterlOloglcal. not from a cosmological, viewpoint HeYre::e~
this. Even the protean Valens and Ursacius cared about the doctrines
~ltogether the problem raised and apparently solved'b b .
rom MIddle Platonism, viz how God or the Su y orrowmg
which they favoured enough to write about them. And Athanasius,
though an unscrupulous politician, was also a genuine theologian. It ~~mHeinto ~ontdact with the world, with transitor:.r~~!eaa;:Trsc:~
. e rerUse to use the pre-' Ch . '
is impossible for anyone who has read his works with an open mind hiloso h· " eXIstent fISt as a convenient
to miss the passion and conviction which inform them. togas i: t~~a~~~::~~'3 For the Father creates everything through the
Though Athanasius' tho.ught is deeply indebted to philosophy and
he defends constantly what is a philosophical principle, the ~~~ ~~~e~a~o :ediator· to c~eat~ the world. So the concept of the
ontological unity of the Father and the Son, his philosophical of the world re e~:edLman~~nd IS to be separated from the concept
language is all devoted to what was ultimately a Scriptural argument. principle.'14 '" e ogos on IS a redemptive, not a cosmic
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
~~d~r:ated t
ings ,. hehstoutl y maintains, can bear the direct hand of
. me latar In t IS sense was unnecessar 15 W .
world to the doctrine of the Incarnation. 7 But the main and tendency even as early as the Contra Gentes; d'hrist is~ can see thIS
paramount source of his doctrine is the Bible. He can on occasion 'ahgood offspring (ytvvn ) f h G
appeal to the practice of baptism, 8 but this takes no prominent place . .,J.l.a 0 t e ood and by origin a true Son' h .
t e P?we.r and WIsdom and Logos of the Father and this n~t e IS
in his thought. He was capable, perhaps alone among his partICIpatIOn nor because these attributes attach to him e t ll:Y
contemporaries, of freeing himself from the enticing but damaging
tendency to speculation about the relation of the pre-existent Son to :~:s;~~:~~;e a:~orSa~~~!7 ~~mh~: are made ~ise .thro:g~r~tmYan~
the Logos of the philosophers. 9 H.J. Sieben observes that for
Athanasius the burden or central message (skopos) of Scripture is
~~~~l.t;~t-:~:~;~~~~~:~~~_~~
virtue-i -h' If .
~r~;~rh;o~e;~~~:e~i~:::s:~
himself, nghteousness-m_hlmsel£
indeed a mystery, but it is not (as it is to Origen) a mystery hidden n Imse, yes and Impress ( , ) ,
(alta6ya""a) and image (e!IC",v) A d xapaICt~p and reflection
under a veil, requiring decoding by allegory: . n, to sum up, he IS by origin the
'In Athanasius' eyes Scripture is no longer the letter 'which casts a veil
l°Sieben in PTAA 20 _ .
over all truth and all wisdom which are in principle conceivable; it "J B W Ik . " 5 II, quotation (my translation) 211
. ' . a er In Ibid. 272; the whole of h' . .
carries the message of a single truth of its own.' subject; he cites Or. con. Ar. 1II.52- and Dt IS essay (256-73) IS relevant to this
120r. (011 . A r. II .2. 53 e Inc. 17·

7De Inc. 41.1-'7. ::fI'

.
ad Sk erap . 3·5, see Ricken 'Nikaia als Krisis' 339-40
arnac Dogmenges(hichte (Grundriss (T b' .
'Or. con. Ar.I.)4; 11.41; De Syn. )6.) ()6)); Ep.ad Serap. I.2), 28, 2!)-)0; ).6; 4.5.
He was not the first to do so; Eusebius of Caesarea had preceded him.
Rlcken op. cit. 340 (my translation)' cf
IV.26-38.
.tl
• . arnac In
ukl~geEnTI92~)6 p. 21 7. quoted by
HIStory 111.139-44 and
9S 0 Ritter, 'Arianismus' 710-11.
15De Decretis 8.2-4 (7, 8).

422
42 3
 The Rival Answers Emerge
wholly perfect product (ICUpno<;) of the Father, and ~l~ne his'Son, the
precise image (€lICO>V ultapa).).alCto<;) of the Father. 1
It is evident that at this early stage the chiefinfluence upon Athanasius
is Alexander of Alexandria, and indeed we can identify no
predecessor who had a greater influence upon Athanasi~s than he. For
Athanasius God is indeed transcendent: he IS mVlSlble. and un-
approachable to transitory «oi<; y&vv1]<oi<;) things and partIcularly to
humankind on earth. But this does not entail a metaphysIcal barner
between God and us: when men call upon him in trouble and dlst:ess
then he shows his kindness (Bo&pywia) 'whIch he exerCISes
through his own Word and in him.'17 When t~e Arians argue that
transitory, created things could not bear God s unmedlated hand,
Athanasius replies that this idea makes out God to be mcompetent
and in need of an assistant, and he asks why on the Anan hypothesIs
there should have been only one mediator, why not an infinite
series. 18 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. I. 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 Godhead,
but in his becoming incarnate. This was a new, mdeed ~evolutl~nary,
theological idea and one entirely consonant wIth. Scnpture.
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 n:'essage. . .
The consequence of this far-reachmg mnovatlon mtroduced 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. He
accuses the Arians with some justice of in effect teaching that God was
not always a Trinity because the Son has not in their view always
existed and also of dividing the Trinity because they allot dIfferent
nature; to the Father and the Son"o As a consequence the Arian,
really believe in two gods, and whereas they claim to avoid the error
16Contra Gentes 46.j2-61.
I7Or. con. Ar. 1.63.
18Ibid. II.2j, 26.
t9Ibid. Or. con. Ar.II.73, 74; but the whole of Book II is devoted to the openmg
verses of Proverbs S.
2°lbid, 1.17, IS.
424
,.
The Doclrine of Alhanasius
of believing in two ultimate principles (uYEVV1]<a, 'ingenerates'), in
effect they beheve III one God who is ingenerate (UYEVV1]<O<;) and one
who IS generated, or who has had a beginning, (Y&V1]<6<;).21 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
To sum up Athanasius' general theological position in a paraphrase of
the words ofLoofs: 24 As early as his first work (Conlra Genies el De
Inca~nation~). :,~hanasius had adopted the Origenistic concept of
God s md,vlSlblllty and had rejected all emanation 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 disti~guished himself from Eustathius by.
Identlfymg firmly the hlstoncalJesus 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 Godhead, 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 immortality to the human race
which had become subject to decay (cp66pa), the Saviour must
becon:'e man. He saw at an early stage the latent polytheism in
Anamsm and was a convinced monotheist; this is why he so
resolutely hnked the Father and the Son and insisted continually that
the Son was the Father's own (t01O<;). .
The relation of the Son to the Father was almost always at the
centre of Athanasius' concern, but not in the sense that it was to the
Arians. For them the problem was how to reconcile an incomparable
2tIbid. III.16.
22Ib~d. 16: the last words are Kata tl'Jv {6l0tT/ta Kat O{KetOtT)ta tfjr; oUaia r .
23Ibld, 1 j. ~
.
24'~rianismus' 17. IS, But in his pre-occupation with the thought of Origen
~oofs has here forgotten to give credit to Alexander of Alexandria as the main
Influence on the young Athanasius.
425
 The Rival Answers Emerge
and impassible God with the biblical message that God suffered for
man's salvation, and they believed that the only way to achieve this
was to postulate a lower god related to the high~r, a god ~ho could
encounter the suffering without compromISIng the high God.
Athanasius, as we shall see, was not much interested in God suffering,
but was deeply preoccupied with the self-revelatIOn of God. The
Arians were in the end not prepared to allow that God could or
would communicate himself. Athanasius was quite certain that he
had communicated himself in Christ. Arian theology tend~d to see
the Son as a safeguard against God the Father commg mto
dangerously close contact with the world, and they had behmd them
a long and respectable tradition of Logos-theology, borrowmg from
contemporary philosophy. AthanaslUs beheved that the Son was, on
the contrary, a guarantee that God had come into the closest contact
with the world and with humankind. Arlan theology was mdeed a
theology of suffering which took seriously one impo.rtant aspect ofSt
Paul's thought, but it did so at the cost of makmg .. ~angerous
disjunction between the Son and the F.ather. AthanasiUs theology
was one of revelation, though he paid the price of completely
ignoring the particular aspect of the New Testament:, witness to
Christ which the Arians had perceived. For him St John s Gospel IS at
the very centre of tlfe Christian faith; the Synoptics., on. which the
Arians relied heavily for their picture of ChrISt, he sometimes found
an obstacle, presenting tiresome evidence which had to be expl~med
away. There were twO capital texts for AthanaslUs,John 10:3 0 , I and
the Father are one', and John 14:9, 'He who has seen me has seen the
Father'. He regarded them, in his own work, as 'a bulwark agamst
every impious thought.'2' In the Father we have the Son: thIS IS a
summary of Athanasius' theology. There is no doubt that It IS a
proper and balanced presentation of the message, the skopos, of the
New Testament. It was inevitable from the circumstances which
prevailed in the fourth century that this message should be expressed
in the vocabulary and the thought-forms of contemporary Greek
philosophy. No other alternative was available, even. though thiS
expression brought with it unavoidably a certam distortIOn and
blurring of the thought of the New Testament. For AthanaslUs a
necessary corollary of the revelatory relation of the Son to the Father
was their full ontological unity which could only be properly
25De Synodis 45.
The Doctrine of Athanasius
defended against distortion and misunderstanding ifit was set out in
some terms which closely connected the Son to the ousia of the
Father.
His favourite words for expressing this relation are all Scriptural:
they are 'image' (&i1CIDV 2Cor 4:4; Col 1:15), 'effulgence' or
'reflection' (altauya0J.1a Heb 1:3), 'stamp' or 'impress' (xapaK<TJP Heb
1:3) and 'truth' (aAlj6&.a, John 1:14, 17; '4:6 etc.)26 In his earlier
writings he is quite ready to use the term 'precise (or exact) image'
(ultapaUaK<oc; &IKIDv) which we have already found in Alexander of
Alexandria, in Asterius, and in the 'Dedication' Creed of Antioch of
341. 27 But he also can use the model of the relation of ray to sun. 2•
Logos of course is so deeply theologital and Scriptural a term that it
can scarcely be called a model. Athanasius does not make any
separation at all between the Logos and th'e Son, and violendy attacks
any Arian inclination to do so. He does admit the existence of a
created Wisdom or Logos in all creatures, but this is not the original
Logos and Wisdom, which is the Son. The original Wisdom at
creation manifested his own image in created things, and this is why
he can be said to be' created'.2 9 But that the Wisdom (Logos, Son) was
himself created Athanasius constandy denies.
Athanasius insists that the Son does not act as a substitute for the
Father, in circumstances where the Father is precluded by his nature
from acting, as the Arians argued, God, he says, experiences neither
weariness (so that he leaves creation to the Son), nor pride (so that he
disdains to come into contact with creation). Ifhe cares for sparrows,
how much more does he care for his whole creation! As the Son acts,
so the Father acts, inseparably.3o If this is so, the Son's relation to the
Father as he performs the functions proper to him cannot be mere
participation (metousia). Everything in one sense partakes of (metechei)
the Son through the Spirit, but the Son himself does not partake of
anythmg created: 'that which participates in the Father «"
ilK <oli
lta<poc; J.1£<&X0J.1&vov), that is the Son' (biblical evidence adduced, 2 Pet
1:4; I Cor 3:16; 2 Cor 6:16). But when we see the Son we see the
260r. can. Ar. 1.20. For a treatment of Athanasius' images in this connection see
Studies in Christian AntiqUity, cap. II, 25)--65.
27Contra Gentes 46; Or. con. Ar. 1.26; 11.33; liLlI, s. It is noteworthy that this use
of the term continues unchanged in book III, a point which is not in favour of
assigning it to another author.
28E.g. Or. con. Ar. 11.33; 111.4.
29lbid. II.80, 81.
30Ibid. II.24",
427
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Father, 'for the thought and understanding of the Son is knowledge
concerning the Father, because the Son is his own offspring derived
from his oUSia'.31 Athanasius' point is that only paternal begetting can
make the Son him who wholly reveals the Father. His insistence upon
the ontological unity of Father and Son rests upon his conviction
about the Son's function as revealer. This expression 'own offspring
derived from his ousia' (i8IOV, or i810V yEVV1]/.lU, tfie; ouolue;) occurs
several times in those writings which precede the point at which
Athanaslus begins to promote the homoousios. 32 Since the Son is an
authentic product (rVl]OIOV ytVV1]/.lu) of the Father, not only can he
not be united to him merely by participation, but the argument that
Father and Son are united only by a moral union, 'by the harmony of
their thoughts and by the Son's not dissenting from the Father' must
be rejected. 33 The Son is in the Father ontologically, but we by grace
and obedience and common life (koinonia), by appointment (thesis),
not by nature (physis); only so can we become 'gods' (In 10:35).34
And Athanasius uses an argument which Arius had explicitly denied:
you cannot say of God 'Father' without implying a Son; it is possible
to use the term 'Maker' without implying any specific thing made,
but to say 'Father' implies the existence (GltUpl;,le;) of the Son. When
therefore God in the Bible is referred to as 'alone' or 'only' in such
passages as Exod 3:14; Deut 32:39, and Isa 44:6 andJn 17:33, this does
not affect the status of the Son. 35 By the same line of reasoning
Athanasius denies that the Son is changeable, as he accuses the Arians
of saying. His ontological unity with the Father precludes his
mutability. He is appalled at the Arian statement that the Son
exercises his own judgment of free-will (ltPOUlPEOtl "Uta t6
UUttI;,0IlOIOV).36 He refuses to believe that the Son earned his exalted
divine status as a reward for his virtue, as the Arians, citing very
reasonably Phil 2:9, 10 and Ps 45:8, argued:
'for if he received what he possessed as a reward for his choice, he
could not possess it unless he performed a function (which showed
that) he was in need of it. and obtained it as a result of his virtue and
3IIbid.1.16.
320r. con. Ar. 1.20, 26; 11.32; IIl.6. Note once again the recurrence of this
expression in the third Book.
.3JDe Synodis 48.1-4 (272-3).
340r. con. Ar. III,I9; c( 111.3.
35Ibid. III.6. For Arius' rejection of this argument, see above, p.8 n 21.
"Ibid. 1.35.
The Doctrine of Athanasius
improvement, and then he might reasonably be called "Son" and
"God" and yet he is not true God. '37
Athanasius, however, does his best to avoid Sabellianism, though
he can find no term to express what God is as Three in distinction
from what he is as One:
'for they are One . .. not like a One named twice over so that he is
sometim~s ~he Father an~ sometimes the Son . .. ' (the; are One) 'in
the pecuhanty and proprIety of their nature and in the identity of the
o~e Godhe~d' (tij IS16t1]tl "?l 0IK,,6t1]tl tiie; <pIlOtOJe; "ai tij tuut6t1]tl
t~e; /.lIne; 600t1]to,). Everything that can be said of the Father can also
be said of the Son, except his being called 'Father'."
Athanasius allows that the Father is the 'source' (or 'well') of the Son
(pege),. and he racks the Bible for texts which display this word _
JeremIah 2:13; 17:12; Baruch 3:12. But without the Son he would be
a dry spring and without Wisdom or Life. 39 It is correct to say that
the \ather 'pre-dates' (ltPOUltUPXtiv) everything, but the Son 'pre-
dates everythmg along WIth hlm.40 This is the kind of point at which
AthanaslUs, not through lack of good intention but through lack of
vocabnlary, verges dangerously close to Sabeilianism.
Athanasius of course has to deal with the manner in which the
Father produces th~ Son; ~e cannot and does not take refuge in the
agnostIc or apophatJc solutIOn of appealing to Isa 53:8. He insists that
the right term is not 'create' but 'beget':
Itis better, he says,41 to say unashamedly that the Father begot the Son
?eca~~e this implies a common nature (Physis). This is not an
IllegItImate anthropomorphism, because 'God is not like man and
men are hot like God. Men were created from matter, and m'deed
mutable (or 'vulnerable' 1tu9rrmcfjC;) matter, but God is immaterial
and incorporeal' (5, 6). Even ifsome texts of the Bible treat God and
~e~ in ~he same way, still it is the business of percipient people to
dlstmgUlsh between the nature of things referred to and not to confuse
their meanings.
Against the Arian argument that if you say that the Son is co-eternal
37Ibid·I.37; cf. t~e ~ong pa~sage 38 - 52 pursuing the same argument. Athanasius
mostly argues that thIS language of exaltation and progression applies to Christ's
human body, not to his divinity.
"Ibid. 1Il+
39Ibid. 1.19; cf. De Deeret. 15.1-4 (13).
4°De Decret. 18.1,2 (15).
"Ibid. 10.4-<> (9).
 The Rival Answers Bmerge
with the Father then he should be called Brother and not Son,
Athanasius answers that if we simply said that he was eternal and no
more, this argument might hold, but in fact we say that he is the
eternal Son.
'For the ousja of the Father was never incomplete so that that which is
its own (t6 i3t.OV a6tfic;) should later accrue to it; the Son is not
engendered as a human being is from a human being, with the result
that there might be some diminishing of the paternal existence; but he
is the offspring of God, and asthe own (t01OC;) Son of God who always
exists. he exists eternally. It is the characteristic of human beings to
engender within time because their nature is incomplete; but God's
offspring is eternal because his nature is eternally complete.42
Against another Arian objection that if the Son whom the Father
produced is eternal, then the whole of creation which the Father has
made must be from eternity, he replies that that which is made
(1toI1111(') is external to the maker, but that the Son is 'the own
offspring of his ousia'.'3 And he points sensibly to the Incarnation as
one example which the Arians must allow of God doing something
which was not from eternity." To the Arian ploy of accosting
matrons in the market-place and asking them if their son existed
before he was born (a kind of anticipation of modem field studies in
theology), Athanasius retortS by suggesting that the husbands of these
good women should be asked, 'Did you become fathers by your own
intention (alone), or by nature and your intention? Or are your
children like your nature and substance?'45
On the subject which this question brings up of the contrast or
combination of will and nature in the production of the Son,
Athanasius is no less resourceful. He denies the Arian thesis that the
Son was produced only by a sheer act of the Father's will and
thought. He is Son by nature, and this in fact precedes and transcends
(though he never says it replaces) will and thought. Rather oddly, he
takes the old analogy of the sun and the ray for this: the ray does not
need a preceding will or thought to be produced.'· One wonders
whether he has been influenced here by Plotinus' account of how the
42 Or. con. Ar. 1.14: cf. 1.26.
43(S10V tii~ ouu(ac; 'Y£VVTJJla, ibid. 1.29.
44 29 .
"Ibid. 111.67.
46Ibid. IIl.66. For this subject see Gregg and Groh, Early Arianism 176-83.
43 0
The Doctrine of Athanasius
Nous is produced by the One. But this illustration comes at the end of
a long discussion of the same point in which Athanasius has made his
ideas clearer:
Everything in creation waS planned and willed before it was made,
but 'his own Logos engendered from him by nature is not subject to
forward planning' ("pO~OU4t111). God's will is in him through whom
he creates; there is no need to postulate two Logoi, as he thinks the
Arians in effect do. 47 The Arians argue that 'ifhe did not come into
existence by (God's) will, then God has a Son by necessity and
unwillingly'. To this Athanasius returns that the contrast is not
between willing and not willing but between that which is willed and
that which is natural (to "ata <p6crlV), and that which is natural is
superior to that which is willed. A man may build a house by willing
to do so, but he produces a son by natural process. You might as well
say that God is only good because he wills to be good assay thathe has
a Son because he wills to have a Son.48 Reducing the question ad
absurdum. he asks if God exists because he wills to exist. There is no
prior will (etA.~crlC; 1tpo~you~tv~ is apparently the term used by his
opponents) attached to the existence of the Son any more than there is
attached to the Father's existence. 'Rather, he (the Son) is the living
will of the Father, in which all these things come into existence'.49
The same argument goes for God having thought of the Son
(<pp6V~crlC;).50 This does not mean that the Son is unrelated to the will
(aesA.~t6C;) of the Father, or that he exists without the Father willing
his existence. The existence of the Son is of COurse according to the
Father's will, just as God is good without willing to be good; even
though his origin is not from God's 'will, still the Son is not
involuntary (unwilled, aesA.~t6C;). The fact that the Father and Son
love each other and that the Son honours the Father shows this. 51
The Son can of course be called an 'offspring' (ytvv~Ila), but not
'something made' (1t611]Ila).52 'From God' (t" to;; eso;;) can refer to
something made, produced simply by the will of the Creator, but the
expression in N 'from the substance' (of God) (t"tijc; o"criac;) denotes
an offspring (ytvv~Ila), and in this passage (as elsewhere) he argues
410r. (on. AT. III.6I.
48Ibid. 62.
496 3, 64 quotation 64.
5°65.
51 66.
52De Synodis 35.4 (362).
43 1
 The Doctrine of Athanasius
The Rival Answers Emerge
here explicitly says that the first two meanings of agenetos which he
from the practice of baptism: we cannot be baptized into the Name of has listed cannot be applied to God, but that the third can, and he
53 denies the Arian objection that it cannot be applied to the Son, 58 but
a creature. .' fi ard his account of the
Athanasius has to face, m putting orw hin ul once again he eschews the use of the word, prefers the Scripture term
. f th Son the charge that he is in effect teac g two - 'Father' and invokes the argument from baptism s9 Had Athanasius
begetbng 0 . I e fa. i"nmta)' if the Son is not unbegotten (a.Y&VVTltOS),
tlmate prmClp es , Y .'" , b' h he did not at this point been able to distinguish between agennetos (un begotten,
as he clearly is not, then there must have een a time w en no unengendered) and agenetos (not having had an origin of existence),
exist In his Orationes contra Arianos AthanaslUs (,;h? makes . he would have saved himself some confusion, because it would have
disti~ction Iiere between 'unbegotten' (agennetos) and wltho~t .orlgm been possible to claim that the Son was eternally begotten (and
of existence' (agenetos» reminds the Arians that ~~:~;:::a~nte::g:~~ therefore not agennetos) and at the same time that he had had no origin
on this argument about agennetos usmg a nO~-N ~ d' so aiso 54 of existence (and was therefore agenetos).60 It is however, significant
that they cannot therefore blame the framers 0 or. omg a ene;o$' that Athanasius here turns from the vocabulary of contemporary
He then explains that there are three different meanmgs of g . philosophy to choose instead biblical terms. It is characteristic of the
(i) It can mean something which could come into existence basic trend of his thought. He returns to this tricky question in De
but has not done so, like a tree which is n~t yet a boat. Synodis 46 and 47. Here he still virtually identifies agennetos and
It can mean something which has not come mto eXIstenCe agenetos, but takes a rather different attitude to the question. Here he
(ii)
and never could, like a four-sided triangle or an even odd argues that though agennetos does not appear in the Bible, many
number. . reputable people have used it, and it should be analysed. It has, he
It can mean that which exists but, ha,s not come mto says, two meanings: it can either mean 'that which exists but has
(iii)
existence from any source ()ITt yev1]8ev Be EK nvo.s), a~d he never been generated nor has had any cause (uinoS) of existence', and·
quotes Asterius as saying 'that is ageneton which IS not in this sense it cannot apply to the Son (because he is generated); or it
made but has eternally existed.'55 can mean 'uncreated', and in this sense it can be applied to the Son (46
(2<)6!7)}. And Athanasius goes on to quote Ignatius of Antioch,
call Ephesians 7, 'There is one physician, fleshly and spiritual, genetos and
On these premises of course, Athanasius' logical course wf:as toth agenetos, God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from
'II ') b t he will not go as ar as IS.
the Son agenetos (as we asgennetos" u ..' t God'. In this case, Athanasius says,genetos means born of Mary and
Agenetos, he says, really ap~lies only to God ~n t~S ::~:oi~ ~~;:::o:~ refers to Christ's human body, and agenetos means the eternal Son (47
things which have come mto eXistence, an e ( h' h (297)), Here, of course, he introduces another theme on the same'
irrelevant to the Son. It is better to think of God as Fa~er w IC subject, and one which is to be found often in his works. 61
. I es the Son) than to think of him as agenetos (which Involves
InVOV . ,. S' I and open to This theme is that all apparent references in the Bible to God
56 Calling God agenetos In fact IS un cn ptura
creatures.) . but the term creating the Son refer to the creation of the human body of the
suspicion as possessing more than o~e. mean~ng .. . " n' incarnate Son, As far as we know, the first person to devise this highly
"Father" is simple and Scriptural and IS simply mdlcatlve of the SAo d' implausible argument was Marcellus of Ancyra, and it seems most
ho do not know the Son. n
Agenetos is a term usedb y t h e G ree k s, w . f b . 57 likely that it was from him that Athanasius learnt it, perhaps through
once more he invokes the appeal to the practice 0 aptlsm. d
Athanasius repeats these arguments at De Deeretis 28. 1--6 (24, 25), an
58De Decret. 5. 6 (25).
"Ibid. 31.1-4 (27).
"Ibid. 36.2, 3 (363); cf. Or. ,on. Ar. 1.8. 6°Shapland, in his edition of Athanasius' Epp. ad Serapionem at I .IS points out. that
540r. con. Ar. 1.30. the same confusion troubled Athanasius when dealing with the procession of the
5slbid. 30. Spirit.
"Ibid. J3. 61Kopecek discusses these passages History 221-2.
57
34 .
4JJ
432
 The Rival Answers Emerge
having read his works, or through direct contact (which cannot be
assumed to have taken place before 340). Athanasius devotes virtually
the whole of Book II of the Orationes contra Arianos to the text which
was considered by all sides to be crucial for this subject, Proverbs
B:22/f. We shall not here follow through the devious windings of his
attempts to prove that the obvious is not true. His basic insight that
the Son of God cannot be created we can readily allow. His
explanations that the passages in the Bible which appear to say that he
is created, and above all this text in Proverbs, which was in the fourth
century fought over by the theologians as in the Iliad .the Greeks and
Trojans fight over the body of Patroclus, are somenmes mgemous
but almost always unsound. 62 He also has other difficult texts to
overcome, e.g. Hebrews 3:2 ('faithful to him that made him') and
Acts 2:36 ('he has made him both Lord and Christ'), which he copes
with as well as he can, always wherever possible referring them to the
human body and not to the pre-existent SOn. 63 'The texts', he says at
one point, 'do not remove the (concept of) nature' (i.e. the sharing of
the Son in the divine nature), 'but rather the (concept of) nature
attracts the texts to itself and alters their meaning'. 64 Athanasius'
hermeneutical method was to keep the basic message, the skopos, of
the Bible firmly in sight, and then to let individual texts looks after
themselves.
In summarizing Athanasius' ideas of the begetting or production
of the Son, it is useful to refer to the account of E. P. Meijering:
In his anti-Arian treatises, says Meijering. Athanasius strongly
deprecates any idea that there is a 'preceding origin' (npounapxouoa
apx1\) for the Father and Son (which the Arians allege to be the logical
conclusio"n of his ideas); he insists that we are not dealing with a Greek
theogony, and that we must not apply human categories to the
generation of the Son. It is his desire to avoid a pre-existent ousia or
arche (origin) that makes him insist that the eternal Father is the origin
of the eternal Son. He uses archl in two senses, as indicating a
beginning in time (which he denies to the Son) and as an 'eternal
origin'. which he allows and places in the Father.
On the subject of cause, he is obscure. That which causes is in his
(Platonic) view superior to _that which is caused; it will not do to say
.62He refers to this crucial text elsewhere, of course, e.g. De Decretis 13.1--6 (II,
12); '4.2 (12).
6lSee, for instance, Or. con. Ar. II.I, 2, 6, 7, 8, 12-14.
640r. con. Ar. 11.3.
434
The Doctrine of Athanasius
that God created the Logos in order to cause mankind for then man
must have been more important than the Son and sh~uld have been
caused . b~fore him: 'temporal priority implies ontological
~upenonty . yet Athanasius Can hardly deny that the Father as agenelos
IS uncaused, whereas the Son as genetos is caused. But Athanasius does
not .want ~o ~ay that the F~ther's ou'sia ~s .cause of the Son's is superior
to hIS. He m~lsts that there IS only one dIvme ousia and one divine arche.
Arch.e fo~ hIm almost means Godhead. In short. 'to Athanasius the
Son lS neIther an addendum in time to the Father ... nor a kind of
~ternal addendum to the Father ... but the Father's perfection consists ,
m the fact that he is the Father of the Son:'6'
It is worth noting that one of the lessons which all pro-Nicene
wnters eventually learnt from the Arian Controversy was the
analogous nature of all language used about God. We ha I d
I
seen Ah
··. veareay
t anaslUs mSls.ting m~re than Once that human examples and i
IUstances when used m relatIOn to God must not be pushed too far It
was not only when the Arians took the phrase 'Son of God' ·so
Ii
I
literally that they denied the Son's eternity, that Athanasius makes I
thIS pomt, nor when he disowns analogies between human and divine
I
begettmg, but when they objected to the identification of Son and
I
i
God (Logos): 'How can the Son be Word, or the Word be an image of .'
God? For a human word is composed of syllables, and simply
sIgnifies t~e mean~g of the speaker, and at once ceases and
dlsapp~a;!? AthanaslUs of course makes his usual anSWer: 'God is not
as man. And shortly after this Athanasius warns against handling
famIlIarly profound and difficult doctrines concerning God: 'It is
better to say nothing in bewilderment and to believe than to lose
behef through being bewildered.'67 We must not, he says in De
Synod.s, take parables and texts in a human way· and once aga!· 'G d
t '68T ' n 0
IS no as man. 0 counter the Arian argument that if the Son is like
fi 65Mreij]erinSrGOd Being History [911-[96] paraphrased and abridged quotations
rom 94 an . ~]. We have seen Athanasius using the word aitios (cause) above.
p. 43.3. In fact, It IS doubtful whether the word 'cause' can have any mea' h'
~ppl.led to two eternally ex!sting divine Beings. Anselm expresses doubtsn~~~; thl~
In hIS work on the Procession of the Holy Spirit; see Studies in Christian Antiquity
cap. 12. ,
660r. con. Ar. II.H, 35.
67Ibid. 36 .
68De Syn. 42. ~ (267-8); cf. a little earlier: gennema (offspring) must not be taken
anthropom.orphJcalJy;. those W?O oppose calling the Son a creature do indeed
employ' human analog~es, but With this c~nditjon, that 'God is not as man, nor is the
generahtl~nkof t~e Son hke human generation, but as it is fitting to God and properto
us to t In of It' (41.4 (267».
435
 The Rival Answers Emerge
the Father in all respects, then he too should have a Son, Athauasius
replies that this is a corporeal and all-too-human way of conceiving
of the relation. 'God is not as man'. The Father himselfhas no father,
as all our fathers have had fathers, nor has the Son a son: 'he is not
engendered by a father himself engendered, so he is not begotten in
order himself to beget'. And he goes on to claim that this divine
paternity is the authentic one, whereas ours is' imperfect. 69 The
argument that fathers must precede sons in time is countered by
saying that this does not apply to the image of 'reflection'
(Iillaoyacrlla) nor of ,source' (pege), and that, as before, the image of
human begetting must not be pressed: the Son is also Wisdom and
Logos, which are not susceptible of misunderstanding in this way: no
vulnerable (lla9'ltOiv), temporary or human analogies will suffice to
denote the begetting of Wisdom and of Word. 70
3. Homoousios
Athanasius makes one reference to the word homoousios in his
Orationes contra Arianos, early in that work, when he described the
Son as 'true God, by origin (ullapxoov) consubstantial (611000crIO,)
with the true Father. '71 But thereafter there is a complete silence'in all
ecclesiastical writers for nearly twenty years. Even the Western
bishops at Serdica in 343 did not mention the word; one recalls the
words of Sherlock Holmes about the dog not barking. It is not until
he writes the De Decretis (356 or 357) that Athanasius again mentions
the word and begins to defend it. This silence has puzzled scholars,
and variou~ hypotheses have been put forward to explain it. Kraft,
for instance, suggested that the word was associated with the policy
of the bishops of Rome and with Western Trinitarian doctrine
generally, and that Athanasius did not wish to appear to be unduly
subservient to that influence. 72 But this does not explain the silence of
690r. (on. AT. 1.21, reiterated 23.
7°Ibid. 1.27. 27. For further account of this subject, see R. P. C. Hanson Cambridge
History of the Bible voH, 447-8 and Studies in Christian Antiquity cap. 13.
71
1.9. For literature on Athanasius' use of homoQusios, see Gwatkin SA 46-so, 133
n I; G. L. Prestige CPT 194-5. 2IS-I8; Bethune-Baker The Meaning of the
Homoousios 28-30; Kelly Early Christian Creeds 242--60; Simonetti Crisi 268-'79;
Stead in Politi que et Theologie 247-53 and Divine Substance 262-5; Kopecek History
94 n I; Klein Conslanlius II 44 n 102; Dinsen Homoousios II 5-34; Ritter Das Konzil
270-<)3·
"'OMOOYl:IOl:' 13.
The Doctrine of Athanasius
the Western bishops in 343, who would not have been at all troubled
about appearing to serve the purposes of the bishop of Rome. It is
more likely, in fact, that the word homoousios when it was inserted in
N did not hav~ the crucial importance in the eyes of people of that
tIme whIch rt was later supposed to have. Our previous
consideration of the word73 has already led us to this conclusion. It
was impossible to rid the term in the minds of many of Sabellian, if
not Gnostic, ~ssociations. ~thanasius in his earlier works saw no great
need to use rt or defend It. He had plenty of other expressions to
denote the ontological unity of Father and Son, to iolOv tlj, ot\cr[a,
(pe~uliar belonging of the substance), or tlllapa1..1..aKtO, .IKOOV tlj,
oIlO1a,. (exact rmage of the substance), or iolOV ytVVT]lIa tlj, O1lcr[a,
(pecuhar o~spnng of the substance), even occasionally (\11010, Kata
llaVta (hke m all respects), and (\11010, Kat' ot\cr[av (like in substance,
Or. con Ar. I.20; 111.26); and he constantly teaches that the two share a
common nature. He writes of 'the identity of nature' (taut6tTJta tTj~
'I'0cr&oo,).75 He says that 'the existence of the Son is the form and
Godhead of the Father' and speaks of 'the identity of Godhead and
the umty ofsubstance',76 and of the Father and the Son being one 'in
the peculiarity and particularity of their nature' (tii I016t'ltl Kat
oIK&16t~tl tlj, 'I'"cr&oo,) and in the identity of their Godhead', 77 and of
the Son as 'belonging to and inseparable from the One according to
the peculiarity and particularity of his substance'. 78
So emphatic are these words, that we might well ask why
AthanaslUs took the trouble to defend the term homoousios at any
pomt, when he had plenty of expressions available to define the way
7JS ee a~ove. pp. 190-202. It surely is significant that the word homoousios does
not occu~ In B~ok III of the Orationes con Ira Arianos, whereas it does occur in the
(pseudeplgra~hl~al) Book IV (9, 12): Had Book ~II been written by someone else
after At~anaslUs d~ath, as Kannenglesser argues In his Alhanase d'Alexandrie, it is
wholly hke1y that It would have contained a use (if not a defence) of this word. It
could of course be ~rgued that Book III is written in the 340S or 350S by somebody
other than AthanaslUS, but this reasoning is too like that of the man who suggested
tha,t4the Odyssey was not written by Homer but by somebody else of the same name.
. Or. con. :4r. 1·40 6JlOIO~ Ka't'cl 7tclV't'a, 1.20, III. [J, 26 OJlOlO~ Ka't" ooo-iav. Once
again we notice community of vocabulary between Book III and the earlier book'
ef. De Syn. 38.2 (263) and 45.7 (270-1). '
75
0,. con. Ar. m.22.
76III.3. the latter expression is n'lv)ltv 't'av.6't'TJ't'a'ti'j~ Be6tT}'t'or;:, 't'1'Iv at. tv6't'T}'t'a 't'fjr;:
oucriar;:.
771II·4.
78IIl. I6. For these expressions see Dinsen Homoousios 116- 17.
437
 The Rival Answers Emerge
in which he thought of the unity of the Father and the Son, and when
homoousios itself was far from being a clearly accurate and universally
understood word. He began to use it first in the De Deeretis and
thereafter regularly in his theological works, defending it fiercely
against all criticism ofit. Ifwe place De Deeretis in 356 or 357, we can
perhaps see the reason for this change of policy. By then it had
become abundantly clear not only that Constantius was everywhere
trying to isolate Athanasius himself from ecclesiastical support both
in the East and the West, but, if we assume, as seems likely, that at
Aries in 353 and Milan in 355 a doctrinal formula which did nothing
at all to forward the doctrine of the unity of Father and Son regarded
by Athanasius as the only orthodox one, was forced upon those who
attended these councils, we can imagine that Athanasius decided that
he must begin a policy of defending the very words ofN as a slogan
or banner round which to gather. And when the Second Creed of
Sirmium of 357 appeared, which explicitly denied the propriety of
using ousia in connection with the Son's.relation to the Father, this
conviction must have deepened, to the point where he actually
repudiated some of the expressions, such as 'like in all respects' and
'exact image of the substance' which he had used and welcomed
earlier. The very significant emergence of the Homoiousians at first
made no impression 0'1 him, partly because they explicitly
repudiated the homoousios; they must have seemed to him at that
point (358) merely another variant of those many groups favoured by
the Emperor who had rejected the strait and narrow path of
orthodoxy.
In the De Deeretis Athanasius says that the party at the Council of
Nicaea wliich he regards as orthodox found that they could not
safeguard orthodoxy sufficiently by using such expressions as 'like the
Father' and 'in all respects exactly as the Father' (t'lltapa....mctov),
because the Arians at the Council could interpret even these words in
a manner which admitted of their concept of the Son as created and
limited in regard to time. This was why they introduced into the
Creed ofNicaea the word homoousios." Even if the expressions used
in N are not biblical, still 'they contain the intention of the
Scriptures: Bo He also tries to answer the Arian objection to
79 20.1-3 (16). This is where Athanasius quotes the embarrassing anathema efN.
omitting, perhaps deliberately,the compromising words 'ij {m;o<ttclCJ&O<; (5(17», see
above, P.245:
802 1.2 (18).
438
The Doctrine of Athanasius
homoousios that it implies that there is in God's ousia something
contingent (c:ruI1P&P'lICO,) or foreign or hidden or that something is
necessary to complete his ousia. B' Athanasius meets this argument by
pointing out that the orthodox as well as homoousios use 'light' and
'reflection' to describe the relation of the Son to the Father, and ihis
corrects any tendency to draw wrong conclusions from the use of
homoousios, because these analogies do not suggest anything produced
from outside and created; they do not refer to a fire kindled by the
sun's heat but to the phenomenon of a ray coming from the sun,
which is genuinely unchangeable and unalterable, and represent
this quality in the Son's relation to the Father, and this relation he
~escribes as 'the identity (tautot'lta) in relation to the Father (that is,
Identity of ousia).B2 He adds that to speak ofhomoousion then is not to
lapse into corporeal nor anthropomorphic expressions implying
partition or division of the Godhead. The analogy (ltapaS&IYl1a) of
light and reflection is a very suitable one because, though ultimately it
is based on a physical phenomenon, it expresses consubstantiality. B3
The rest of his defence of homoousios in this work is occupied with
discussing its use, and the use of the other terms, by, some of the great
men of the past, Theognostus, the two Dionysii and Origen.84
Athanasius' defence of the homoousios in the De Synodis is longer
and is complicated by the fact that since his writing of the De Deeretis
a. party has emerg~d,. that of Basil of Ancyra, which explicitly
dISowns blatant Artarusm, opts for the use of ousia in defming the
relatIOn of the Son to the Father, but rejects homoousios as leading to
Sabelharusm. He first attacks strongly the doctrine (as he alleges) of
Akakius and Eudoxius that the Son is a creature: he is an 'offspring'
(gennema) but not somethmg made (poiema). and the phrase tIC tfi,
ouaia, ofN can apply to the former but not to the latter. B5 He again
tackles the objection to homoousios that it is non-Scriptural: this time
he cites a number of non-Scriptural words used by his opponents,
81 22. 1 (18).
~223:I, .2. (I?). In this pa~sage (3(~9}) At~anasius discusses several other cognates of
OUSIO~. mc~udmg heterouslOs hu.t. mterestIngly. does not accuse his opponents of
holdmg thIS last. In fact heterou.slO.s was the watchword of the foHowers ofEunomius
(not anlromoio.s), and this suggests that when the De Decreti.s was written the
Eunomian doctrine was still litde known. In So. I (274) he produces the terms
dllo'tptoumot; and avoJ,l.Dlouatot;.
8324 .1- 5 (19, 20).
84 26. 27 (20-23). Cf. De Sententia Diony.sii and De Synod;.s 43-45 (268--'70 ).
85 J ).I-"7 (J62). J6.2 (J6J).
439
 The Rival Answers Emerge
'from non-existence' (t~ OUK l)Vtcov), agenetas, 'three hypostases', 'not
without beginning' (OUK I!vapxoc;), and the term used (as he expressly
says) in the Second ('Dedication') Creed of Antioch 34', 'exact image
(ultapa....uKtovoiK6vu) of the ausia and will and glory' (of God). 86 He
does not mention that he himself had in his Oratianes contra Arianas
used 'exact image' more than once as a quite satisfactory theological
term. A little later he reproaches the Arians for saying that the Son is
'from another hypostasis' than the Father's.87 Clearly for him
hypostasis and ousia were still synonymous, and he had not yet
realized that a doctrine of three hypostases was consistent with what
he regarded as orthodoxy. He now turns to the Homoiousians (as
they were called) having in mind both Basil of Ancyra's document
issued after the Synod of Ancyra in 358 and the treatise called the
Letter aIGeorge (of Laodicea) published in 359 not long before the
Council of Seleucia met. 8~ His tone is now quite eirenic; he realises
that the followers of this school cannot be classed as out-and-out
Arians, as he had classed them earlier. His argument is simply that if
anyone has advanced as far as these bishops had in theological
understanding, they might as well adopt the homoausios. What he
does not realize is that Basil and those who thought like him had
progressed farther than Athanasius in beginning to distinguish what
God is as Three from what he is as One, and that to them an
acceptance of homoousios without some sort of distinction like that
towards which they were moving would naturally appear to involve
them in pure indiscriminate Sabellianism. Athanasius, though his
goodwill is evident, gives them very little help:
'If now tbey admit that the Son is from the ousia of the Father and not
of a different hypostasis and is not a creature nor something made, but
an authentic and natural offspring and, as Logos and Wisdom he has
eternally co-existed with the Father, they are not far off from
accepting the term homoousios. '89
After a section dealing with Paul of Samosata and the two Dionysii,
86 36.4-6 (363); cf. 38.1-4 (264-5); it is significant that he still regards 'three
hypostases' as the watchword of his adversaries.
87 40.3 (266).
88S ee above, pp. 348-57, 365--?1. . 9&6'['11<;:·
89 4 1.2 (266); more eireniclanguage 41.5 (267). cr. in the same chapter 'we do not
attack them as mad Arianizers, as opponents of the Fathers, but we discuss as
brothers with brothers who have the same outlook as we but who only disagree
about the word'.
440
The Doctrine of Athanasius
Athanasius returns to a consideration of the word agennetos, which
we have examined already,90 and then produces some more points in
favour of homoousias. The Son, as a genuine offspring of the Father,
cannot be united to him merely 'by participation' (tK "Etouaiac;), and
the relation between them cannot be merely by the agreement of
their ideas and by the Son not dissenting from the Father, as the
Arians say"l Presently he produces another argument: only he who
is consubstantial could bring apotheosis (OEoltoi'lmc;) to US. 92 Then he
confronts the Arian objection that calling the Son homoo-usios implies
that there is a common ousia shared by Father and Son and superior or
prior to both, and that anyway in such circumstances the two divine
Beings should be called brothers and not Father and Son. His answer
is the rather curious one of saying that sons are consubsta~tial with
their ~athers but brothers are consubstantial, not with each other (for
each IS heterousios, of a different substance, in relation to each other),
but with the ousia of their father. This suggests that in his view
homoousios has some derivative force in it; Sons derive from fathers,
but brothers do ?ot derive from each other. And he ends the passage
by exhortmg hIS readers not to allow material and low ideas to
corrupt their concept of God .. ' He goes on in the next passage to
make a senous attempt to define the unity of the Father and the Son:
'\Vedo not speak of two gods, we do notthink of the unity of the Son
with the Father in terms of the resemblance of their teaching. but in
terms of substance (ousia) and reality. So that thus we do not speak of
two gods, but of one God who exists as one form of divinity. like the
relation of the light to the ray.'94
It is evident here, as in other places, that Athanasius really thinks that
the term homoousias must be balanced and modified by the use of
otl,er expressions and models in order to achieve the proper
understanding of the Son's relation to the Father. 9s The great slogan
of the pro-Nicenes is not all-sufficient. Athanasius ends his defence of
the hamaausios by a linguistic argument. 'Like' (5"OIoC;) applies to
90 46.1-47.2 (271-2); see above, Pp.432-3.
"4 8. 1 -49.5 (272-4).
92
51.2 (74); here he uses the expression 'his ontological divinity', oo(m'0511~
93 5 1.2,3
(274-5).
9452.1(275).
9~ShapJand. P·99 of his edition of Epp. ad Serapionem, observes this, and cites
particularly Or. con. Ar. 1.28 and Epp. ad Serap. 1.6 and 4.5.
44'
 The Rival Answers Emerge
'structures and qualities' (crXlll'UTU Kui 7[016T1]T&<;), but not to ousia:
'In the case ofsubstances (O~"(OlY) one would not speak oflikeness, but
of identity (TUOT6T1]<;). A human being, for instance, is said to be like
another human being. not in substance (ousia), but in form and type
("X~l'a Kai xapaKT~pu); they are of the same nature (61'0<puei<;) in
substance' (ousia).
An illustration of this is that when we shall be like Christ (IJn 3:2), it
will not be a sharing of a common ousia (i.e. we shall not be of the
same nature), but only like in sonship which we shall share with
him.96
In his Epp. ad Serapionem Athanasius describes the Spirit as
'belonging to (tSIOY) the Logos who is one and belonging to God who
is one, and consubstantial' (homoousion).·' And at the end of his Ep. ad
Jovinianum (written in 3(3), having given a highly partisan account of
the Arian Controversy to date, he defends the homoousios ofN in the
following terms:
'For they did not simply say that the Son was like the Father, so that he
should be believed in as true God from God, not merely like God, but
they wrote 'consubstantial' (homoousiGs), which is the attribute (lSIOY)
of an authentic and real Son, derived from a real and natural Father.
Neither did they divorce the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son,
but rather they glorified him along with the Father and the Son in the
single faith of the holy Trinity, because there is one Godhead in the
holy Trinity,'·'
It is not e:isy from these examples of Athanasius' use of the word
homoousios to determine its precise meaning for him. Bethune-Baker
asserted unequivocally that for Athanasius and for all pro-Nicene
writers the word implied numerical identity.·· But this is too
absolute a statement. Some of the examples which we have seen
cannot bear this interpretation. Though Athanasius can use the word
'identity' (TUUT6T1],), a father cannot be described as being identical
with his son, nor even as having an identical being with his son.
96De Synodis 55.1-3 (276-7). On the De Synodis see Kopecek History 216-25.
971.27; also 3.1. Athanasius' doctrine of the Holy Spirit is examined separately
below, PP.748-53. . l0 0 'Arianismus' 19.
98Theodoret HE IV.J.Il. 14. It is ironical that at the beginning of this letter
Athanasius should greet as 'Victor' (NncTttTlC;) an Emperor who has just negotiated a
humiliating peace with the Parthians after a crushing defeat, and wish many years of
successful reign to one who was destined to die within a few weeks.
99The Meaning of Homoousios .2.8-30.
The Doctrine oj Athanasius
Athanasius is uneasily aware of this, but is handicapped by lacking
any word to dlstmgUlsh what God is as Three from what he is as One.
Loofs in his earlier work said that Athanasius swung between the
Sabellian and the anti-Sabellian tendencies in his thought,'OO and in
hIS later essay he saId that Athanasius wavered between an
interpretation of homoousios which was 'generisch-generativer', i.e.
~eaning 'belo?gin~ to the same genus because generated by it', and
smgulamcher , whIch expresses identity or near-identity.'O! Dinsen
suggests that consubstantiality in God means for Athanasius
something that exists peculiarly between God the Father and God the
~on, not really, t~e same ~~ human consubstantiality, but denoting
two quantItIes ( Grossen ) which exist for each other' ,02 and she
points out that for Athanasius homoousios also meant th,'t the Father
wa~ the Origin, Root and Source of the Son,'03 and this is a point
whIch we have noted already. There is a 'derivative' sense which
Athanasius reads into the word. This thought is expressed differently
by Stead m a useful and perceptive passage on the meaning of the
homoousios in his Divine Substance. 104
He notes that Athanasius is much restricted in his use of this word
retaining it "tictly to defme the relation of the Son to the Father and
not vice versa, and not for any other purpose; he does not, for inst~nce.
introduce the epithet into his handling of images of Word or
~isdom; it is to be reserved for the Father/Son image. He does not use
It In or~er ~o .establis~ that the Father and Son constitute a single ousia,
or one mdlvldual belllg. What the term means is (in the words of a
xixth cenmry edit?r ?f Athanasius, Robertson) 'the full, unbroken
contInu~tJon ofbem&". Bu~ eve~ sO',the relationship is asymmetrical.
A common stutfmamfests ltselfm dIfferent forms, as with the spring
and the stream, the sun and the ray, the branch and the shoot, The idea
is not o~e ?f a single reality. but of organic continuity. Occasionally
Ath~na~lUs use of language suggest!. genuine rather than organic
COntlnUl~y. but not .when he uses homoousios and never decisively.
Perhaps U1 De SynodlS 51, he suggests that homoousios denotes that the
total reali~y of Father a~d Son is comparable to a single personality
and may Imply numerIcal unity, but even here the asymmetry of
IOl'Das Nicanum', 70, 71, 79.
I02Homoousjos 130,
IOJJbid. 13 I; she observes reasonably that this was not what those who framed N
meant by the word,
104260-6.
443

The Rival Answers Emerge
function is preserved: the Son is agent of the Father, not vice versa: the
Father remains the ultimate source. On the whole then, we may
conclude that in using homoousjos Athanasius did not mean the equal
dignity of Father afld Son as members of the same species, and he did
not mean that Father and Son possessed numerical identity, though he
moved further in that direction than his predecessors.
What gave an inevitable lack of balance to Athanasius' use of the
word homoousios and his championship of it was his incapacity to
define effectively what God is as Three in distinction from what he is
as One. As long as he had no proper vocabulary to express this, he
could not fail to give many the impression that he did not distinguish
between the 'Persons' of the Trinity. This was not his intention; he
was not a Sabellius, not even a Marcellus. But until he could come to
terms with a theology which admitted the existence of three
hypostases, and no longer regarded the word hypostasis as a synonym
for ousia, he could not fail to give the impression that he was in danger
of falling into Sabellianism.
For Athanasius ousia is what God is, what makes God God. 'oS But
what did hypostasis mean to him? We must answer, almost nothing.
He alj,oids using the word.as far as he can, at,'d, at least till he wrote the
Tomus ad Antiochenos 'o • In 362, he treats It as a sImple synonym of
ousia. '07 He had attended the Council ofSerdica among the Western
bishops in 343, and a formal letter of that Council had emphatically
opted for the belief in one, and only one, hypostasis as orthodoxy.
Athanasius certainly accepted this doctrine at least up to 359, even
though he tried later to suppress this fact. He makes efforts to avoid
Sabellianism. The Father and the Son are One, he says, 'but not in
such a way as One is named twice (i.e. has two names, Father and
Son) nor that the same is sometimes Father and sometimes Son'.'o,
Everything that can be said of the Father can also be said of the Son,
105He says so emphatically in De Deeretis 22 (18,19).
I06This work is dealt with in another chapter, below, pp.639-53.
I07That Athanasius had no word for 'Person' at least till 362, and that he avoided
using Ilypostasis is now widely recognized: see Armstrong 'The Synod of
Alexandria' 217-19. Loofs' Arianismus' 19, Simonetti Crisi 276 and esp. n 77, Ritter
Das Konzil28I n 83. Prestige CPT 180-1 can only quote spurious works in order to
find examples to the contrary. I take it that In Illud Omnia cannot possibly.be by
Athanasius, if only because of its much too neat reference to three hypostases In one
ousia (PG 25: 220, §6).
1080r. con. Ar. 111.4.
444
•
The Doctrine of Athanasius
except that he is not named (MY8G8at) Father. loo But this is of course
a very it,'a?equate explanation. Apparently Athanasius thought that
hypostaSIS In theologIcal contexts always meant ousia, and that if any
spoke of thr~e. hypostases they must mean three ousiai, and probably
dIfferent OUSJat at that, and so must be well on the way to Arianism.
ThIS IS odd, because Alexander of Alexandria had not hesitated to use
the word hypostasis. lIo But the evidence that for Athanasius
hypostasis was the same as ousia is unmistakable. He quotes Paul of
Samosata as saYIng that under a certain hypothesis 'there must be
three ousjaj, one superior and the other two derived from that'; 111
probably he thought that this was the same as postulating three
hypostases. And when he commends the party of Basil of Ancyra for
confeSSIng that the Son is 'from the ousia of the Father and not from
another hypostasis', he shows the same conviction.1I2 He clearly
approves o~ the sentence of Oionysius of Rome that it is wrong to
dIvIde the dIVIne monarchy into 'three powers and separate hypostases
and three Godheads', thereby postulating 'three diverse hypostases
wholly separated from each other'.lI' And he quotes Origen to show
that the Logos IS not of'a different ousia or hypostasis' from the Father,
and cItes hIm as describing the Logos as 'the image of the unspeakable
and unnameable and Ineffable hypostasis of the Father', manifestly
meanIng the ~ather's ~ubstance.'14 Even after the composition of the
Tomus ad AntlOchenos In 362 Athanasius preferred to regard hypostasis
as a synonym of ousia; indeed his most explicit statement of this
preference occurs later than that work: .
'An~ hypostasis is ousia and ~t has no other meaning except Being itself
(a6toto .6v) ... for hypostasis and ousia are existence' (finap~I<;).l15
Athanasius never uses prosopon in Christological contexts.
l09Ibid. 4.
1lOSee above, p. 14I.
HIDe Syn. 45.4 (270).
112Ibid. 41.2 (266).
113De Deeret 26.2,3 (22).
114Ib'd
I .27·2 (23)· Of course Origen frequently said that the Son's ousia was not
the same as the Father's. But Athanasius either does not know or does noc admit chis
lIS~C 26: 10 36 Ep. ad Afros 4: Achanasius is here referring to the rendering of
Jere~lah LXX 9:9 O~IC i]lCouaav cproVl'lv 01t'41pl;eror; (NEB 9.10 'they hear no lowing of.
cattle ); the cransl~cors .used u?tup!;tr; to mean 'livestock'. Athanasius, determined to
~ead the word o~sta?r Its eqUivalent somewhere into the Bible, seized on it and gave
t a perfectly unJustified, nay ridiculous, phiI,?sophicaI sense. For the equivalent of
445
 The Rival Answers Emerge
The Doctrine of Athanasius
4. The Incarnation
worshipping idols, serving demons and believing in I M
could have known God not nI b . astro ogy. an
We are fortunate in possessing a whole treatise of Athanasius on the observing the phenomena of thO . y y possedssbIng his image. but by
e umverse an y pay' .
Incarnation written before the theological implications of the Arian the prophets and holy men of Id G d h d mg attention to
Controversy had made themselves clear to him, as well as many the situation by sending h' 0
own
i
0 a no alternatIve but to repair
remarks of his in opposition to the Arian doctrine of the Incarnation by this true Image OnlylSth ~~ge, so that men could know him
later. He sets out his account of the Incarnation in the first eighteen
chapters of De Incarnatione:
. e actlVlry of the L
sufficient; it was as if an old inscription 1 og~ In;
. h b
e ody was
carved. The Incarnation was an accorn 'd o~g e ace , was freshly
teachin d" rna anon to men's earthliness
God made the world through the Logos, out of nothing, not (as Plato death A::::;;P~:In~ by ibts! example, both in the Saviour's life and
said) out of pre-existing matter. Man was by nature subject to . se VISl e to those who could 1 'b
things (a!,,6~t!i 16:1). The activo f th on y see senSl Ie
corruption or decay (tp90pa), like the rest of nature, but God gave to the body, but he continued d~lo e Logos wa~ not ~onfined to
man the special gift of being in his own image (eikon). and this meant sustaining creation' the Lo d' g the Incarnanon hIS work of
being rational, capable of enjoying blessedness and obeying God's body Th L d' l ' :gos Id not suffer but rather he sancrified the
law. But by disobeying God's command man, in the person of Adam, mira~ulo:s :::gsw:~: t~: b~:y :~~ting everything, and by the
fell back into non-existenc:e and corruption: evil, to which he turned,
is non-existence. In consequence human· sinfulness exceeded all
manifesred that he was the Logos. e he was In the body he

bounds. It would have been unworthy of God to leave man in this There are certain notable feat b .
condition, condemned to corruption by God's own law; mere Incarnation. In the first place ther~r~s a out thIS doctrine of the
repentance~ight have stopped man sinning. but would not have reduction of the divinit f h IS no hmt that the Incarnation is a
. something which the Farh ~ e Logos, or that the Son was doing
0
summoned man from a natural condition into one of incorruption. r
Ohlythe Logos of God could achieve this, could recreate everything, do; and Athanasius consist: , ecau~e o~hlS hIgher status, could not
suffer on behalf of everybody and intercede effectively for everybody. writings. We have seen tha~~~ ;::,~~~~,~ed thIS position in his later
Redemption, in fact, must be more than simply moral; it must affect glory as a reward "or his If. . t at ChrISt achIeved exalted
the whole state of human existence. The Logos determined to take to
himself a human body in order to effect this recreation. His motives
"
says, did not enslave the Word wh i
se -emptymg 116 Th k'
db e ta mg of flesh, he
was an emancipation of all hum 0 ;;,as?r y nature, 'but rather it
Athanasius firmly places the m:~ia ~mg (1[<10'% av6pC01[6t~toC;).117
were pity and love of humankind. He appropriated the body as an
instrument (opyavov De Inc. 8:3), becoming recognisable in it and
living in it. He delivered this body to death on behalf of all men, and
within the Godhead but in th I
e
tm~ actIvIty. of the Logos, not
divine Being who ca~ und t k ncamatlon. For hIm the Son is not a
the law ordaining corruption could then be repealed. By assuming the . h .' er a e contact WIth humanity b h
body the Logosrescued the human race who were kin to the body. The IS ow, m contrast to God the Fath h' d' '" ecause t at
Logos gave his body as a ransom (avthvuxov 9:2) for all men. Just as one who represents the way in wh~;i. ~ ;~~lIty IS constituted, but
some great monarch does honour to a town by coming to live in one such contact. This was in th c h 0 Imself chooses to have
. pregnant with,. e wllrt century IaO
doctnne revU I t'lonary,new
of its houses and frees it from oppression and injustice, so the Logos by
dwelling in this body benefitted the whole human race. God's dignity not apparently provok::~:t~nt co~sequences for the future, and
was thus vindicated and hope of a resurrection of the body offered to Controversy. p y un er the pressure of the Anan
men. God had originally made himself known to men by creating
Next, we must examine the manner i h' h
them in his own image, but they refused to take advantage of this, the Incarnation as taking place Th Ln w IC Athan~sius envisages
(whose mind or soul as h' II e ogos takes to h,mself a body
.
Instrument ( . , h we s a see, is a
vl'rtu IyI 'Ignore d) as an
ousia and hypostasis c( another part of the Ep. ad Afros recoverable from Theodoret
HE II.23.9, where Athanasius declares that the Arians at about the time of the organon IS t e word used more than once by Athanasius),
Council of Ariminum dared to say 'it is not necessary for God to possess ousia or
I t6S ee above p.428
hypostasis' . "'0 . .
T. con. Ar. II.14.

446
447
 The Rival Answers Emerge
The Doctrine of Athanasius
and within this body he operates as he chooses, both permlttmg . . theI
body to endure normal human expenences (or rather), mbost nhorma human weaknesses (pathi) are changed into impassibility and done
human experiences, thoug h not a11 , as w e shall see,f ut Imself
erformin away with, become beyond suffering (impassible) and free of these
experiences themselves for etemity.'123
unaffected by these experiences, and he IS cap:b~e ~ ~ We ca~
su er-human or preter-human acts by means,o t ~s 0 Y', ust as This account of the Incarnation enabled Athanasius to meet in his
p I describe this doctrine as a 'Space-suIt Chnstology . J
~~~;::r~naut in order to operate in a part of the UnIverse where there
later writings the Arian argument that the limitations and weaknesses
of the incarnate Christ were a demonstration of the inferiority in
. . d 'where he has to experience weightlessness: puts on an divine status of the Son in contrast to the Father. All the
IS no aIr an .. h. r and act m thIS new,
elaborate space-suIt WhICh enables 1m to Ive b d which enabled compromising evidence could be channelled into the human body
unfamiliar environment, so the Logos put on a 0 \ . B t his and prevented from damaging the divine status of the Logos. Even the
him to behave as a human being among human emgs.. u 'highly exalted' of Phil 2:9 must refer to the flesh ofJesus, which was
relation to this body is no clos~r th~n that o~an astr~:~t~~dh~i:P::~ '2
glorified. ' He rules out both 'reward of virtue' and 'progression,
suit. The Logos, says AthanasIUs, though e was ur moral improvement' which the Arians ascribed to the incarnate
body and by using this as an instrument (organon) became man for.o Word.'25It is doubtful ifhe would even allow this to Christ's body;
k s' 118 The body was subject to corporeal needs and restnct~ons indeed if the human mind and soul are ignored it could hardly apply
sa e . thirst, suffermg,
(hunger, .weanness
. ) etc, and evenhtheh d,vme
bod actIOns
.11' to the body. When Christ was anointed with the Spirit at his baptism,
which the Saviour performed were done throug t e y. 'he was giver and receiver, giving as God the Logos, receiving as
man'.126
'Of course when the need arose to revive Peter's mother-~-!aw w~~
was suffering from a fever, it was as m~n th~~2~e strete e out IS Logically Athanasius ought to have said that the human body was
hand, but as God that he arrested the dIsease. capable of making human decisions, was morally responsible for its
Even though the sufferings of the body did not affect ~(bl~IV) foth: actions, as Jesus Christ in all the four Gospels manifestly was, and the
Logos still they were the sufferings of the Logos an t er~ or Arians did not fail to point this out. But Athanasius will not allow
rede~ptive12I If the activity of the Godhead had not h een this, he will not admit thatJesus Christ was 'alterable' «P&ll<OC;). Once
accomplished through the body, 'the human race could not ave again, his failure to recognize the existence of a human mind in Jesus
h . d' 122 All the weaknesses and apparent defiCIenCIes lands him in an absurd and impossible situation. Adam, he said, gave
been apot eOSlze . b scribed to a bad example of a human being who was morally free. What we
of Christ incarnate, cowardice, ignorance, etc, are to e a
Christ's human body: needed was an example of a human being who was not morally free,
and that C~rist gave; his moral activity was part of his divine nature,
'the Logos is by nature incapable of human experience (:7ta~i]~, and therefore was unalterably fixed.'27 It does not seem to have
im assible) still because of the Resh which he assume t ese
cx:erience: are related of him since these are peculiar to the :es~:~~ Occurred to him that moral freedom is what constitutes homo sapiens
sapiens human and not animal, and that in this theory he was in effect
the body is peculiar to the Saviour. He hImself remams W at b; saying that Jesus Christ was not human.
impassible by nature, unaffected (11~ ~AU1n6I1"voc;)
bY tern,
h hu
. tern.
rather erasing and destroymg h B ut human bemgs , because t elr 'He was not subject to moral law, he did not weigh two choices,
preferring one, rejecting another, so that he chooses one out of fear of
..
118Ibid·III.3 I; notice ChI
hiS analogy lor t e ncama t'on
1 Or . con. Ar. II.7I, a man who committing a fault (tK1t£O'£lV), and in other respects is subject to
goes into a house is not part of the house. conviction as one with freewill' (tpe1tto<; eiO"fzyrltal).
I t 911I·3I. 123lU.34.
12°32. 1240r. con. Ar. 1.44.
121
3 2.. 125Ibid. 47.
122
33 . 1264 8.
127 51.

449

The Rival Answers Emerge
Th wkward text taken by both sides as applied to Christ by David,
'T:e\ord is right~ous and has loved righteousness' (ps 1 ~ (!~l:8(7~
means that Christ loved righteous people and hated the eVIl. ,je~ s
Christ does not exercise faith, for this w,ould be to show c?a~ty ho~
' d Athanasius involves hlmselfm the most ar- etc e
moraI ch OIce,an h' h b' I
. t ex lain away some of the texts W Ie 0 VIQUS Y
eXPlanatl0jns 0 Ph m' g faith 129 Christ's conduct and life is
represent esUS as a v , I I
therefore an example to us, but not a human examp.. , on Y an
example of God operating through a not-qUite-human Instrument,
Christ is a paradigm and an example, and this kind of example is the
best for imitation. 'Man's behaviour is capable of change', but If he
looks towards that which is by nature incapa~le of change h~ ~::
avoid what is bad and model himself on the highest examples,
For Athanasius in fact our sinfulness is bound up with our
chan eable corrupt state. 'What we must be redeemed from ,IS not
prim!ily si~ or disobedience but corruptibility, from which sm and
disobedience flow. ' 'h'
One of the curious results of this theology of the Incarnation IS t at
it almost does away with a doctrine of the Atonement. Of course
Athanasius believes in the Atonement, in Christ's death,.s savI~g, but
he cannot really explain why Christ should have died. W ,.n m
cha ters 19 and following of the De Incarnatione he begms trymg to
ex 1ain the necessity of Christ's death, he can only present a senes of
pu~rile reasons unworthy of the rest of this treatise. The fact IS that hi~
doctrine of the Incarnation has almost swallowed up any doctrm~ 0
the Atonement, has rendered it unnecessary, Once th~ Logos has ta . en
human flesh on himself, in a sense, certainly m prmclple, rede;"1 ~~IO:
, I' h d St Paul said 'One died for all, therefore a Ie
IS accomp IS e . , hI"
(2 Cor 5' 1 4) but Athanasius pushes this act back mto t e ncarnatlon,
this is b~cadse what constitutes the solid~rity of human fallenn:ss ~s
not for him sin but transitoriness, corruption, human mor~allty Sm, h Christ's human nature as (j)umr; and to the term 'one in substance' (I1v Kat" oGcr(av) in
J RoldaniiS 'takes on the character of a defect rat er t an an
says _,' ccence ' ,;, When Christ was baptised in the Jordan, says
actual ow . , h' b tf< r
Athanasius, this was not because he was lacking m anyt mg, u 0
128 52. . Christ selon les Ariem'; Rolandus Le Christ et ['Homme 2J 5-70; C. Stead' Athanasius
129 0, con. Ar. U.6 - 9· d' d' t"
130lbid. 111.20; a highly disputable st~tement, and a lrect contra Ie IOn
teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
1l1Lt" Christ et I'Homme 189·
45 0
The Doctrine of Athanasius
our sanctification. We were anointed with the Spirit when he became
man; we were anointed as sharing in his body.'32 In expounding the
words in 1 Pet 4:1 'Christ suffered for us in the flesh', he appears to put
human fragility and mortality, our proneness to hunger, weariness"
sleep and ignorance, in a list alongside our proneness to sin. 133
Sometimes he gives the impression that our redemption is a kind of
sacred blood-transfusion, or an affair of mass-transference almost
independent of our act offaith. 134 He does however insist that Christ
offered his human body to God and that he died in order to destroy
death. Even though we may not go quite as far as Harnack when he
declared of Athanasius' doctrine of the Incarnation that 'every feature
which recalls the historical}esus of Nazareth was erased','3s we must
conclude that whatever else the Logos incarnate is in Athanasius'
account of him, he is not a human being.
The chief reason for, Athanasius' picture of Jesus being so
completely unconvincing is of course that, at least till the year 362, it
never crossed his mind that there was an y point in maintaining that
jesus had a human soul or mind. He accuses his Arian opponents of
many things, but never of omitting this feature in their account of
Christ. 13. In his anthropology, as Rolandus points out, Athanasius
does not really envisage a trichotomy of flesh or body (sarx or soma),
soul (psyche) and mind (nous), He sees no necessity for a mediating
element between mind and body.'37 As we shall see, in his Tomus ad
1 320r. con. Ar. 1.47.48.
133Ibid. III.34; cf. JI; all these passages noted by Rolandus op. cit. 154, 182-J.
134Rolandus discusses this tendency usefully op. cit. 207-12. He thinks that
certain expressions in Or. con. Ar. 11.66 vindicate Athanasius from this charge; but
even in this chapter the author seems to me to tremble on the brink of falling into
this 'collectivist' error. But admittedly Rolandus is right in saying that for
Athanasius our redemption is only potential. GriUmeier can say (CCT 318) after
discussing Athanasius' concept of the human body of Christ as an organon that it
'seems to be rather dangerously exaggerated'.
'35History IV.45. J.B. Walker in PTAA attempts to argue from references to
Or. con. Ar. 11.28 and 70 that Athanasius regarded Jesus as completely human; but
until the~matter of his human soul is faced, such arguments are unconvincing. And
the evidenceagainstAthanasius seeing any real point in attributing ahuman mind to
Christ is very strong.
136For literature on the subject of the soul ofJesus Christ in Athanasius' thought,
see Grillmeier CCT 287 and 308-28; M. Richard 'St Athanase et la Psychologie du
of the and ~he Soul of Christ', and R. Williams 'Origen on the Soul of Jesus'.
137Richard op. cit. 54-55. The subject is discussed again in connection with the
work of G. D. Dragas below, pp.645-51.
45 1
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Antiochenos 7 (PG 26:804-5) he did formally acknowledge that
Christ's human body was not soulless (Ii'llo;>;ov), and in his late Ep. ad
Epictetum he says 'our salvation of course was not an illusion nor only
salvation of the body, but of the whole man, really soul and bod~' .13"
But it is now widely admitted that this realization of the necesSity of
allowing a human soul to Jesus came to Athanasius only late and had
nO effect at all on his thinking before the year 362. Before that date It
does not occur to him to admit such a thing. As early as 1947 M.
Richard had realized this fact. He said that it was not the case that
nobody had raised the subject and consequently Athan.asius di~ ?ot
refer to it. The Arians (as we have seen agam and agam) exphcltly
denied a human mind or soul to Jesus Christ, and yet (as we have
seen), violently though Athanasius at~acked the. A~ans, he never
accused them of this. 13 ' In copmg with the Arlans ascription of
weakness and fear to Christ, when he has to cope with the awkward
text in Jn 12:27 'My soul is troubled' (1'1 '110;>;1'11100 <&tapaK~al), he
boldly equated 'soul' with 'life', ignoring the psychological difficulty
of the text. I' O Athanasius simply glosses over or Ignores the prickly
problem presented by the fact (which ~as expressly noted by the
Arians) that Christ prays to the Father. Richard ends hiS treatment of
the subject with the uncompromising words:
'It must therefore be frankly acknowledged that his [Athanasius']
authority as a theologian of the Incarnation has been exaggerated. As
far as the human psychology of Christ is concerned, it evidently does
not exist' .142 .
Twenty-one years later Rolandus was a little more reserved on the
subject, but could not help coming to much the same concluSion as
Richard. Some people at the CouncIl of Alexandria of 362
temporarily persuaded Athanasius of the necessity of recognizing a
human soul in Jesus, but he could hardly have taken thiS senously; he
envisages no human subjec~ in the incarnate Word. ~4~ Grillmeier
allows that Athanasius does not take the step of recognIzmg a human
"'7 (PG .6:1061).
'3 9 Richard op. cit. 3-11.
140Ibid. 21-3 8; the place where]n 12:27 is referred to is Or. con. Ar. IIL54~ further
useful exposition by Richard 38-46.
141Richard op. cit. 42-4·
1420p. cit. 54.
143Rolandus Le Christ et fHomme 250-364 and esp. 261-3, 268-']0 and 362-4
(summary).
The Doctrine of Athanasius
soul in Jesus, any more than Marcellus did, and he notes that
Athanasius avoids expounding Luke 22:42 (,Not my will be done,
but thine) which, had he taken it seriously, would have been fatal for
his doctrine of the moral fixity of Jesus. '" In fact Athanasius has
completely forgotten the human mind of Jesus. The Logos wholly
dominates the human actions of Jesus. 14S At Alexandria in 362 he
formally acknowledged its existence, but failed altogether to see its
significance. ". Stead observes that Athanasius in his Commentary on
Psalms recognizes where his master whom he is imitating, Eusebius of
Caesarea, recognizes a human soul in Christ, but only in those
passages where he is reproducing direct mentions of it in the Bible;
and acknowledges that till the year 362 he does not include this
feature in Christ, even where one would most expect him to do
SO.I'7 Stead suggests that he avoided the subject because Marcellus
had allowed Jesus a human soul. But we have seen that it is far from
sure that Marcellus did introduce this feature into his Christology.I'"
The result of this refusal to accept the existence of a human soul or
mind in Jesus was that when Athanasius has to deal with Jesus as a
human person with human limitations he is immediately in
difficulties. The Arian theologians whom he was opposing made, as
we have seen, a great point of the infirmities, weaknesses and
limitations of the historicalJesus, his vulnerability to hunger, thirst,
weariness, ignorance and fear, in order to argue that these frailties
demonstrated that the pre-existent Son was an inferior deity to the
Father, who was free of such things. Athanasius was determined that
his picture of Christ, by way of contrast, should be as far as possible
devoid of weakness. God, he says, must not be weak. I.' The 'scandal
of the cross', as presented forinstance in I Cor I: I 8-3 I, has no appeal
to him whatever. When his opponents cite examples ofJesus asking
questions in apparent want of information, Athanasius admits that it
is the property of the flesh to be ignorant, as of the Godhead to be
omniscient, but he will not follow the logical consequences of his
'44Grillmeier CCT 286-'].
145Ibid. 308-28, and esp. 312-3 15.
146Ibid·319.
'47Stead 'Athanasius and the Soul of Christ'. He chinks that Eusebius wrote his
Commentary on Psalms early, and that Athanasius as a boy of fifteen could have met
him in Alexandria and learnt from him his manner ofhandJing the book. But this
seems to me a hazardous conjecture.
148See above, pp.229-30, 233-4.
1490r. con. Ar. 11.25.
453

The Rival Answers Emerge
admission, and tries to show that Jesus was not really ignorant. His
questions do not necessarily betray ignoranc~; there are examples of
Christ asking for informatIon whIch he certamly had already, and at
places (e.g. Jn 2:25 and I1:I4) he displays more than human
knowledge. ISO Perhaps his flesh was ignorant, but the 0~1llSClenCe of
the divine mind overcame the ignorance, indeed ab~lished It. He
only asked questions in order to encourage others to gam knowledge
of him etc. ISI Dealing with Mark 13:32 ('About that day and hour
no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, not even the Son; only
the Father) Athanasius labours to show that the text does not mean
what it quite obviously does mean. It is inconceivable that Chnst
should not have this knowledge. 152 It IS no derogatlOn to the Son to
say that he did not know: 'As Logos he knows the hour of the end of
all things, but as man he is ignorant'. He did not say that the Holy
Spirit was ignorant of the day; if the Spirit knew (as he cert~mly did),
how much more did the Son know. '53 He only professed Ignorance
to show that men were ignorant, and so· on. '54 The fact t.hat Luke
wrote that Jesus 'grew in knowledge and in wisdom and m favour
·th God and man' (2:52) gives him great trouble. Men of course
;:ow in wisdom, butJesus was more than man. It is unthinkable that
the Logos should grow in this way; as a man he grew. or rather the
Logos increasingly manifested himself in the .man:
'But the human part (to UV9pOlXlVOV) grew in wisdom, gradually
overstepping the human nature (cpuO'w) and being made d.ivine,. a~d
becoming an instrument (organon) of the Godhead itselffor Its acnvlty
and its illumination and appearance to aU'.
How a human body if the human mind is ignored can .grow in
wisdom he· does not stop to explain. Next he reaches passages In the
New Testament where. the Arians alleged, Jesus IS recorded as
showing fear and dismay-Jn 12:27; Matt 26:39; Mk 15:34· It IS not to
be allowed. Athanasius declares, that the Logos should have shown
fear or weakness.'S6 But he will not even allow that the hum.an
instrument did so; this was perhaps logical. ifit did not occur to hIm
that this instrument had a human mind. The man showed these
"'Ibid. 1l1.J7.
151 Ibid. 38.
152 42 .
1534 3.44. quotation from 43·
154
4 5.
155
53.
156 54_,
454
The Doctrine of Athanasius
infirmities, he says, simply to show how men could overcome
them.' 57 The passage 'Not as I will but as thou wilt' (Matt 26:39) is
peculiarly difficult because it seems to attribute a human will to Jesus.
independent of the divine will. But this must not be allowed:
'It was God who made the act of will. but as he had become man he
wore flesh which was afraid. and by this flesh he mingled his own will
with the human weakness in order that he should by abolishing this
(weakness) render man more courageous in the face of death ... Just as
he abolished death by dying ... so by his so-called (vo~ll;o,,"V1])
cowardice he removed our cowardice and caused men no longer to
fear death.'158
Does Athanasius think that Christ was really afraid? Only minds can
fear, not mindless bodies. It seems likely that what he really thought
was that Christ could not have been afraid; his divine mind cast out all
fear which his human part·might be thought to experience. He only
pretended to fear,just as he only pretended to be ignorant. In his late
Ep. ad Epictetum he says
'What the human body of the Logos suffered. that the Logos. dwelling
. in it. applied (uve'P£p£v) to himself, so that we might be able to share in
the Godhead of the Logos'. Consequently the Logos was he who
suffered and did not suffer and remained impassible in a passible body.
'The body held in itself the impassible Logos. who abolished the
weakness of his body.'lS9
Athanasius could have said that the human mind ofJesus endured the
suffering, leaving the Logos unscathed. But even in this work, where
he appears to acknowledge formally the existence of a human mind
in Jesus.'6n when it comes to the crux he will not do so.
Two points in Athanasius' account of the Incarnation remain to be
dealt with. Can we say that Athanasius actually taught a doctrine of
two natures within the incarnate Logos? At times it looks as ifhe did:
157
56.
158
57 .
. >596 (PG 76: 1060).
16°The refusal of Athanasius to alJow that Jesus could have actually been ignorant
or subject to fear has been widely acknowledged. See GrilImeier CeT 3 I 5-17 (who
points out that even at Christ's death it is the Logos, not the psyche, who descends to
the Underworld in Atha!!i!sius' view, Or. con. Ar. 11.57; De Inc. 22; Ep. ad Epictetum 5
'and 6): B. Fischer in PTAA 309-10: Richard 'Athanase er rAme du Christ' 28-46
(Ignorance de droit. non de £tir' 45); Roldanus Le Christ et l'Homme 183-6.
455
 The Rival Answers Emerge
'And just as we would not have been emancipated from sin and from
the curse unless the flesh which the Lord put on was by nature human,
SO the man would not have been divinised unless he who became flesh
was by nature from the Father and his true and own Logos. Therefore
the union (cruva<pi) was of such a sort as tojoin the man-by~na~ure to
the nature «ij> Ku<il 'l'ucnv) of the Godhead, and to make hIS (I.e. the
man's) salvation and divinisation secure.'161
And at times he almost approaches the doctrine ofthe .Tome oj Leo a
century later; 'he enquires as a man ":h~re. Lazarus IS laId, but as G~d
he raises him' .•• 2 But in spite of thIS .t " better to conclude w.th
Fischer'.3 and Rolandus that Athanasius does not actually reach the
point of envisaging tWO natures in J~~us Chmt. Nature, says
Rolandus, is for Athanasius 'al\ empmcal term rath~r ,than .a
philosophical expression, more descriptiv~ t~an metap.hYS1c~I., and"
concerned with function.'.· A wholly d.vrne Berng inhab.trng as a
space-suit, or even as if dwelling in a house, a human body whose
mind or soul is not brought into play cannot reall~ be sa.d to be
subsisting in two natures. The other point to note IS one that has
already been incidentally brought up, that Athanasius sees some for,:"
of apotheosis or divinisation (theopoiesis) as the goal ofhumamty rn
Christ. This process has already happened to Christ's human body. It
is the destiny that awaits our bodies. It must be understood th~t rn the
fourth century the word 'God' (theos, deus) had' n".t acqUired the
significance whieh in our twentieth-century world It has acquired
(mainly in fact as the result of the creed of381 having, so to speak,
entered the bloodstream of European culture), viz. the onea~d sole
true God. The word could apply to many gradations. of dl,:,rnlty and
was not as absolute to Athanasius as it is to us. The rntentlon of the
Incarnation, says Athanasius, was 'that we should sh~re the Spmt and
be capable of divinisation', ,.5
but in undergorng th".expenence, he
adds, we do not abolish our own ousia.'. o Agarnst ~he;"r.lan
argument that though Christ is 'like' the Father we too are hke him,
1610r. can. Ar. 11.70. C h
162Ep. ad Maximum Philosophum (a late I.etter) PG 26:1089 (3)· ompareo~~
reference to the healing of Peter's mother-m-Iaw at Or. can. Ar. III. 3 2 qu
above, P·448 .
1631n PTAA 327· d ' th'
16"Le Ch,ist et l'Homme 54-55; Rolandus here is partly repro uClng e VIeW 0
Prestige.
165De Decretis 14.4 (12).
166Ibi.d. l (12).
The Doctrine oj Athanasius
Athanasius indignantly asks whether they are trying to climb up into
heaven and make themselves like the Highest (Isa 14:13).'.7 We are
urged by Scripture, he says, to emulate Christ and become like him,
but not to share his nature (i.e. his divine nature; we can on
Athanasius' premises hardly imitate his human nature, because he is
not wholly human, and it is significant that Athanasius makes no
reference to his humanity in this passage). We can be called 'gods' On
10:35), but 'not in the same way as the true God or his Logos, but in
the way in which God who has kindly conferred this on us has
chosen'. We are made sons by appointment and grace through him
when we share his Spirit. The Son is in the Father ontologieally, but
we by grace and obedience.'·s It is only, he says later, because he is
homoousios with the Father that he can divinise us. '~9 But this
divinisation is not, in spite of2 Pet r:4 (,sharers of the divine nature') a
participation in the divine nature. Athanasius is quite clear about this.
Such then in outline are the main features of Athanasius' doctrine.
His theology is not without dangerous /laws and he is capable of
indulging in some bad logic in the process of expounding it. He
blatantly begs the question: when arguing about whether 'becoming'
(greater than the angels) is equivalent to genetos (having had a·
beginning of existence) and whether the Son can or cannot be
compared to angels, he solves the matter by assuming simply that
whieh he has to prove."o His exposition of Proverbs 8:22-27
involved assuming that Solomon in this passage switches without
warning from referring to the pre-existent Christ to speaking of the
incarnate Christ and back again, and he puts a wholly unjustified
weight on a single Greek particle BE, which of course represents
nothing in' the Hebrew original. 17' He can produce the fantastic
argument in the account of Moses at the Burning Bush that Moses
sees an angel (not Christ) but hears Christ (not an angel) .'72 Stead has
pointed out several more examples of bad logic or polemical sharp
practice on the part of Athanasius.' 73 He followed, says Stead, 'a
1670r. con. Ar. III.I?
168Ibid. 19.20; c( De Synodis 55.13 (276-7).
169De Synodis 51.2 (274). Cf. Ep. ad Maximum PG 26.1088 (2). and Ep. ad
Adelphium 4 (26:1077). On divinisation see Rolandus op. cit. 166.
170 0,. con. Ar. 1.53-58.
f
171 Ibid. II. 53--60.
1721bid. JII.I4.
173'Rhetorical Method in Athanasius' 121-137; he calls what I call begging the
question 'the Mosaic method'.
457
 The Rival Answers Emerge
course which the rhetorical conventions of his age permitted but
which our own more exacting requirements of candour
preclude'.'74 But when all is said and done it must be conceded that
Athanasius' achievement in his doctrinal works was a great one. He
established the ongoing search for an adequate Christian doctrine of
God on a quite new basis, pulling it away from its traditional
preoccupation with the identification of the Son with a principle of
Greek philosophy. And in spite of his constant use of and
championship of philosophical terms he vindicated a theology of
revelation with a soteriological intention against an obsession with
the cosmological or metaphysical implicates of the subject, and that
without paying the price of postulating a higher and a lower Deity.
He laid the ground for a rapprochement between his own point of
view and its supporters on the one hand, and on the other that
tradition of theology which was beginning to distinguish itself
significantly from the theological heritage of Eusebius of Caesarea
and of Arius, and which was soon to take maturer form in the work
of the great Cappadocian theologians. With his contribution to the
theological debate the materials were now being prepared for a
resolution of the search for the Christian doctrine of God.
I was very well acquainted with secular Latin literature, as well (as we
~
1140p. cit. 136.
15
The Western Pro-Nicenes I
I. Hilary of Poitiers: his Career and Works
Having examined the doctrine of the first great Greek-speaking
champion of the Creed ofNicaea of 325, we must now turn our
attention to those in the Latin-speaking West who also undertook the
defence of that creed, and among them indisputably the greatest was
Hilary of Poitiers.'
We know nothing about the date or place of Hilary's birth and
almost nothing at all about his life until he was made bishop of
Poitiers about the year 353. In fact until he attended the Council of
Biterrae in the year 356 we have only the most meagre information
about him 2 He must have been born between 310 and 320. When he
became a bishop he was married. We are certain that he wrote his
Commentary on Matthew before he became actively engaged in the
Arian Controversy.3 Some have attempted from the remarks in his
Preface to the De Trinitate to reconstruct a sequence of events leading
from his first being interested in intellectual affairs to his conversion
and final elevation to the episcopate but Doignon has shown that
Hilary's language here is so much indebted to the themes and
expressions of traditional rhetoric that we cannot trust it to give us
autobiographical details. 4 This fact however reminds us that Hilary
IFor Hilary, see Gwatkin SA 152-4. AC 84; Zeiller Les Origines 274-5; P.
Smulders f:a doctrine T.n.nitaire de S. f!ilaire de Po!tiers; M.M. Thomas The Christology
of St. Htlary of Pottlers (unpublIshed theSIS); C.P.A. Borchardt Hilary of
Poitjets' ROle in the Arian Struggle; J. Doignen Hilaire de Poitjets avant rExil;
Simonetti Crisi 298-3 12; Klein Constan/ius II 125-3 I; E.-R. Labande (ed.) Hilaire de
Poitiers, Eveque et Docteur and Hilaire et son Temps; Brennecke Hilarjus von P.
2Lack of materials however has not prevented Doignon writing an erudite book
of over 600 pages on Hilary's career up to 356.
JS ee below, P.468.
4Summary of Doignon's findings op. cit. 155-6.
459
 The Rival Answers Emerge
shall see) with the Latin Christian writers who had gone before him.
And this argues a considerable period of study and formation before
he took up his pen to instruct his Rock, as he certainly regarded
himself as doing in his Commentary on Matthew. He was not like
Cyprian, placed in a responsible position in the Church after
comparatively little time to mature his theological ideas. It is most
unlikely that he took any part either in the Council of Arles of 353 or
in the Council of Milan of355. Indeed he does not seem to have been
aware of the issues which were agitating the minds of his
contemporaries in the East and which the ecclesiastical policy of the
Emperor Constantius had since at least 353 been bringing home to
many in the West. It is well known that in one of the works written in
the middle of his career as a bishop he tells us that he did not know N
until he was about to go into exile: s
'I did not become acquainted with the Nicene Creed until 1 had been
baptised for some time and had been a bishop for some short period,
when I was about to go into exile.'
We can confidently conclude from this that Hilary was not baptised
as an infant, though whether he came from a pagan or a Christian
background we cannot know. We can also infer the point at which
Hilary became aware of the existence of a doctrinal crisis in the
church. It was the exile of Paulinus of Trier after he had at the
Council of Arles refused to condemn Athanasius along with
Marcellus and Photinus. 6 And when he learnt that Eusebius of
Vercelli had at the Council of Milan produced a copy of N and had
been prevented by Valens from inducing those present to sign it, this
may have been the point at which his attention was first called to the
existence of that creed. 7 The result of these events and this
5De SYllodis 91 (545) Regeneratus pridem et ill episcopalu aliquantisper manens fidem
Njcaellam numquam nisi exulaturus audivi. Doignon (op. cit. 166-8) insists, quoting
parallels, that aliquantisper must mean 'a few months'. If we take his argument au
pied de La lettre we must therefore conclude that Hilary was made bishop at the
earliest in 354 and perhaps even in 355. But it is not necessary to press the word to
yield so exact a meaning. Hilary's statement here is confirmed by fragment XII of
the meagre remains of his Apologetjca ad Reprehellsores (PL 10:548) where;
commenting on this passage in the De Syn., he says me dixi cum nomina homousii atque
homoeousii nescissem I tamen per ullitatem similitudinem recepisse.
650 Doignon op. cit. 440-45.
75ee above, pp. 332-3 and Doignon op. cit. 433-'7, 445--6. Doignon (op. cit. 451)
believes, following 5. Prate, that in his accoum of both Aries and Milan Sulpicius
Severus is wholly dependent on Hilary, so that the details given in Chronicle 11.39
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of PoWers
information as far as Hilary was concerned was that, further stirred
by the second series of exilings which followed the Council of
Milan! he publicly excommunicated the chief executor of
Constantinus' policy in Gaul, Saturninus bishop of Arles, and with
him Ursacius and Valens. The fact that a temporary usurper,
Silvanus, was at the time (355) in rebellion may have emboldened
him to take a step which he must have known to be unpleasing to
Constantius. 9 The next event in his career which we can identify is his
appearance at the Council of Bitterrae (Beziers). Very little is known
about this council; it was probably one of several which were at that
time being held throughout the Gallic provinces at the instigation of
Constantius, designed to implement his ecclesiastical policy. It was
held, Doignon concludes, 'scarcely a year after Milan' .'0 Hilary's
reference to this council, simply refers to 'the profession of the synod
of Biterrae, in which I had denounced those who wished to spread
this heresy in the presence of some of you [the bishops of Gaul to
whom he is appealing] as witnesses' ." A recently promulgated edict
of Constantius had laid down that bishops who had complaints
against other bishops must meet at an ecclesiastical (not a secular)
court and there confront each other and ascertain all the facts. 12 It is
likely that the Council of Biterrae was convened partly at least to
derive from Hilary, and not least Valens' colloquial utterance 'You can't do that
there here!' (lion posse fieri ut aliquid inde gereretur). I cannot agree with Brennecke's
attempt (Hilarius VOII P.I75-87) to impugn the veracity of this account. The Council
had begun by condemning Marcellus and Photinus, thereby betraying its intention
to deal with doctrine. Hilary wrote his account only two or three years after the
event.
8Jerome (Chronjcon sub. ann. AUC 2370, reign of Constantius XII (?3S3),
pp. 239-40), describes two waves of banishment, after Arles those of Paulinus of
Trier and Rhodianus of Toulouse and after Milan of Dionysius of Milan, Eusehius·
of Vercelli. Lucifer of Calaris, Pancratius a presbyter and Hilary a deacon. Cf.
Doignon op. cit. 431. But it seems more likely_ that Rhodianus was exiled later,
along with Hilary.
9See Doignon op. cit. 457-8; for Hilary's excommunication of Satuminus see
also Borchardt op. cit. 24-5. For Silvanus see Brennecke Hilarius von P. 202-10.
lOOp. cit. 454; cf. 461. Borchardt, op. cit. 27-30, also places it early in 356.
11 post synodi Biterrensis prtifessionem in qua patronos huius hacreseos ingerendae
quibusdam vobis testibus denuntiaveram, (De Syn. 2 (481-2)). Hilary refers to Biterrae
again Con. Constantiam 2, and also at Coli. Antiar. Bl.5 (101-2), if we accept an
ingenious emendation of Duchesne; for ex his quibusve terris gesta sint he suggested ex
his quibusque Biterris gesta sint.
I2Cod. Theod. XV!.2.l2 (Sept. 23rd, 355). Doignon think, (op. cit. 461, 465) that
this was a pro-Arian move, but it seems rather to have been dictated by common
sense.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
enable other bishops to hear why Hilary had taken the drastic step of
excommunicating Saturninus. Neither the acts nor the signatures of
the bishops attending Biterrae survive. Jerome says that it banished
Hilary to Phrygia, but this is most unlikely.' 3 We cannot even
conclude that Hilary was deposed by the Council of Biterrae , because
eight years later, when he was facing Auxentius in Milan, he
protested vigorously that he had not been deposed, as Auxentius
alleged that he had.'" He complains, in another part of a passage
already referred to, that at Biterrae the proceedings were hurried and
irregular, and they would not let him appeal to the Emperor." But
which Emperor? It was not till 356 that Julian arrived in Gaul, with
the title of Caesar, not yet having openly declared his departure from
Christianity. Borchardt assumed that the Council of Biterrae asked
Julian to deal with Hilary, and that Julian, much preoccupied with
military affairs, refused to .concern himself with Hilary's case.'6 All
that Biterrae can have done, then, was to refuse to support Hilary in
his excommunication of Saturninus and to reverse the sentence
which he had passed on him; Hilary experienced a rebuff, but not a
deposition. Some little time later, however, Saturninus, whom
Hilary consistently regarded as his enemy, informed Constantius of
Hilary's conduct, and this resulted in a sentence of exile being passed
13Jerome De Scriptoribus E"lesiasticis Ioo(PL 23:699), Hilariu! u,bis PictavQrum
Aquitanicae episcopusjac/ione Saturnini Arelatensis .episcopi de synodo Biterrensi Phrygiam
re/egatus. J. Gaudemet Conciles Gallois du IVeme 8iecle 85-6 teUs all that can be
known for certain about this council.
14Contra Auxentium 7 (PL 10:613-4).
1SEt necesse fujI in eo sermone omnia esse praepropera, incomposita, confusa, quia,
qllanlO nos inpensiore cura audientiam quaereremus I tanto ill; pertinaciorj studio audienliae
contrairent. The audientia must be that of the Emperor, Coli. An/jar. BI 6 (102).
'6Borchardt op. cit. 27-30. Brennecke, on the other hand, appears to know a
good deal more about Biterrae than the evidence warrants: that this council deposed
and excommunicateq Hilary (Hilarius von P. 230-1); that sentence of exile for
political, not doctrinal, reasons immediately followed it (ibid. 207, 217, 230-1, 237,
239-43. 245)· Hilary himself directly contradicts the -first conclusion, and the
second, though embraced by some scholars (Chadwick, Klein) is a matter of pure
conjecture. It is much more Jikely that Hilary was exiled as several others had been.
not on suspicion of supporting the revolt of Silvanus. which lasted for only about a
fortnight and took place at the other end of the Gallic provinces from Poitiers, but
for refusing to condemn Athanasius and to agree to a doctrinal statement of
doubtful orthodoxy. His reference to Biterrae in Contra Constantium 2 (PL 10:578/9)
can o~ly be taken as meaning that he first excommunicated Satuminus, Valens and
Ursac1Us and then was later (postea, 579) summoned before the council as a result of
this action. If we cannot accept this evidence, we can accept none.
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
on him. It seems wholly unlikely, however, that Constantius would
have exercised jurisdiction in Julian'S territory thus arbitrarily,
without consulting his new Caesar. It is probable that he first gained
Julian's assent before exiling Hilary, and Hilary's words suggest this:
'I am in exile not for any offence, but by an intrigue (factione) an~ by
false reports sent from the council to you, pious- Emperor . . . informed
against by wicked men ... But everything which they produced to
ensure my exile was false ... I shall 'show ... that you, Augustus, were
tricked and your Caesar de·ceived' ,17
If we are to believe the statement of Sulpicius Severus that Martin,
later bishop of Tours, visited Hilary before his exile and spent some
time with him (Vita Martini 5.1), it is best to place this visit in the not
inconsiderable interval between Hilary's appearance at Biterrae and
his actual departure in the autumn of 356, just before the period
during which journeying by sea was regarded as dangerous or
impossible. '8
All we know of Hilary's exile is that the place to which he was sent
was somewhere in Phrygia, that he was able while in exile to
maintain a correspondence with the bishops in Gaul, that during that
period he learnt some Greek, having previously progressed no
further than being able to use a Greek/Latin Lexicon without reading
Greek fluently, that he became acquainted with the recent history of
the Arian Controversy and in consequence gained a certain sympathy
with several trends in Eastern theology, which showed itselfin his De
Synodis,'9 and that he may have read orin some way mastered the
contents of a few Greek books by Origen and by Eusebius of
Caesarea. as we shall see, he certainly wrote much of his theological
17Ad Constantium II 2 (Feder 198, PL 10:564-5). See Doignon op. cit. 504-5.
18S 0 Doignon. op. cit. 506--7; for contact between Hilary and Martin, see J.
Fontairie who in Hilaire Eveque et Docteur (58-86)"accepts this visit as historical; but
Meslin, in Hilaire de PoWers et son Temps 25. casts doubt upon its feasibility, and
Brennecke (Hilarius von P. 243--'7) discounts it.
19Doignon op. cit. 174-5 argues that Hilary's acquaintance with Greek before his
exile was of the most exiguous; cf. 14,22, I70ff. In his Excursus I (531-43) he tries to
show that Hilary even after the exile 'n'avait pas Ie pratique des textcs grecs' (543).
arid needed a translator for Greek books; and in Excursus II (545-55) he labours to
prove (as.-in my view, is correct) that in his Commentary on Matthew Hilary was in no
way indebted to Origen's work on the same Gospel. For a summary of Hilary's
activity during his exile in Phrygia, see Simonet.ti Crisi 248-9. For Phrygia as place
of his exile, see Jerome De Vir. Ill. C and Sulpicius Severus Chron. 11.42 (95). But
Meslin (Hilaire et son T.) 26 suggests that he was able to move freely within the Asian
diocese.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
work in Latin during his exile. 20 We know that in 359 he was able to
attend the Council of Seleucia (which is in Cilicia, not in Phrygia).
Nobody can explain why Hilary was permitted to attend this
council, because ifhe was to attend any it might have been expected
to be that of Ariminum, which was for Western, Latin-speaking
bishops. Perhaps in giving a general invitiation to all exiled bishops to
return to these councils which, Constantius hoped, would solve the
doctrinal dispute, the Emperor was not particular about which
bishops attended which council. We have already heard something of
Hilary's impressions of the Council of Seleucia. 21 Sulpicius Severus
sa ys that he was there to defend the Westerners against the charge of
Sabellianism. 22 Hilary records a conversation which he had at the
council with a radical Arian who maintained that the Son was the
product of God's will rather than of his Godhead.23 From Seleucia
Hilary went on, following the development of the policy of the
Emperor, to Constantinople and remained there, hearing much
argument about it and about, till 360. This was the point at which he
offered to debate the doctrinal issues publicly with his opponent
Saturninus, but the plan was vetoed by Constantius. 24 After the
Council of Constantinople early in 360 Hilary was allowed to return
from exile to his own see which apparently had not in his absence
been filled by any intruder. He was returned there, says Sulpicius, 'as
a source of discord and disturber of the East, without his exile being
cancelled. '25 But it is much more likely that Hilary did not appear to
be a dangerous sower of dissent in the East in imperial eyes, especially
if he was not fluent in Greek, and this is just one more example of
Constantius' tolerance.
2°He is, for instance, certainly in exile when he is writing Book X of his De
Trinitate, for he says so X:4.
2tSee above, PP.374-6.
22Chronic/e 11.42 (95--6). $uJpicius cannot understand either how Hilary was able
to attend Seleucia, using the Imperial post. Simonetti (Crisi 327) says that it was
because the authorities had received no order to exclude him.
23Contra Constantjum 14.
24S ul picius Severus Chronicle 11.45 (98): Satuminus was present in
Constantinople, Hilary Ad Constantium II.2 (565).
25Chronide II.4S (98) quaSi discordiae seminarium et perturbator Orientis redire Callias
iubetur J absque exiliI' indulgentia. The meaning of the last three words is obscure. but I
take it to mean that though he was permitted to return. sentence of exile was not
formally repealed. Cf. Borchardt op. cit. 173-4. Meslin thinks that Hilary simply
took flight from Constantinople and that the Emperor let him go as unimportant.
(Hilaire et son T. 37-8); also Brennecke Hilarius von P. 359.
The Western Pro-Nicenes I; Hilary of Poitiers
On returning to Gaul, Hilary occupied himself with active
measures to combat Arianism in Gaul. The Western Empire, at least
west of the Balkans, was now under the control of Julian who had
shown himself an able administrator and successful military
commander and who was in no mood to act as ifhe was subordinate
to his Augustus, Constantius. It is probable that he at least put no
obstacle in the way of the efforts of Hilary and those of his party to
discountenance those prelates whom Constantius had favoured and
to reverse the effect of the Council of Ariminum which Constantius
had called. 26 The only one of what must have been several gatherings
assembled at this period to forward Hilary's policy which we know
anything of is the Council ofParis. 27 The date of this Council is not
certain, but it must have taken place in 360 or 36 I. Hilary gives us the
text of a letter sent by this council, speaking for all the Gallic bishops,
to the Eastern bishops, in reply to letters brought from Eastern
bishops (presumably the Homoousian or at least anti-Arian ones) by
Hilary.2.
They deplore the fact that several bishops in the East are as a result of
the councils of Ariminum and Nice compelled to eschew the use of
the word ousja, because it is essential to combating Arianism. Th.ey
disown Sabellianism which teaches a union (unio) of Father and Son,
but they profess a unity (unitas) instead. They do not think of the Son
as part of the Father, but regard him as 'born whole and perfect only-
begotten God from the whole and perfect ingenerate God'. They
insist on the use of the term unius usiae vel substantiae (of one ousia or
substance) in order to avoid the suggestion that the Son is created or
adopted, 'because he must be from (God) himself, as a Son from a
Father, a.God from God, as Power (virtus) from Power, as Spirit from
Spirit, as Light from Light'. They allow the concept of likeness
(similitudo), but the likeness must be one worthy of the truth, 'which is
(likeness) of true God to true God, so that we must realize not a union
but a unity of Godhead, because a union signifies singularity (sit
26S 0 , convincingly, Klein Constantius II 101-5. But see Sulpicius Severus II.4S
(98).
27Sources for the Council of Paris and Hilary's policy in Gaul are Rufinus HE
1.30; Altercatio Heracliani et Germinii PL Suppl. 1.34.5; Sulpicius Severus Vita Martini
6; Jerome Adv. Luciferanos 19; Hilary ColI. Antiar. AI.I-4 (43--6). See also Simonetti
Crisi 357; Borchardt op. cit. 178-9; Thomas op. cit. XIII; Gaudemet op. cit. 88--90.
It seems likdy that on Hilary's return to Poitiers Martin. who had already declared
himself stoutly pro-Nicene, settled near the town, to live an ascetic life for a few
years (Sulpicius Severus Vita Martini 7).
"Coli. Antiar. AI 1-4 (4)-<».
 The Rival Answers Emerge
singularis) but unity the fullness of him who is born according to the
truth of his birth'. They also reject 'he did not exist before he was
born', and yet do not regard the only-begotten God as ingenerate
(innascibilem). While inclined to pardon as deceived the other Western
bishops who had gone from Ariminum to Constantinople and back,
the council singles out for excommunication on the ground of heresy
Auxentius, Ursacius. Valens, Gaius, Megasius, Iustinus and Satuminus
(who has already been excommunicated by alI the bishops of Gaul),
and they reaffirm the homoousion. It is remarkable that at no point does
this document use the word persona. Only Gallic bishops were affected
by the excommunications pronounced here. The others remained
intact.
One other incident in Hilary's career is known. In the year 364 he
attempted to have Auxentius, bishop of Milan, deposed for heresy.
His attempt was unsuccessful. A new Emperor, Valentinian I, was
now in control of the West. His ecclesiastical policy was as far as
possible to remain neutral without involving himself in controversy.
He was in Milan from November 364 till the autumn of 365, and it
was to him that Hilary appealed. Because Hilary later wrote his
Contra Auxentium we know the details of the case?" A council of
bishops in Milan had met and considered the subject of orthodoxy.
They then presented Auxentius to Valentinian as an heretic liable to
be deposed. Hilary and Eusebius of Vercelli were apparently the
moving spirits in this enterprise. The Emperor ordered a quaestor and
a magister with ten bishops to investigate.
Hilary believed that Milanese Arians, led by Auxentius, were ready to
confess that Christ was Deum verum filium. meaning 'the true Son of
God' and not 'true God the Son'. But Auxentius, who had submitted a
number of documents to Valentinus designed to show that he
believed as the Emperor believed, was ready to say that 'he believed
tbt Christ is true God and of one Godhead and substance with God
the Father: 30 He said that he had never met Arius even when he
(Auxentius) was a presbyter in the Church of Alexandria under
George as bishop.31 He appealed to the authority of the Councils of
Ariminum and Seleucia which had produced a creed not to be
abandoned at the request of a few bishops who (Auxentius alIeged)
29As well as this work, see Simonetti Crisi 382-3. On the whole episode, see
M'eslin Hilaire et son T. 39-4 I.
30Cotltra Auxentium (PL 10) 7 (614). For comment on this odd statement, see
below pp. 596-7.
318 (314, 315); '4 (617).
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers '
had been deposed several years ago. He submitted a creed which was
probably the traditional creed of the Church of Milan; as it was
composed before the Arian Controversy it was a quite innocuous and
irrelevant one,,32 He never believed in two gods, two Fathers or two
Sons, but 'one Son from one Father, Sole from the Sole, God from
God ... and that is why we profess one Godhead. '33
As a result of this statement of Auxentius, Valentinus dismissed the
case, declared himself ready to communicate with Auxentius, and
ordered Hilary to return to Gaul (and cease to make a nuisance of
himself). Hilary had nO alternative exceptto obey. He had failed to
show that Auxentius was heretical. His interference in a see and a
province of the church quite removed from his must have roused
resentment. All that he could do was to write his book Contra
Auxentium.
Under the rule of Julian. and in the years immediately succeeding
his death, now that Constantius' hand was removed, with some
exceptions such as that of Auxentius, a regime favourable to the pro-
Nicene cause was established everywhere west of the Balkan
provinces. A letter of Liberius, now restored not only to his see in
Rome but also to the liberty of expressing pro-Nicene views, dating
from 362 or 363, is given us by Hilary as a sign of thisstate of affairs. 34
It is worded obscurely, but we can see that it is designed to justify the
policy now pursued by the Roman see (and certainly favoured by
Hilary) of leniency in dealing with bishops who under pressure had
signed Arian or near-Arian documents (and who required such
leniency more than Liberius himself?). Hilary gives us another letter,
dating from 363, addressed from the bishops ofitaly to the bishops of
Illyricum welcoming those who had returned to the Nicene faith,
condemning outright the decrees of Ariminum, and damning
U rsacius and Valens by name as supporters of heresis Arrianae vel
Aedanae {the heresy of Arius or of Aetius.)"·The terms of return were
ro condemn Arianism (probably in the form of the creeds of
Nice or Constantinople), and to affirm N. We can envisage Hilary as
spending his last years occupied in this work of reconciliation, and
probably also in repelling the criticisms and insinuations of Lucifer of
32 14 (617); cf. the Roman creed which Marcellus signed in 340; see above, p. 218.
33 '5 (618).
34Coli. Ant jar. BIV.I (156--7). Some chink chat this document and the next were
added to the Collectanea by another hand.
"Ibid. B IV .• (158-9).
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Calaris and his followers who regarded the policy of leniency as a
betrayal. Sulpicius Severus says that he died six years after the
Council ofParis!6 Jerome, more vaguely, in the reign of Valentinus
and Valens. 37 Modem authorities opt for 367, 368 or 369. A.J.
Goemans, after a survey of all the evidence, decided that ISt Nov. 367
was the likeliest date.
Determining what precisely Hilary wrote, how much survives and
when each piece was written is a complex business, but not beyond
solution. It is agreed on all hands that his Commentary on Matthew was
written before he was exiled, indeed before he became seriously
aware of or involved in the Arian Controversy." It is certain
however, that Hilary was already a bishop when he wrote this work,
mdeed he regarded such activity as part of his duty to instruct his
flock. When he wrote this work he was dimly aware of the existence
of Arian doctrine; he' can write:
'he (Christ) refuted all distortion of the faith for the future, that is of
whose who deprive the Lord of his dignity and participation in his
Father's substance, and have boiled over into various schemes of
heresy.'39
And he is aware that some people teach that Christ did not come
forth from eternity Ror derive from the Father's substance but was
made from nothing. 4o But he is not aware yet of the doctrine of the
eternal generation of the Son, and he can occasionally produce
sentIments which are not strictly in accordance with pro-Nicene
orthodoxy.41
J6Chronjcle 11.45 (99); for the attacks of Luciferans see Brennecke Hi/arius von P.
'55, )66.
37De Vir. l~[. C. <?regory of Tours long afterwards alleged that he had read in
Jerome ~at Hilary died four years into .the reign of V and V. For a good review of
all the eVIdence as to the date of Hilary's death, see A.-J. Goemans. Hilaire et son T
107-11. Cf. Meslin Hilaire et son T.41. . indeed the order of Le Fevre's own manuscript. He entitled the book
. 38Jer0In:e gives a list c:>fHiIarY,'s work~ D~ ~jr. Ill. C. Borchardt op. cic. 14-17
glv~s a review of the subject; cf. SimonettI Cnsl 355-'7. Both Borchardt (13-17) and
DOlgnon (op. cit. 165-8) place it here. See also P. C. Bums 'Hilary of Poitiers'
Confrontation with Arianism' 287-8.
"Gomm. In. Mott. lu8 (284); cf. 7.8 ('0'); 12.17 (,84); lu8 (,86)' ,6.5
(19 8-'00). '
:~3 I.~ (328, 330)~ cf. Kannengiess~r in Hilaire et son T. 127-42.
I?olgnon, op ..Clt. 167 calls attention to Comm. in Matt. 31.3 (228) natum esse ex
eo qUI erat: et hoc In eo esse qui notus est quod is ipse est penes quem erat ante quam
nas,er~tur, w~ich.presumabJy must be translated, 'he (the Son) was born from Him
who IS: and m him who was born there was that which he is with whom he was
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
The task of fixing the dates and deciding the form of most of the
rest of Hilary's literary output is one of greater delicacy. Once Hilary
had become well-informed about the threat to his conception of true
doctrine represented by the Councils of Arles and of Milan, some
time in 355, he began writing an apologetic work portions of which
survive and which Jerome calls Liber contra Valentem et Ursacium(in
three Books). At some period between Jerome's reading of this book
and the early sixth century (Fulgentius Ferrandus 520-547). this work
had become fragmented and parts of it had been lost, but an
anonymous compiler had collected the separate fragments into a
single work. This work was in three parts (corresponding to but not
wholly comprisingJerome's three books of Contra Vet A), consisting
of (i) material concerning the Council of Serdica put together
between the Council of Biterrae and Hilary's departure for exile; (ii)
material concerning the C.ouncil of Ariminum and some Letters of
Pope Liberius, put together perhaps in 360; (iii) material concerning
events after 359 such as the results of the policy of the Homoian party
after Ariminum and some documents about the relations of
Germinius, Valens and Ursacius a few years later, perhaps included
by someone other than Hilary. This work was published in a
speculative reconstruction of its order, and based on a manuscript
from the collection of Peter Pithou of the XVth century, now lost, by
Nicolas Le Fevre in 1598, and this order was followed by Coustant,
the Maurist editor, in 1693. The work was at that time called the
Fragmenta Historica. This was the form and title of it in the Migne
edition of 1845. In 1916 however A. Feder, editing the work for the
Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, relying on his own
researches 'and those of A. Wilmart and B. Marx, produced a
different order for the constituents of this book, based on the order of
an older manuscript, the archetype of that used by Le Fevre, and
Collectanea Antiariana Parisina, for his earlier MS, of the IXth century,
was in the Bibliotheque de I' Arsenal in Paris. This order, and this
edition is now generally used and is that which has been followed in
this book. Feder divided the material into a Series A and a Series B
before he was born', i.e. the Son was in the Father before he was put forth as an
independent entity. Doignon concludes that this work must have been written
before the spring of 355. Smulders had 'earlier noticed this, La doctrine Trinitaire
78-9.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
and added to it a document which he called Appendix to the
Col/ectanea Antiariana but which is usually known as Liber I ad
Constantium (and sometimes, in earlier works Adversus Valentem et
Ursadum), properly part of the Col/ectanea; and then a separate work,
called Liber II ad Constantium which is really an appeal made to the
Emperor by Hilary rather than a collection of documents with a
narrative text combining them, which is the character of the
Col/ectanea. The materials composing the whole work edited by
Feder must have been put together at different dates. Series A and B
of the Col/ectanea represent material assembled at three different
periods, 356, 359-60 and 367 (though these periods do not exactly
correspond to the division between the series, which is derived from
the MS and perhaps is the work of the original compiler). Liber ad
Constantium I must have been written in 355 or 3S6 and Liber ad
Constantium II in 359, when Hilary was in Constantinople, though it
cannot have been published till after Constantius' death. Both these
. ·books addressed, or supposedly addressed, to the Emperor are mild
and respectful in their tone. Hilary also wrote, in the year 359, a
booked called De Synodis retailing for the benefit of readers in the
West most of the councils and their creeds and statements which had
taken place between 341 and 3S9 and showing a sympathetic
understanding towards aU of them except for the radical Second
Sirmian Creed of 357. In 360, disillusioned by the upshot of the
Council of Ariminum, Hilary wrote a book known as Liber contra
Constantium; the Latin preposition here is important; the work was
not an appeal addressed to Constantius, but a violent attack on him,
full of scorn and vituperation. Needless to say, it was not published
till after the death of Constantius. As we have seen, his Contra
Auxentium was written in 364, after his failure to have Auxentius
deposed for heresy. These are all the polemical or controversial
works of Hilary. 42
~~For information about these works, see, in addition to what Feder says in his
edmon of the Collectanea along with Uber I Ad Constantium and Uber II Ad
Constantium. Simonetti C,jsi 224.355-'7; Borchardt op. cit. 25-26, 3 1-33. 139-40,
167',I?o-I, 174-5',1,81, 183; Declercq Ossius 469; Quasten Patrologia III (Inst.
Patnstlcum ~ugustlmanum 1978),45:-46; Doignen, op. cit. 426-32, 455-']. 503-5;
Bums, op.. en. 288; B,rennecke H,larlus von p, 248-65. Brennecke attempts in his
book to show that HIlary wrote no doctrinal or polemical work (apart from the
c.omm . ?n ~att.) before he ha? been in exile for some time, and that what prompted
hiS begm~m~ the work agamst Valens and Ursacius was the production of the
Second SumJan Creed of 357 (see especially op. cit. 217 and 297-312, 325, 361-2).
470
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of PoWers
Immensely important for our knowledge of the Arian
Controversy though the Collectanea Antiariana and the other works
already mentioned are, even in an imperfect form they do not
constitute Hilary's greatest work. This was undoubtedly his long
theological work in twelve books which had traditionally been
entitled De Trinitate, even though this was not the name which
Hilary gave to it. Many scholars have believed that the fmt three
books of this work were written before Hilary left for his exile, and
were called. by him De Fide. 43 Certainly the work was finished while
he was in exile (though not wholly while he was in Phrygia) some
time before he wrote De Synodis. Two more short extant works of
Hilary, neither of which is much use for determining his doctrine of
the Trinity, Tractatus super Psalmos and De Mysteriis, as well as some
hymns, are to be placed between the year 361 and his death, when,
restored to his see, he could resume the work of writing to edify his
flock rather than to engage in controversy .
2. Hilary'. Theology: Introduction
It is not a simple matter to determine the sources of Hilary's thought.
That he was well acquainted with Latin literature is perfectly clear.
He may have picked up some philosophical ideas from Cicero and
from Seneca and unwittingly some Stoic doctrine through
Tertullian. H. D. Saffrey, in an interesting essay in Hilaire et son
temps44 demonstrates how wholly divorced from philosophical
speculation was Hilary's bent of mind. He certainly knew no Greek
philosophy before his exile; he was no Platonist. 45 He may have
But Brennecke tends sometimes to ignore proper critical principles in order to fit all
the evidence into his scheme, which is based on the assumption that no doctrinal
issue was debated or demanded until Sirmium 357. Thus, Hilary's account of the
events at Milan is discounted simply because Lucifer does not happen to mention
them, though Lucifer insists that after Milan the Emperor issued an edict requiring
doctrinal uniformity.
4JSee Borchardt op. cit. 40-43; Doignon op. cit. 82-3; Burns op. cit. 288-90.
Burns follows Simonetti and Kannengiesser in concluding from some apparent
references to the Homoiousians in these three books that, though begun before his
exile, they must have been finished while he was in exile in Phrygia in 357. Meslin
(Hilaire et son T. 26) disputes the assumption that Books I-III were written in Gaul.
See also J. Moingt in Hilaire et son T. 169-70.
44247--65.
4sCf. Doignon in Hilaire et son Temps 366.
471
 The Rival Answers Emerge
encountered in Asia the Pergamene school of theurgic Neo-
Platonism professed by people like Iamblichus and Maximus and
patronised by the Emperor Julian; if so, he reacted strongly against it.
In fact he rejected and suspected all pagan philosophy as likely to lead
to error or doubt or atheism and regarded the Scriptures as the source
of all true philosophy. He regarded Christianity as 'a liberation from
the limits of pure reason, which he considered inadequate when one
broaches the problem of the supreme principle, and he thought of the
Arians as unhappily restricted within these limits'.46 By far the most
important of his sources are the Christian Latin writers who had gone
before him, Minucius Felix, Cyprian, Novatian, Victorinus of
Pettau, Fortunatianus of Aquileia, and above all Tertullian. He can
write patronisingly of Tertullian (the subject is prayer):
'Although Tertullian too had written a very useful (aptissimum) book
on the subject. this author's later error [Le. his defection to
Montanism] deprived of authority writings which were much to be
commended',47
But in fact Hilary relies constantly on Tertullian: he followed him in
almost every detail (though not quite every detail) of his theology. In
a most TertuIlianic manner, for instance, he can comment on Col
!.Is: 'this means that in him (Christ) the material (materia) of
everything visible and invisible is hidden and placed', reproducing
Tertullian's materialistic concept of reality." At least till he went
into exile, then, Hilary's sources were all Latin. And even after that
point he cannot have read extensively in Greek theology; influence of
Origen, which is not at all visible in his interpretation of Scripture, if
it came at all, came through other authors. 49 He certainly knew
46S atfreyop. cit, 263 (my tr.).
47Comm. in Matt. S.I (ISO).
4BColl. Antiar. BILl 1.3 (30). p. 152: so Doignan Hilaire avant l'Exil494-S. Bums,
'Hilary of Poitiers' Confrontation with Arianism from 356 to 367', 293. tends a little
to play down Hilary's indebtedness to TertuUian, pointing out that the two writers
had two different purposes in their theological work.
49
50 Doignon, Hilaire avant J'Exil 14, 22, 155-6, 179, 198 and Excursus II 545-55.
Jerome (Epp 82.7) alleges that Hilary translated Odgen's Homilies onJob (which are
not extant) and 'many treatises on the Psalms'. But this does not seem likely. By the
time Hilary wrote his late Tractatus in Psalmos he may have learnt something more
ofOrigen"s handling of the Psalms. The attempt of5mulders (Hilaire et son Temps
175-212) to show that Hilary was much indebted to Eusebius of Emesa is quite
unconvincing. Doignon wi1l not even allow that Hilary had read lrenaeus (op. cit.
194-200).
472
The Western Pro-Nice"es 1: Hilary of PoWers
something about Arian teaching when he wrote his Commentary on
Matthew,'· but was equally certainly not aware of the full
implications of the issue at stake in the controversy. In this work he
can produce doctrine which is not in accordance with what Eastern
pro-Nicenes would have regarded as orthodoxy, nor with what he
later was to set out in his De Trinitate. 51 We have already seen that it
was only just before going into exile that he learnt of the contents of
N.52 The question concerning Hilary's debt to Athanasius is a vexed
one, and various opinions have been held about it.53 On the whole it
is difficult to see any clear influence of Athanasius' thought on Hilary,
who must be given the credit of working out his own Trinitarian
theology according to his own lights, except in two particulars. By
the time he is writing in exile he knows and accepts the doctrine of the
eternal generation of the Son, though not in a form which is
recognizably either Origenistic or Athanasian, and by then too he is
ready to attribute, as Athanasius frequently did, awkward texts
apparently limiting the nature and capacity of the Word to Christ's
human body or his humanity. He could conceivably have learnt this
idea from Marcellus of Ancyra, who apparently originated it, but this
seems wholly unlikely. It is perhaps wisest to assume that Hilary did
not have any first-hand acquaintance with Athanasius' works, but
that in conversation or discussion with those pro-Nicenes whom he
met during his exile he had picked up some of Athanasius' ideas and
had woven them into his own theology. That he knew something of
the work of Basil of Ancyra by the time he came to write his De
Synodis (in 359) is evident from his references to the events of 358 in
that work.
Hilary's' immunity from Origen's influence is perhaps most
obvious in his interpretation of the text of the Bible. He allegorizes,
of-course, but in a mode quite different from that of Origen; the
proper test of different modes of allegory is the result: what kind of
material does the allegorization (which is by its nature wholly
subjective and detached from any contextual obligation) produce? In
50E.g. Comm. on Matt. 12.18 (284); 31.3 (328, 330); cf. Bums op. cit. 287 . .
51S ee above, n 14.
52S ee above. p. 460.
53Danielou (Hilaire de Poitiers, Ev2que et Docteur 17) thought that he knew the
work. not only of Athanasius, but also of Origen, Marcellus, Basil of Ancyra and
Photinus! Thomas (Christo/agy of Hilary 44) attributed knowledge of Athanasius to
him. But most recent scholars (especially Doignon) are much less confident.
473
 The Rival Answers Emerge
the case of Hilary, the hermeneutical principle is, as Danielou
perceived, 'Ia tradition ecclesiale', resembling that of Irenaeus,
Cyprian, Novatian and Tertullian,54 dealing much in types and
resulting in the Rule of Faith of the church. Origen's allegory was
employed for a different purpose, that of reading into the text a
complex system of doctrine which owed much to contemporary
philosophy. Doignon characterises Hilary's treatment of the Gospel
of Matthew as 'une conception ·tres equilibree de l'intelligibilite
spirituelle de I'Evangile.'ss Others might see it as a dreary jungle of
empty fantasy, but it certainly is not like that ofOrigen. On the other
hand, Hilary's allegorisation resembles remarkably that employed by
Fortunatianus of Aquileia in the few fragments of his work that have
come down to us. 56 Fortunatianus gives the reader an interpretation
of every detail, conceivable and inconceivable, of the narrative so as
to refer them to the Rule of Faith of the church; his method is no less
fantastic than that of Origen, but much less adventurous and less
sophisticated. It is thought that Hilary refers to Fortunatianus at
Comm. in Matt 18.12 when he says that some think that the ass at the
entry into Jerusalem refers to pagans. 57 Doignon declares that Hilary
in his Commentary on Matthew' develops the implications of a spiritual
typology, while holding firmly to the historical reality of the facts
narrated'.5. This is-only a half truth. There are places in the
Commentary on Matthew where Hilary directly repudiates the literal
sense. 'There afe many passages,' he says, 'which do not permit us to
take the words of the Gospel in a direct sense' (simplici intelleclu).5'
'Let him who is on the roof not come down to take anything away
with him' (Matt 24:17) cannot be intended literally, because the
escaper would have to come down anyway if he is to escape. 60
Similarly' Alas for those who are with child, and those who give suck
in those days' (Matt 24:19) cannot be intended literally and must be
54HUa;re, Ev2que et Docteur I.I. Doignan, similarly, echoing Simonetti, describes
Hilary's exegesis as 'nullement reduccible acelle d'Origene'. Hilaire de P. ,want l'Exil
14·
550 p. cit. 294; cf. the whole section 227-294·
56S ee Corp. Christ. SeT. Lat. 9 (1957) 366-70.
S7Doignon Hilaire de P. avant l'Exil 201 says so. But in fact in the fragments
collected from the editions of Wilmart and Bischoff in Corp. Chr. Ser. Lat.
Fortunadanus consistently interprets the ass as meaning the Jewish people.
580p. cit. 524.
59Comm. in Matt. 20.2 (102).
,oIbid. 25.5 (186).
474
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
allegorised, because it would be absurd to think that women are
cursed for being pregnant, and it makes no sense to effect a distinction
here between her who is suckling her child and her whose child is
weaned. 61 So Hilary proceeds to allegorise both passages in order to
make them refer to various points in the Rule of Faith of the Church,
that is, the traditional doctrine generally of the Church as far as it was
known to him· 2 It is interesting to observe, further, that Hilary's
interpretation of the key passage in the Arian Controversy, Prov
8:22ff, is rather different in his early Commenlary on Matthew from
what it is in his later work. In his Commentary on Matthew he can
employ the expression 'that Wisdom which is created Wisdom',
referring to Prov 8:22 but reproducing the thought of Tertullian
(Adv. Praxean 6.1). In his De Trinilale however he deals with this
capital text in the last book (XII.35fi): by now he teaches that
Wisdom has been generated from all eternity; verses 23 and 25 refer,
he thinks, to the eternal generation of the Word and verse 22 to the
Word's assisting the Father in the creation of the world; but he also
sees this verse as referring to epiphanies of the Word in the Old
Testament. But in De Trinilate XII 45-50 and in De Synodis 17ffhe
produces another interpretation: both vv. 22 and 25 refer to the birth
of Jesus Christ from the Virgin Mary, whereby the eternally
generated Word was temporarily born as man. 63 In short, then, the
intellectual influences which formed Hilary's mind were more Latin
than Greek. He did indeed, once he left Gaul for exile, come into
contact with Eastern theological thought to an important extent. But
the foundations of his theology and some its its main principles were
already present in his mind before then.
3. The Relation of the Son to the Father
Because he owes little or nothing to philosophy, Hilary in his
theology, in keeping with the burden and genius of Christianity,
holds that God is completely independent of the world, that there is
no scale of being at whose summit he should be placed, no 'continuity
61lbid. 25.6 (188, 190).
62For chis concept of the Rule of Faith, see R. P. C. Hanson Tradition in the Early
Church, cap. 3 (75-129).
63S ee Simonetti Stud; 77-82, referred to by Danielou Hilaire Eveque et Docteur 14.
475
 The Rival Answers Emerge
of being between the temporal an~ the eternal'. 6. I~ his Introduction
to Book I of the De Trinitate he disparages any aid m thinkmg about
God which could be provided by mere reason, by the .general
opinion of mankind and by 'the futile speculations of philosophy'.·5
But he was, he tells us, at an early stage of the process of his bein~
drawn towards Christianity greatly impressed by the '\ am that \ am
(ego sum qui sum, lit. '\ am who am') and the 'He who is has sen~ me to
you' (Misit me ad vos qui est VL, Vulg; '\ am has sent me to you RSV)
of Exod 3:14. He expresses succinctly the nature of God's presence
with us:
'And so he wholly comprehends himself both within and without ~nd
though he is infinite is neither absent from anybody nor does anythmg
not exist within him who is infinite. '66
God cannot be understood (i.e. fully grasped or comprehended), but
he can be believed in (and therefore of course known).·7 The means
by which he is known is his revelation of himself recorded in the
Bible:
'But investigation of thy doctrine educates us to a perception of divine
knowledge, and the obedience of faith carries us beyond the ideas of
reason;.68
But Hilary spends almost no time at all in discoursing about God in
the abstract, apart from how he is known in his revelation through
Christ. He reaches the subject of the Incarnation by the thirteenth
chapter of the first book of the De Trinitate: 'Remember', he says
later on, 'that the Father has not been revealed to you as God, but it
has been r~vealed to you that God is the Father', God is essentially,
not accidentally, Father.·' And he begins his serious and detailed
theological argument at the commencement of the Second Book of
De Trinitate (11.1) from the triple formula of Matthew 28: 19, recallmg
to all Christians their baptism. Even before that in the First Book he
has produced a careful formulation of the Trinitarian faith:
64Thomas, Christology 24.
65De Trin. 1.4-13; the last expression (13) is inutiles filisofiae quaestiones: cf. V.21.
66Ibid. 1.6 adque ita totus ipse intra extraque se continens neque infinitus abesset a cunctis,
neque ,uncta ei qui infinitus est non inessent.
"Ibid. 1.8.
681.37, sed doctrinae tuae studia ad sensum nos divinae cognitionis instituunt et ultra
rationalem opinionem fidei obedientia provehit; cf. 1.22.
69 111.22.
476
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
'so that they (Father and Son) in our belief are each one reality, not
[togetherJ one Person and we do not profess that the Two are the same
nor some compromise between a true and a false (God); because his
birth does not permit him who is born as God from God to be either
identical or separate. '70
He refuses to allow that the Son was created for the sake of the
71
world. He will sometimes use the argument from relations (the pros
ti argument disliked by Arius), that a Father necessarily implies a
Son.72 He directly denies Tertullian's unguarded statement that the
Son is a 'part' (portio) of the Father. 73 It is clear even from the meagre
evidence so far produced that Hilary is an unusual theologian. He has
been called the Western Athanasius. In fact· his thought little
resembles that of Athanasius, but in originality and insight he is
nearly his equal.
Early in his great work he asserts unequivocally the full divinity of
the Son. 'Jesus Christ is to be confessed as nothing else than God in the
fullness of Godhead.'7' Again and again he asserts that the union of
the Son with the Father is one of nature, not merely a moral nor
voluntary union. It is by the metaphysical, natural union with the
Son that God reveals himself:
'He described his birth by naming the Father. He teaches that the
Father is known when he himself is known. He confesses a unity of
nature since the Father is seen when he is seen. He testifies that he is
inseparable from the Father since he abides in the Father who abides in
him.'75
He cannot be a Son of God like other sons, sons by adoption such as
we were. 7. It is mistaken to believe that the likeness of Father and Son
lies only in power (virtute) and not in substance (essentia), or activity
701. 17 ut unum ~n fide nostra sint ~terque non unus neque eundem utrumque neque inter
verum ac fa/sum a/Iud confitentes; qUIa Deo ex Deo nato neque eundem nativitas permittit
esse neque aliud.
7IXII·43.
72E.g. Lz8; Thomas calls attention to this, Christo!ogy 27.
73D~ Trin. II.8.22; see Thomas op. cit. 28-32; Tertullian's expression is to be
found m Adv. Praxean 9· IncidentaUy, this comment of Hilary, who surely knew the
meaning ofTertullian's Latin better than we do, implies that the offensive term is to
be taken in its literal sense and cannot be explained away.
741.13; cf. VI.IO.
75VIII.4.
76VI.28, 30, 36.
477
 The Rival Answers Emerge
(efficacia = energeia).77 He goes into some detail in explaining why
moral or voluntary union, which was postulated by the Anans, IS not
sufficient. We must distinguish between voluntary and actual unity
(in re);78 the correct belief is in a unity of nature and a uniform
(indifferens) substance of Godhead. 79 In effect John 17:21 ('that they
may all be one, even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they
may also be in us') means that the disciples of Christ should take as an
example for their voluntary union with Christ and among
themselves the metaphysical union of Father and Son. 80 We are
naturally in Christ in the sense that he took our human nature upon
him and he gives us his nature in the eucharist; why then should our
union with Christ not be an analogy for the natural union of Father
and Son?81 Father and Son are of course united by will as well as by
nature. 82 As far as the distinction of the will of the Son and that of the
Father goes, Hilary is more realistic than Athanasius. He insists that
the Son's activity is the Father's,83 but he allows that the Son has an
independent will of his own, which he voluntarily aligns with the
Father's will. 8' He never raises the interesting question, whether this
will of the Son is a human or divine will. The theologians of the early
church, of all complexions, show remarkably little interest in the
psychology, as contrasted with the metaphysical constitution, of
Christ. When in the De Trinitate Hilary comes to explain]ohn 10:30
('I and the Father are one'), he treats the union much more in terms of
nature than of substance, and this is perhaps what has led several
scholars to characterise Hilary as teaching a generic unity of Father
and Son:
'We confess the same likeness both of power (virtutis) and of Godhead
in both'. 'But he goes on, adducing Heb 1:3 (imago substantiae eius in
Latin) to say (the author) 'distinguishes him who is from him who is
the image of his substance only (to ensure) beliefin his actual existence
(subsistendi fidem), not so that any dissimilarity of nature should be
understood'.85
77De Synodis 19 (495. 496); a little later.(2I-~3 (497-8) he admits that similarity of
essence can be misunderstood to mean IdentIty.
78De Trin. VIll.6-9.
79Ibid. VIII.lo.
80VIll.l I.
81VIll.13-17.
82VlII.I9.
831X.44-47.
84IX.4g-S0.
85
111.23.
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
And this is how elsewhere he expounds the same text John 10:30:
'1 and the Father are one, because I and the Father are names of realities
(rerum); one, now, is the declaration of the nature, because neither
differs in that which is; ,we are however rules out identity (unionem).
And here because we are one is not identity, the generation (nativitas)
makes them to be one'. 86
Hilary has thought carefully about the character of the unity
between Father and Son.
'There is the only-begotten God: and the word "only-begotten" does
not allow an only-bego~ten partner Gust as ingenerate (innascibilis)
does not allow a ~artner m respect of being ingenerate), for he is One
from One. Nor IS there any other only-begotten God besides the
Only-begotten God. Each therefore is One. and Sole, in the peculiarity,
t?at IS, III each ofmgenerateness and oforigin. And so each is one God,
smce between One and Ohe, that is One from One, there is no other
nature of the eternal Godhead. '87
And a little later: 'God the Father and God the Son are One
un~ondit~onally (absolute), not by identity (unione) of Person, but by
umty (umtate) .of substance. '88 He further defines this natural unity by
saymg that It IS not effected 'by any corporeal means, but by divine
powers, and not by a communication (transfusione) of nature to
nature, but by the mystery and power of nature', and not by
~epnvatlOn or extension or process of God to God. 89 He does not
like the model, devised ~y a certain Hieracas, of a torch kindling
~nother torc~, and he rejects the notion that this unity of nature
I~phes the eXistence of a pre-existent material common to both: 'the
birth of the Only-begotten is not a succession, but a production
(progemes), n?t a ~rocess (tractus), but light from light'.90 And the
same umty IS eVIdent when the activity of Father and Son IS
conSidered rather than the nature. 91 Thus:
.,
'The Father therefore is in the Son and the Son in the Father God in
God; not by a meeting of two types joining together, no; by the
Implantmg of the nature of a more capacious' substance ... but
:6VII .2S ; he always prefers unitas to unio; cr. VI.II.
'IV.l3; cf. lI.lI.
88IV·42 .
89V.37.
90VI.I2..
91S ee VII. 17-2. I.
479
 The Rival Answers Emerge
through the generation of a nature which is living fro~ the Living
One' seeing that the situation does not alter, that generation does not
dam;ge the nature of God, that nothing is produced other than the
birth of God into God from God, that there is here no novelty,
nothing extrinsic, nothing detachable, etc. '92
In this conclusion th~t God is God through God Hilary approaches
unconsciously to the dynamic concept of God as Trlmty which hes
ultimately behind Origen's thought and which was b~ought out
prominently in Karl Barth's Trinitarian theology .. He IS perfe~tly
capable ofintroducing the word 'subst~nce', but this IS not the ousla of
N and of Athanasius, but the substantia of Tertullian, which Hilary
93
employs as early as his Commentary on Matthew. If we ask,. as
Smulders and several others have asked, whether his concept of umty
is of a generic or numerical unity. the a~swer is O?t obvi?us. On th~s
subject, which did not directly present Itself to Hilary, hIS thoug~t IS
fluid. But, as we have seen, he insisted that Father and Son are one
God' (unusdeus), the substance which they share, ifw.e are.to speak of
substance, is one; and he rejects 'union' which to him Implies Identl.ty,
in favour of 'unity'. Hilary introduces 'nature' (natura) (which
Tertullian never uses in Trinitarian contexts) especially when treatmg
of generation, equality and likeness. Essentia (essence) n~ver appea~s
in the De Trinitate. It first surfaces in the De SynodlS, where It
translates ousia and is introduced in deference to Greek theology. He
seldom uses persona to distinguish Father and Son, nor does he ~ry to
distinguish persona and natura; in fact persona played httle part m the
debates sparked off by the Arian Controversy among the Latm-
speaking theologians, and this is a puzzle which no scholar has, yet
explained and few even have recognized. Tertulhan 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 salus Deus (sole God). He never uses 'single' (unicus) of God,
because this, he believes, would imply Sabellianism!4
92Vll.J9·
93S ee Comm. in Matt. 23.8 (162).
94The foregoing remarks are much indeb~ed t~ J. Moingt, in Hilaj~e et son Temps
16 4-5. Smulders in his earlier work had said qUite co~~ec:l~ that Hilary ~o.es no~
distinguish between numerical unity and what he calls I umte purement specmque
(La doctrine Trinitaire 234-5, cf. 245). Generally ,peaking, .though the Fathers
recognised the danger of imagining a kind of 'GodpstufF. behl1~d and beyon~ the
Persons, they did not see the necessity (if such neceSSIty eXists!) of makmg a
distinction such as this.
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
He is ready to use the concept of 'image' for the Son, as we have
already seen, reproducing the 'image of the substance' of Hebrews
I :3.0' Material images, he says, are made of paint or wood or stone or
metal and are not the same as the original. But the Son, as an 'image of
the invisible God' is not an image in this way, 'because he is a living
image of the Living One; and, being born from him, has no diversity
of nature, and because he is diverse in no point he possesses the power
of that nature from which he is without diversity',96 And Hilary
regards the model oflight coming from light with particular favour:
it exhibits 'the radiance oflight, the warmth of nature, the power of
burning, the upward motion of a flame', and yet remains fire
entirely, and this is its whole nature. Further, it appears to be the
communication of a nature without division and partition. even
though it has the disadvantage of being a material substance which
dies with the death of tha.t substance!'
We have already seen that in the Commentary on Matthew Hilary
had not yet heard of the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son,
but still held to Tertullian's conception of the Son as produced from
the being of the Father, having resided in that being from eternity, to
become a distinct entity for purposes of creation, revelation and.
redemption!' By the time that he comes to write the De Trinitate,
however, Hilary has encountered and accepted the doctrine of the
eternal generation of the Son, though never in any form that can lead
us to suppose that he is directly quoting either Origen or Athanasius.
On the whole he gives the impression that the new ideas which he has
met during his residence in the East were gained in conversation and
discussion rather than by reading books. And if we are to accept
Doignon's'estimate of this paucity of his acquaintance with Greek,
this seems a likely conjecture. In the De Trinitate he can write:
'But we profess a generation (nativitatem) which has existed
(subsistentem) timelessly, we declare God the Son as God of no diverse
95De Trin. m.23.
96VII.37· C£ the statement in De Syn. 13 (490) that the image must have the
species, natura and essentia of that of which is an image, and the careful sentence a little
lat.er. (discussing likeness, which must include likeness ofgenus, species andforma) 'and
thJ~ IS t~uly to ~e a.Son, to reproduce the truth of the Father's form equally imaged
(collnagmatae) m hImself by a perfect likeness of nature' (IS (491, 492).
97VII.29·
98S ee above, PP.468--9. Compare Comm. in Matt. 31.3 (228) and 16.4 (52).
Borchardt, Hilary of Poitiers' R6Ie 88, 89 and n 159 remarks upon this. See also
Moingt in Hilaire et son Temps 162-3.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
nature from God the Father, nor equal to the Ingenerate by reason of
ingenerateness, but because of his generation as Only-begotten not
dissimilar'.99
Much of the seventh book is indeed occupied with expounding the
eternity of the Son as distinct Son, what Hilary calls 'the mystery of
his perfect and indescribable generation'''oo Later he can write:
'Our faith therefore, though it does not conceive of a beginning of
generation. always professes an only-begotten Son. be~au~e hi~ natur.e
is not consistent with a belief that he has ever had a begmmng smce hIS
'generation is beyond every temporal beginn~ng. But .though it
confesses that he has existed always and before times, yet It does not
doubt that he is born in timeless infinity, yet it proclaims him to derive
from a generatIon. 0 f'mgenerate M'In. d "0'
And again:
'Por where the Father is the originator (auctor), there generation is also
present; yet where the originator .is e~ernal, there i~ ~lso eternit~ of
generation, because just as generatIon IS from the ongmator, so bIrth
from an eternal originator is eternal.'
And he explicitly identifies birth (nativitas) and generation (generatiD,
a rare word with Hilary).!02
Hilary is careful to clear the concept of divine generation from
misunderstanding. He speaks of the origin of the Son 'from the
Eternal, not himself from a beginning, but from the Unbegun
(ininitiabili); not by his own initiative (per se ipsum), but from him
who is for ever without origin (a nemine), born from the Eternal,
taking his birth in fact from his Father's eternity'.,03 The proper
understanding of generation has nothing to do with Valentinus'
concept of prolation, and it has no such human attributes as
'copul~tion, conception, process, delivery'.' 04 In one passage as early
as the third book he makes several careful distinctions on this subject:
'In this case therefore the Ingenerate begot from himself before all
time a Son, not from some material substratum, because everything
99X.6: the last expression is one of Hilary's best lapidary definitions, neque ex
innascibilitate innasc.ibili coaequalem, sed ex generatione unigeniti non disparem.
looVII.27.
'·'IX.S7: cf. XII.14.
102XII.lI.
IOlIV.6.
I04VI.9·
The Western Pro-Nicenes [: Hilary of PoitieTS
exists through the Son; not from non-existence because nothing in
God is alterable or empty; not part of himself either divided or cut off
or extended because God is impassible and incorporeal ... But
incomprehensibly, indescribably before all time and ages he
procreated from that which was ingenerate in himself, imparting to
this generation by love and power everything which God k And so
the only-begotten Son is perfect and eternal from the perfect and
eternal Father.'lOS
This is certainly not the eternal generation as described by either
Origen or Athanasius. Three books, and perhaps a year later, he can
express the same concept in significantly different terms:
'it is not a fragment. not a section, not a reduction, not a derivation,
not an extension, not a process (passio), but it is the generation
(nativitas) of a living nature from the Living One. God is moving out
(exiefis) from God, not a qeature appointed to bear the name of God.
He did not have a beginning so as to exist from nothingness, but he
proceeded (exiit) from the Abiding One. And "proceeding" has the
meaning of generation, it does not have that of commencement
(inchoationis). For a substance to begin is not the same thing as God to
proceed from God'.1 06
Hilary does his best to establish a distinction between the Father
and the Son, without (as we shall see) having the advantage of an
agreed formal terminology for this task. At an early stage in the De
Trinitate, interpreting John 14:28 ('the Father is greater than 1') he can
write:
'And who will not allow that the Father is greater, as the Ingenerate (is
greater t4an) the generated, as the Father than the Son, as he who sends
than he who is sent, as he who wills than he who obeys'.lo7
Later, in the ninth book, he says 'he who exists (subsistit) as God
according to the nature of divine generation from the existing
(subsistente) God is not separable in the truth of his nature from him
who is alone true God'.'oS He can make the distinction only by
1051II.]. C£ Smulders Lz doctrine Trinitaire 150, 'Telle est I' essence de la paternite'
~e ~ngendr~ ~ Ie fils tout ce qui constitute sa propre substance; l'essence de I~
fihatlon consIste en cc que Ie fils re~oive tout ce qui est dans Ie pere.·
t06VI.35; notice the dynamic note in this account.
107
111.12; it is this sort of language which inclines one to agree with those who
conclude that the first three books of this work were written before Hilary's exile.
I o8IX.36. Cf. De Syn. 69 (526) Patri subiectus est ut auctor; (see Smulders Ie doctrine
Tr;nitaire 187-8).
 The Rival Answers Emerge
elaborately defining the nature of the relationship without, in the De
Trinitate, achieving a vocabulary which will enable him to make
himself clear on the point. 109 Later when he is writing his De Synodis
he is rather more aware of the necessity of making this distinction,
though his vocabulary is confused:"o
'Because the Godhead of the one born is not diverse (indiscreta) from
that of the begetter, this is no reason why the Generator and the
Generated should be the same; clearly he who generates and he who is
generated cannot be other than two distinct things (alius et alius) , no~
on the other hand can he who is born and his begetter be dissimilar'.
And he can speak of 'the significance as a Person' (personalem
significantiam) of the Son. 111
But within the limits which he observes in the De Trinitate Hilary has
worked out the relation of the Son to the Father with admirable care:
'For if God is from God or God is in God he does not effect a duality of
Gods, as long as One from One remains in the nature and name of
One; nor does he lapse into a solitary God because One and One does
not signify Sole',112
We have seen that in the course of attempting to distinguish the
Father and the Son Hilary can admit a certain subordination of the
Son to the Father, if only because the Father is the Son's origin. 113 He
often evades apparently subordinationist texts by applying the
relevant words to the human nature of Christ, not to the pre-existent
I09E.g. 11.22: 'Let them learn that there is one ingenerate God the Father and one
only-begotten Son of God, perfect offspring of a perfect. Father; no~ begott~n. by
reduction, not cut off from any part of a mass, but possessmg everythmg, reC~IV1ng
aU the implications of generation (genuisse omnia consecutum (Smulders), a difficult
phrase: one suspects a c'orruption in the MSS); not produced by derivation or
process (/luxus), but from everything and in everything born from him who does
not cease to exist in everything and in which he exists; free from time; unaffected by
the ages; through whom all things were made, for he cannot be (classed with) those
things which were established by him'.
110For Hilary's formal terminology see below, pp. 486-92. . HIlary has aVOIded the danger of making the Son a mediator within
11 t De Synodis XI 8 (496); cf. ibid .. 68 (S2S) where he insists that 'of one substance'
must not be taken to mean that the Son differs from the Father only in name, and a
very clear expression in De Trin. IV.42, non unione personae sed substantiae unitate.
Smulders (Le doctrine Trinitaire 118) calls attention to a sentence at IV.21 personarum
autem ita/acta distinctio est, ut opus referatur ad utrumque.
t 12Vll.33; 'neither a solitary
nor a diverse God' is indeed Hilary's watchword: cf.
39 'seeing that though he is not singular yet he does not tum into two gods, and
though he is not two he cannot be thought to be solitary'.
t1JSee Thomas Christology 28-32.
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary oj PoWers
Son,'14 e.g. the subjection of the Son spoken ofinJn 6:38 etc is 'not
subjection implying a renewed obedience but a mystery of (God's)
strategy'.'15 And he sometimes seems to take away with one hand
what he gives with the other:
'So the Father is greater in that he is Father. But the Son, in that he is
Son, is not less. The generation of the Son makes the Father grea ter.
Yet the nature of the generation does not permit the Son to be less.
The Father is greater in that he is entreated to give glory to the man
who has been assumed. The Son is not the lesser in that he resumes his
glory with the Father. Thus it is that the mystery of generation and the
strategy of incarnation (dispensatio corporation is) is fulfilled'.1l6
But he allows that though the Son is equal to the Father in divine
nature, yet the Son is not his own origin nor did he generate himself
from nothing, 117 and the fact that the Father confers on the Son his
name and his honour justifies the text 'the Father is greater than 1'.'18
And m the De Synodis he concedes that the Father is greater 'only in
the authority conferred by ingenerateness' ."9 He has considerable
difficulty in the same book in reconciling his views with the XVIIth
anathema of the First Sirmian Creed of 3SI which had declared 'we
do not rank the Son alongside the Father, but he is subordinated to
the Father'. All Hilary can say at this point is that the mission and
activity of the Son in obedience to the Father do not affect his
metaphysic~l status:. 'but the subjection motivated by duty (pietatis) is
not a reductIOn ofhlS substance (essentiae) nor does the activity arising
from sacred obligation (religionis officium) cause his nature to be
defective: (De Synodis SI (SI8, S19». There is however one important
passage ~ the De Trinitate, to which Simonetti has called
attention,'20 where Hilary appears to go further. It Occurs in the
fourth book (42). He describes the Son as 'God visible and palpable in
man,' and calls him 'one Mediator between God and man mediator
inthe giving of the Law, in the assuming of a body'. So fa'r so good;
114E.g. IX.SI; X1.30, 59.
. It5Xl.30 subjectio haec non novae obedientiae sed dispensandi sacramentum est: cf.
XI·49, dispensatiol.non demutatio.
116IX.S6.
117IX.S3.
I18IX.54.
U9 47 (SIS).
120Crisi 30S n 188.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
the Godhead. But a little later, having mentioned some of the
activities of the pre-existent and incarnate Son, he says:
'No other god will be reckoned with this one. These activities are
appropriate to this only-begotten God alone. And this one God has
been born from God in this peculiar blessedness of his powers'.
Hilary has here avoided Arianism, but has he avoided the suggestion
that the Son was constituted as Mediator in such a way that the Father
was not, that he was doing something which the Father could not do?
A brief attention to Hilary's terminology will be perhaps useful at
this point. We have already noted'2' his apparent reluctance to use
the word persona, one supplied to him by Tertullian, and one which,
it might be thought, if regtilarly used to express what God is as Three
in distinction from what he is as· One, would have considerably
clarified his thought. The word never occurs in that work where
Tertullian's influence is strongest, the Commentary on Matthew, nor
any substitute for it.'22 It is used from time to time in both De
Trinitate and De Synodis in this sense,'23 bnt by nO means exclusively
and not in contexts where it could have prevented confusion of
thought. Perhaps we have to remember that between the writings of
Tertullian and Hilary's day lay the appearance of Sabellius and others
of his school. It may be that persona was associated in the minds of the
writers of the fourth century with Sabellianism. It was not perhaps
fitted owing to its associations to express distinct subsistence.
Smulder notes (La doctrine Trinitaire 288) that at De Trinitiate VII. 39,
Hilary repudiates the 'theatrical use of pmontl. The word to express
what God is as One in distinction from what he is as Three which
comes most easily to Hilary is nature (natura, occasionally genus as a
synonym) which Tertullian never uses in this sense, not substantia
(substance) nor essentia (substance also). The great defect of Hilary's
theological vocabulary is that he uses substantia both to mean what
God is as Three (hypostasis in the later Cappadocian sense) arid for
what God is as One (ousia in the Cappadocian sense), and in some
contexts it is almost impossible to determine which sense he intends ..
In his Commentary on Matthew he uses substantia several times
121See above. P.480.
122so Doignan observes Hilaire avant ['Exi1.356 n 8. Smulders La doctrine
Trinitaire 280-89. has some useful cemar.ks on Hilary'~ ~erminology.
123E.g. De Syn. 14 (491); De T,in. VI1.40. Smulders (Lt doctrine T,initaire 268-9,
289) notes that Hilary never directly calls any of the Three persona. The nearest
approach is De Syn. 32 (504) subsistentium personas per substantias edocentes. "
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
reproducing it from either Tertullian or Novatian, in the sense of that
which God essentially is.'24 In De Synodis 32 (504, 505) he makes a
distinction; speaking of the 'Dedication' Creed of 34"
'They said there were three substances (substantias) inculcating by
'substances' the Persons (personas) each of the distinctly existing (or
subsisting, subsistentium) Ones, not separating the substance
(= common Godhead) of the Father and the Son by the diversity of a
dissimilar essence (= common Go"dhead)'.
If Hilary had kept to using substantia=persona=what God is as
Three, all would have been well. But even in this carefully devised
statement uncertainty is introduced by his use of substantia to mean
what God is as One at the end of the passage. It is worth noting that
Hilary here uses the verb subsistere (to subsist) in order to refer to the
Persons of the Godhead, as distinct from its essence or substance. He is
consistent in using this verb only to refer to the Persons, but he does
not often so use it.'25 It is of course in the De Synodis that Hilary has
most often to use the word substantia because he is interpreting or
translating the creeds which had been produced between 34' and 358,
and here hypostasis and ousia cropped up again and again. It cannot be
said that Hilary maintained any consistent and clear rule of translation
and use, even when he was attempting to define his terms. To give a
host of examples in the text would be to run the risk of boring the
reader.126 One example must suffice:
'Not two ingenerates because by the authority of his ingenerateness
God is one; and the Only-begotten is not thereby not God, because his
124E.g. 5.1'5 (168); 12, 17 (284-); 7.8 (32) is the example from Novatian's De Trin.
JI.
125Cf. De Trin. X.6 nativitatem subsistentem.
126B . fI
. ric y to e':1Um.er~te, .one can instance: De Syn. 12 (490) an attempt to define
essentla and also m dlstmctlon from it substantia, (in the course of which he uses
sub~tantia in t~e definition of essential); 25 (499) hypostasis translated by substantia and
ousla by. essentla; but 28.(501) um:us substantiae translates homoousion; and 27 (5 0 0-5 01 )
substanllO translate~ OUSJa (of which the. Logos was declared an eikon in Ancyra 3.5 8);
35 (5 08 ) commentmg on the IVth Antlochene Creed of 341 he uses substantia in both
sense of ousia an~ hypostasis ~. Perso~; 47, (515) substantia certainly means ousia here;
55 (S~9) subs~antla of the Splrlt meamng Person', but 61 (522) substantia of the Son
meanmg ous.a. In Coil. Antiar. BU 11.5 (153, 154) he defines essentia as substantia
agai~: !=sse?tia i~ '~at which always is, and because it needs no external aid for
sustaInIng Itse.lf It JS a~so called substantia, because within itself it is that which (is)
eternal and ex~sts (subslstat) by the po.wer of its eternity'. This is useful as far as it goes
but does nothmg to clear up the eqUIvocal use of substantia. See Smulders Le doctrine
Trinitaire 287.

The Rivar Answers Emerge
origin is ingenerate substance (substantia = ousia). Not one Person (lit.
"subsister", subsistentem) but one uniform substance (substantiam non
differentem, ousia). Not one name of God among diverse natures, but
uniform substance (essentiam = ousia) of one name and nature. Not one
(of the Three) superior to the other in type of substance
(substantia = ausia) , but one subordinated to the other by the
generation of his nature' ,127
By this time Hilary has reached the stage of using substantia fairly
regularly to mean ausia, what God is as One. But he varies his
vocabulary to use essentia in the same meaning, and natura also. As he
has frequently up to this used substantia to mean 'Person', what God is
as Three, this late regularity of usage leaves him with no word to use
for 'Person'. All he can produce for this is a verb, subsistere. It is not
surprising that in the next chapter he apologises for the insufficiency
of language in speaking of these deep matters. 12 •
Hilary does not of course discuss the word hamaausian in his
Commentary on Matthew, because he had never heard of the word
when he wrote that work. Once or twice he produces in the De
Trinitate expressions which are close to the word though not identical
with it, such as 'uniformity of an inseparable nature' (naturae
indifferentiam inseparabilis) and 'nature preserving through generation
the authenticity of substance' (natura tenens per nativitatem substantiae
veritatem).129 But in only one place in this work does he deal with the
famous watchword of the pro-Nicenes at length (IV.4-'7). Here he
first describes the terms as 'promulgated by bishops in the past' (ab
anteriaribus episcopis praedicatum), presumably a reference to the
Council of Nicaea, and then goes on to list the Arian objections to
it.'3o He defends the term against these accusations: it does not imply
an identity of Father and Son; and it does not import corporeal
notions into the Godhead:
'These arguments have been stated in case a,ny suspicion should lirtger
about the mention of homoousion as adopted by the Fathers and in that
creed which was to last for ever, so that it should be recognized that
the Son exists (subsistere) in the substance in which he was generated
127De Syn. 64 (523, 524).
128 65 (5.24). He only uses essentia once before De Syn. (Smulders Ie doctrine
Trinitaire 281).
129De Trin. VlI.I I. Cf. Smulders Le doctrine Trinitaire .245-50.
n.2;3 3 sll~I.\(3.2d ~p'. 1.53 ~n~
130IV.4; for another list of these objections, see below P.490. Cf. Smulders Le
doctrine Trinitaire 108, .243. The other mention of homoousios is at Vl.IO.
r
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
fr~~ the Father, and that nothing of the substance in which he was
eXlstmg :was removed. from the Father by the generation of the Son,
and that It was not regIstered that the Son is homoousios with the Father
by men who were holy and zealous for the doctrine of God for th
w~ong reasons (vitiis causisque) listed above; in case anybody shoul~
thmk that the generation of the only-begotten Son was abolished by
means of ousla because he was said to be homoousios with th
Father.'131 e
He then decbres that he will spend the rest of the book explaining
why hamoauSlan was necessary, arguing only from the text f th
Bibk 132 In the Callectanea Antiariana he defines hamaausian bri~tly a~
Uleamn~ :;;erni~y is alone like itself and that which exists eternally is
1n God. It IS dou,btful w?ether there is enough evidence to
suPpOrt. the statement of Momgt that in the De Trinitate Hilary
usually mtended to mean numerkal identity when he used homoousios
of the Son, whereas in the De Synadis he permitted a generic
mterpretat~on ~f the word for the sake of accommodating the
HO~OlouSlans. 34 In the first place, it is uncertain whether homoousios
earned ~o precise a meaning as to denote identity of ousia outside
Athanas1Us' use of it, and in the second the so-called Homoiousians
never actually used the word hamaiausias, which was attributed to
them by the Second Sirmian Creed of 357, but preferred the
expreSSIOn homoios kat' ousian.
But certainly in the De Synadis Hilary made a determined effort to
explore and analyse the word hamaausias.
In this. work he translates the term in Tertullian's phrase unius
substan~la.e (of one substance), and at the outset encounters and
rec~?mses the sli~periness of the word substantia: 'this word holds
waltmg for the behever both conviction (conscientiam) and deceptio '
If we ar~ s~eaking of likeness of nature, we rightly mention only o~~
substant~a: ~n~ substance, as long as it does not abolish the Person
who eXIst~ dIstInctly (personam subsistentem) nor divide one substance
separated Into t:wo, will be maintained in an orthodox sense'.135 On
the other.han~, If we take 'ofone substance' to mean that the Son is the
Father, dlffenng only in name, oris a part of the Father divided off, we
131
6.
132 .
7
sa
B
154· Doignon 'Hilaire avant l'Exil496 n 4 and 497
134~/' at t IS e ninon IS mdebted to Seneca Epistle 113.5 and Dialogue 7 16 3
13S I atre et son Temps 165-6. . .
De Syn. 67 (525).

The Rival Answers Emerge
plunge into error; and a third and equally wrong interpreta~on is to
take substantia as a reality prior to both Father and Son, of whIch they
both partake. 136 When we say 'one substance', we must know what
we mean: 'not another god in the genus "substance". but one Go~
through the essence (essentia) of a uniform substance. ~he one God 15
not a Person (persona) but is a nature, be~ause he W~O.lS ?or.nl~~d he
who generates has ~othing in himself diverse or dlsslmtlar .
Later in the work he gives the reasons alleged by the Arians
(represented by Valens and Ursacius direcring affairs at. the th~rd
Sirmian Council of 357) against using homoousJOs: It Imphes a pn?r
substance behind Father and Son; in the case of Paul of Samosata m
the third century the Fathers had condemned the use of the word
because it implied that God was solitary and smgle (unlCus); the
bishops at Nicaea had adopted it only under pressure [presumably
from Constantine) against .those who called the Son ~ creature, bu;;!
should not be accepted because it does not appear m the BIble.
Hilary replies to the last charge by saying that the Father.s of N~c~;;
had adopted the word because the Arians had expressly. rejected It. .
He next gives the Latin text of N and adds an mterestmg comment.
'Surely this is no other than our belief, that he (the Son) does n?t
distinctly exist from any other source and that he does n~t eXIst
differently? Or does the profession of homoousion mean ~nythm.g else
than that one and the same essence (essentia) ofhoth exists accordmg to
the offspring of nature because the essence of the Son is not from
another source? And since he is not from another source both are
properly believed to be of the same essence, bec~use the Son does not
possess the substance (substantia) of his generation except from the
· a f his F ath'
authority er s nat ure '14D
. 343. He applauds the declaration of Ancyra that the likeness of Father
And finally he defines precisely what he means by homoousion:
'By homoousion ., . I understand God from God, not of a different
substance (essentiae), not divided offbut born, and fro~ the substance
of the ingenerate God a co-generated only-begotten bIrth for the Son.
according to likeness' .141
>3'68 (525, 526).
13769 (526).
13880 (534).
139 83 (535)·
1408 4 (53 6).
. . '
141 58 (55 ); Hilary is of course mterpretmg h~moo.us,o~ to accord a~ far as pO~Sl Ie
0
with lIomoiousion.lt is interesting to compare thiS wah hIS reproduction ofN m the
490
••
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
Hilary of course was also ready to accept the homoiousios which was
attributed to the followers of Basil of Ancyra. His De Synodis was
written partly for the benefit of the Gallic bishops, to make them
realize that the development in the East of the doctrine of God as
witnessed in the many formulae produced between 34' and 358 had
not been wholly mistaken nor wholly in vain, and to commend to
them the formula 61101000'10<; (homoiousios) which the group round
Basil had recently appeared to favour at Ancyra. The work's stimulus
was certainly the widespread alarm caused in both East and West by
the production and publication of the Second Sirmian Creed of 357.
This was the subject of chapters '-'77, and the whole work opens
with an impressive address to the Gallic and the British bishops (but,
curiously, not those of Narbonensis Secunda, Viennensis, Alpes
Maritimae or of Spain). But the latter part of the book, chapters
78-9', switches its addre,s to the bishops of the Eastern Roman
Empire who had at Ancyra in 358 made a protest against the Second
Sirmian Creed of 357 and had produced a document favouring
011010<; Kut'otlO'iuv. 142 This part is designed not onJy to express
Hilary's joy at the appearance of this document, but also to
commend, gently and politely, to these bishops the homoousion of N
and that creed generally. The suggestion made by A. D. Jacobs that
these chapters were originally a letter addressed by Hilary to Basil of
Ancyra is an interesting one. 143 Hilary's attitude to homoiousion is
open and generous. Indeed during his survey of the various creeds
produced between 34' and 358 he condemns outright none except
the Second Sirmian of 357 (though he can occasionally criticize a
detail), not even the statement of the Eastern bishops after Serdica in
and Son must involve likeness of ousia. '44 God's generating
something similar to himself and communicating life does not affect
Coil. Antiar. B 11.10, (p. ISO): he does not translate Jlovoyevi'j after yevvTJ9&vta £K tOU
7tatp6~, for 6Jlo6ucnov he has 'unjus substantiae cum patre, quod Graeci dicunl
"omousion"'; in the anathemas he glosses ex nullis extantibus with quod Graeci (ex u(
onton' dicunt, and translates ii t~ t-ttp~ 01tocrtclcrec.o; i1 o1)cria; simply by vel alia
substantia without attempting any distinction between ousia and hypostasis. In his
reproduction of N in De Syn. 84 (536) he translates the expression vel ex alia
substantia aut essentia.
142See PP.348-57.
143He is, however, anxious also to commend the document of Ancyra 358 to the
'b
Gallic b~hops, see 13ff (490fI).
14415 (490, 491).
49'
 The Rival Answers Emerge
the possession of a common substance (essentia) by the two." s He can
even accept Basil's readiness to regard the Son as created, granted the
conditions under which Basil believes this notion; in effect he agrees
that creation means generation, and, allied with the concept of
generation, excludes production by sheer will or power.·· 6 He
agrees with Basil in rejecting the idea that generating a Son means a
reduction in God's substance (essentia), and other misunderstandings
of the doctrine." 7 With Basil he refuses to allow that the Father is the
God of the Son or that there is any difference of time or age between
the Two."· He assents to Basil's refusal to identify the Person of the
Father with that of the Son." 9 He commends the doctrine of the Son
as image of the Father propounded by Basil:
'Where the Son is declared to be the Father's image because of the
authenticity of the likeness he does not differ as dissimilar in substance
from the substance of the' Father whose image he is',1s0
He notes without comment that the Ancyran document rejected .the
use of homoousios. Later, still addressing the Gallic bishops, having
carefully explained the right and the wrong way to understand 'one
substance' (una substantia) he announces confidently that 'of like
substance'can be understood to have the same meaning as 'one
substance'.'s, Though he points out, reasonably, that objections can
be raised to homoiousios, as they can to homoousios,152 this is a
treatment of the theology of Basil of Ancyra and his followers much
wiser and more generous that the somewhat patronizing and
uncomprehending words of Athanasius in his De Synodis.' 53
4. Hilary's Doctrine of the Incarnation
As we might expect, Hilary does not regard the Incarnation as a
reduction of divinity on the part of God and never (or almost never)
'·'16 (492, 493).
,.6 17- 19 (494-496).
'·'20 (496)-21 (497).
'·'23, 24 (498, 499).
14925-26 (499-500); most confusingly the Larin translation of the twelfth
anathema of Ancyra quoted by Hilary renders hypostasis as substantia, 'and Hilary in
his comment follows suit.
'15°27 (SOO, 501). Here substantia manifestly means 'substance' (ousia).
lS'71 (527), 76 (530).
'''8~ (541). Cf. Smulders La doctrine Trinitaire 246-50.
1535ee above p. 440.
49 2
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
suggests that it was something which the Son by his divine
constitution was peculiarly well-equipped to accomplish. He allows
that God had no need to become incarnate. God assumed a body only
so as to become intelligible to our weak minds.' s, Late in the De
Trinitate he gives a careful account of the reasons for the Incarnation:
'Now these are the sacred purposes (sacramenta) of heavenly mysteries
determined before the foundation of the world: the only-begotten
God was to choose to be born as nian, and man was destined to abide
for ever in God; God was to choose to suffer so that when God took on
himself our weakness the devil should no longer rage among the
paSSIons of human weakness and uphold the law of sin in us; that God
sho~ld choose to ~ie to prevent any arrogant authority standing
agamst God and bemg able to pervert in itself the nature of mortal
g~o~ne5s. seeing that immortal God would have placed himself
w.thm the law of death. Consequently God is born that we might be
raised, he suffers next that we might become sinless, finally he dies to
avenge us: thereby both our humanity abides in God, and the passions
of ~ur weaknesses a~e associated with God, and the evil powers are
subjugated by the tnumph of the flesh since God dies in the flesh' .155
This is a much more robust and satisfying account of the Atonement
at least than any Athanasius could give, deriving much ofits content
from Tertullian and manifesting already those characteristics which
would in the future distinguish Western from Eastern theology. It is
noticeable that Hilary, following his master Tertullian does not
hesitate to say that God was born and God died. Accordin~ to Hilary
. the Incarnation meant that 'when Christ was born as a man he
introduced to himself a new nature, not by the loss of divinity and
power but by a change of condition. '.56 This looks like a doctrine of
two n~tllres, but in fact is not so; what Hilary says here is, not 'a new
nature but 'newness of nature' (naturae novitatem), and 'condition'
(habitus) is not the same as 'nature'. Elsewhere he says '(his) flesh
exalted our flesh without incurring the shame of our constitution'
(elementorum) .• 57
IS4De Trin. m.3.
l~sDe T~in. IX.7. B.urns ('Hilary's Confrontation with Arianism' 296-7) makes
t~e Illte!es~n:g sug~estlOn that though in places Hilary conceives of Christ's body as
sl~ply mdlvldual, III other places he seems to think ofit as corporate, i.e. he took on
hImself t~e whole human race; he gives as instances some passages in Comm. in Matt.
but admits that at least in De Trin. 11.24 and III.I6 the body is individual
lS6De Trin. IX.38. "
157III. I9 and Hilary is as ready as Tertullian to accept what one might call the
493

The Rival Answers Emerge
The Incarnation was of course in Hilary's view foreshadowed in
the Old Testament. He sees this as a paradox, much in the style of
TertuIlian:
'He who had existed is born; he who is iITlmutable grows up; he who is
impassible suffers; the Living One dies; a dead man lives. for
everything in him is contrary to nature',iSS
In accordance with the tradition established by Marcellus of Ancyra
and Athanasius, Hilary is ready on occasion to refer awkward or
embarrassing texts to the incarnate rather than the pre-existent Son.
<Here is an opportunity for the heretics to deceive the simple and
ignorant, so· that they falsely allege that utterances made b~ him
(Christ) according to his humanity (secundum hominem) were said as a
<.
result of the impenectIon 0 f h'15 d'Ivme
. nat
ure' . 15"
This is one way of disposing ofJohn 14:28 ('the Father is greater than
1'): 'Have you forgotten', he asks rhetorically, .'the strategy of the
Mediator and the birth, infancy, growth, suffermg, cross and death
involved in it?'!60 The anointing referred to in Ps 45 (44):7 must be
applied to Christ's human body, and this is the best way of disposing
of the embarrassing language of St. Paul m Cor 15:24-28 about the
subjection of Christ to God.!6! But Hilary does not follow Ongen m
ultimately dispensing altogether with Christ'~ humanity.'62 and,
unlike Athanasius, he holds that it is absurd and ImpIOUS to thmk that
God cannot ordain an added glory for himself.163
messiness of the Incarnation: 'he experienced all the humiliations of our nature in
conception. birch. crying, swaddling-bands ... If anyone will ~egard these ,as
unworthy afCad, he will acknowledge himsel~th~t much m~re obhged for the gIft
as these conditions are the less suitable to the dIgnity of God, 11.24· But see bel?w
pp.496-S02 for what is in effect a modification of thiS. att~tude whi~h Te~tulhan
never envisaged. Smulders (Le doctrine Trinitaire 197) mamtalns that HIlary dId have
a doctrine of two natures.
lS8V.I8; the passages foreshadowing the Incarnation are the angel with whom
Jacob wrestled (19), the figure who stood at the top ofJacob's ladder (20), he whom
Moses saw in the Burning Bush (21, 22), and he who ga,:,e Moses the law on ~t.
Sinai (23). These of course are not the only places where Htlary sees an adumbratIon
of the Incarriation; he works his· way implausibly through the prophets also.
t59IX.S·
16°IX.SI.
t6tXI.2I-3 z ; earlier at XI.II-16 he has explained)n 20:17 ('My God and your
God') as uttered only in forma servi.
t62E.g. XI40.
t63XI.43·
494
The Western Pro-Nieenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
Hilary indeed is remarkably free in referring to the kenosis, God's
act in emptying or humbling himself in the Incarnation:
'He emptied himself of the form of God, that is from having been
equal with God; he did not through arrogance (rapinam) think of
himself as equal with God although, in the form of God and equal
with God he remained marked as God through God'.!64
But he did not, because he could not, empty himself of the nature of
God.'65 This rather confusing statement is'made clearer in the next
book. What Christ emptied himself of was theform of God, since he
could not at the same time possess the form of God and the form of a
slave. Therefore the abandonment (evacuatio) of the form is not the
destruction of the divine nature because whoever abandons himselfis
still present to himself (non caret sese).'66 And later he says that while
he accommodated, reduced and emptied himself to become man
Christ remained unemptied and unrestricted as God:
'He remained in the form of God and took the form of man, not
altered but having emptied himself, and though himself reduced
(vacuifaetus) remaining secretly (latens) within his being and within his
power ... The fact that he maintained himself reduced within himself
brought no damage to his power because during this unselfish process
ofemptying himselfhe still used the effect ofall the power ofwhich he
had emptied himselC!67
Hilary is perhaps inevitably obscure here. He seems to want to say
that Christ abandoned the form, that is the appearance and condition,
·of God without abandoning any of the powers of God and without
ceasing to be God. He is making a much more serious effort than
Athanasius' ever did to take the Pauline doctrine of God's self-
emptying seriously, but (as we shall see) some of his fundamental
convictions about the Incarnation were to land him into great
difficulties. Just because he faced the dilemma of the Incarnation more
resolutely than Athanasius he fell into graver disaster. But he should
be credited with better intentions than those of the bishop of
Alexandria.
Hilary knows reasonably well the kind of arguments· about the
constitution of the incarnate Word advanced by the Arians of his
164VIII.4S·
165 46.
166IX.14.
167X1.48.
495
 The Rival Answers Emerge
time. It is not likely that he was deeply read in Arian literature, but he
knew enough to maintain the debate with them. At De Trinilale
IV.12, 13 he quotes a Latin translation of the profession of faith in
Arius' Leiter to Alexander of Alexandria and refers to it again at VI.4, 5
with quotations. '08 He knows that his opponents ascribe to the
imperfection of Christ's divine nature the limitations which others
would attribute to his humanity.'oo And he knows that the Arians
deny a human mind and will to the incarnate Christ,170 though his
account of why they hold this doctrine is confused and
implausible. '71 In reply to the Arian doctrine of the Incarnation
Hilary is quite clear that Jesus Christ had a human soul or mind
(anima). He was fully human as well as fully divine.17 2 It was this
human soul which he commended to God on the cross.1 73 This point
alone should make it clear that Hilary's doctrine of the Incarnation
owed nothing to Athanasius. Christ also had a human will. '74
But having reached this point of insight into the account ofJesus
given us in the Gospels, Hilary pulls himself up short. In the
Commentary on Matthew he had already insisted that in asking the
disciples the number of the loaves in their possession (Matt 14:13-17)
Christ did not display ignorance. '7s He repeats this conviction in the
De Trinitate. 17o He is hard put to meet the Arian proof-text on this
point., Mk 13:32 (par. Matt 24:36) 'Of that day and hour no one
knows, not even the angels in heaven, or the Son, but only the
Father'.'77 It is inconceivable that Christ should not know the day of
his return; it is inconceivable that the Father should have kept him in
ignorance on this point; Paul says that all the treasures of knowledge
168Smulders had already observed this. La doctrine Trinitaire 97-9. This fact
would indicate pretty strongly that he had begun the doctrinal controversy before
he left Gaul for exile, because it is most unlikdy that he would have found a Latin
translation of this document in Asia. For a list of the pro,,:,Nicenes who used this
letter in their anti-Arian propaganda, see note (c) attached to p. 104 in PL 10,
probably that of Coustant.
169IX,IS.
170X.50 hominem ilium qui a Maria esse coepit habitaverit et virtutibus divinae
operationis instruit, animae tamen suae (i.e. the eternal Son's) motu naturaque viventem.
1?lX.51
1?lX.52.
173X.57-63.
174IX·49. 50.
175Comm. in Matt. 14.10 (20); so again 26.4 (196, 198).
176De Trin. VII.19.
171The difficulty is presented IX.58.
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
are hid in him (Col 2:2, 3}.'78 Hilary's explanation is as follows:
'In all matters in which God says that he is ignorant. he professes
ignorance certainly, but he is not restricted by ignorance. seeing that
in regard to what he does not know this is not the imperfection of
ignorance, but either it is not an occasion for speaking or a strategy to
obviate action'.179
God rations the revelation of his knowledge according to time and
circumstance. '8o The 'I never knew you' of Matt 7:23 means that
these people were unworthy of Jesus' knowledge. 181 So with all
Jesus' professions of ignorance or questions apparently requiring
inf~rination: 'In the case of him who knows everything, the things
which he does not know are a device for saying sometimes that he
does not know'.182
'He took on himself these .things (human weaknesses). not so that the
unalterable nature should be reduced to an imperfect nature, but that
within the unalterable nature there should be a sacred purpose
(sacramentum) of assumption [of humanity], seeing that he who was
God is man and he who is man does not cease to be God'.183
Christ pretended to be ignorant about the Parousia in order to keep
us on our toes waiting for his Return. '84 How a human mind can be
omniscient he does not attempt to explain.
In his Commentary on Matthew Hilary had declared that Christ did
not hunger for bread but for human salvation,'8s that Christ
displayed no fear for his own welfare in the Agony in the Garden nor
sorrow no~ weakness,'86 that he was only afraid that his disciples,
desertmg hIm, would commit the sin against the Holy Spirit. '87 In
the later works he takes this type of argument to extravagant lengths.
Even when he was incarnate the divine Word dis pia yed
immutability, 'powers in his miracles, glory on the mountain,
knowledge of human hearts in his thoughts, confidence in suffering,
178IX.59, 60, 61, 62.
179IX.63.
180IX.64.
18lJX.65.
182 66.
183
66.
18467.
185 3 . 2 (113- 1 14).
186 3 1.2 (226, 228).
187 31 .4 . 5 (230, 232).
497
 The Rival Answers Emerge
life in death' .'BB And he gives a summary of his ideas on the
IBO
subject.
'Although he submitted himself to suffering yet the Word which was
made Besh was not affected by the weakness of suffering. For he was
able to suffer and yet not be passible ... because he is unalterable God,
even when the Word was made flesh (events) found in him the
material (materiam) for suffering without the weakness of suffering.'
In the De Trinitate he had spelt out the details of this extraorclinary
theory. Signs of fear and pain and distress, such as are apparently
witnessed to in Matt 26:38, 39 and 27:46 and even in Luke 23:46
(,Father, into thy hands .. .') are incompatible with Christ's
possessing the nature of God who is i",,:pass!ble, but sugg~st th~t he
possessed an inferior divine nature. ChrISt himself urged hIS dISciples
not to fear death, and he himself had power over his own departure
from this life. What had heto fear from death? He knew that his body
would be raised in three days and that his spirit would go to the
Father.'oo But perhaps he was afraid of the pain of his passion? The
answer to this question requires a short analysis of human
psychology:
It is the presence of the soul (anima) in the body which registers pain; if
the soul is dulled by an opiate it does not feel pain.'" But Hilary
denies that Christ's body could have been precisely like ours in such a
way that it 'felt the pain our body feels, of our soul and body'. In his
birth Jesus Christ had heredity from his mother, but as far as hIS
human origin went he was God. Still Hilary allows that he had a
human soul. 192 It cannot even be said without reservations that Mary
imparted its origin to Christ's body, 'for Mary did not contribute the
origin to 'his body, though she conferred everything which naturally
belongs to her sex towards the (embryonic) growth, and birth of the
body'. The Besh drew its origin [i.e. its conception] from the
Word.193 Christ's human nature, though it was human nature, was
not human nature like ours because it was united with the divine
word. 194
'''De Sy., 48 (5.6).
18949 (5. 6).
190De Trin. X.g-I2.
191X.I3. 14.,
192 1 S·
193 1 6. We must remember that the ancients held the mistaken theory that in
human conception all the positive initiative came from the male while the female
only acted as a passive receptacle of the semen.
194
23.
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
This statement leads Hilary on to an amazing account of the Passion:
'So the man Christ Jesus the only-begotten God, by Besh and the
Word both Son of Man and Son of God, assumed the true man
according to the likeness of our manhood without departing from
being God. And in him though the blow struck or the wound fell
upon him or the knots tightened or the ropes raised him, they brought
to him the force (impetus) of suffering, but not the pain of sutfering 195
. .. but suffering inflicted in these instances does not preserve its
character. seeing that it is not natural that water should be pierced nor
flIe struck nor air wounded even though it is of the nature of the
weapon to wound or strike or pierce', So with Christ's passion;
suffering operate:d as far as suffering could,196 but 'the power of the
body accepted the ~orce of the violence which was savaging it without
the feeling of the violence' (Christ's body, if it could perform the
miracles which it did perform, could not have experienced pain as we
experience it). 'That flesh; that is that bread, is from heaven, and that
man is from God; he had a body liable to suffer and he did suffer, but
he did not have a nature capable offeeling pain' (naturam non habens ad
dolendum)'97 Itis inconceivable that Christ could really have thirsted,
hungered or mourned. He only underwent these apparently human
experiences to demonstrate that he was genuinely human, he did not
need to endure them: 'or when he took drink or food he was not
giving way to the demand of the body, but to convention'.'" 'He
had a body, but one appropriate to its origin.'199
Consequently Christ could not have been afraid;20. he could not
have been 'sorrowful unto death' ?Ol He could not have seriously
asked that the cup should pass from him. 202 The utterance 'My God,
my God why hast thou forsaken me?' could not have meant any
consciousness of the absence of God's presence. 203 The cross
represented no weakness and no disgrace?o. In short 'although
suffering was inflicted on the body, yet it did not introduce the
195 At this point Hilary gives some examples of things in nature not susceptible to
beating or wounding, air, water, fire.
196 .
23
197 .
23
198 24 .
199
25 .
200 2 6, 28.
201
29 .
202
30 .
203 I.
3
204 22- 23 .
499
 The Rival Answers Emerge
quality of pain into the body'. Because his body was conceived of the
Virgin by the Holy Spirit it did not have the weakness imported into
our bodies by sin and therefore the necessity of experiencing pain. 20 '
'Sorrowful unto death' meant sorrowful in such a way that death
would terminate the sorrow. 206 Jesus was omniscient because he was
God. 20 ? He was sad not for himself but for his apostles. The bloody
sweat was no sign of weakness. He did not need any comfort. 208 And
so Hilary continues to the end of the tenth book, concluding by a
reversion to the cry of dereliction on the cross when with tortuous
logic clothed in rhetoric he takes this as a sign given to others that
Jesus was human and going to die but not an indication of weakness
in Christ himself. 20 •
This startling doctrine of Hilary has, not surprisingly, caused
. several students of Hilary something of a shock. Smulders, who
devoted surprisingly little space to the subject, can only say (La doc-
trine Trinitaire 203-6). that Hilary fell into Apollinarianism, not
Docetism. I do not think that it is fair to accuse Hilary of
A pollinarianism, for he certainly recognised a human soul in Jesus
Christ. It is in his failure to acknowledge the reality of Christ's flesh
that he erred. Borchardt, after reviewing the history of scholarship
on the subject, attempts to deal with it himself in a rather heavy-
handed way, concluding that Hilary taught that Christ did indeed
suffer pain, but only in his own way because his soul was ignorant of
sin, and pointing out that Hilary admitted that Christ died (an
admission which he could hardly have avoided!).2'0 Thomas does his
best for Hilary, but not in an impressive way: he observes that Hilary
certainly believed that Jesus Christ had a human soul; he admits
quaveringly that there were 'docetic elements' in Hilary's doctrine,
but believes that on a final assessment he cannot be charged with
Docetism. 211 Boularand speaks nervously of a Christology 'whose
originality and daring sometimes surprise the reader', but believes
that Coustant in the XVIlth century and Galtier in the XIXth have
vindicated Hilary's orthodoxy.212 Grillmeier compares Hilary
205
35.
206J6.
2°'37·
208
39.
209
7 1.
210Borchardc, Hilary's ROle 117-130.
211Thomas Christ%gy 190, 19). 194·
212Boularand. L'Heresie 9D--92.
500
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
favourably with Athanasius in that he recognized a human soul in
Jesus, but admits that he taught that the Word so transfigured the
human body that it felt no pain. 2' 3 Doignon's treatment of the
subject is uncharacteristically undistinguished and uncritical. 214
None of these scholars is at ease when dealing with Hilary's account
of Christ's Passion. None of them will admit that he was nakedly
Docetic.
And yet Docetic he certainly was, albeit in a sophisticated way.
R. D. Williams is much more open and more convincing. If the
Logos, he argues, becomes the animating principle in Jesus Christ,
then the suffering of the incarnate Lord belongs to the flesh alone.
This was what Athanasius unreflectingly believed. Hilary enlarged
upon the implications of this assumption, with disastrous results:
'Jesus becomes incapable of mental suffering of any kind, indeed
incapable of anything we normally regard as "experience"'. In later
theology 'Once it has become customary to attribute suffering only
to the flesh, the addition of a human voG, to the person ofJesus makes
very little difference; vaG, assuch is in an y case generally agreed to be
impassible.'2" Hilary believed that Jesus Christ had a human soul,
and he held that the human soul normally does experience suffering.
He did not follow the line of either Athanasius or of Eusebius of
Emesa. His insight had provided him with the materials for a much
more satisfactory Christology than either of these authors produced.
But his undeniable ability was in this case completely lost, and he
presents us with a more unrealistic, more implausible, and - it must
be said - more unorthodox Christ than either of the other two. This
was partly because he went into greater detail in his Christology,
partly because in spite of his disavowal of philosophical influences his
mind was deeply dyed with the axiom that God is impassible (and
that Jesus Christ was fully God), but partly too because he made the
disastrous mistake of allowing the story of the Virgin Birth, which
plays so insignificant a part in the New Testament, to control the
whole of his Christology. In effect he concluded that at the very point
where Christ's solidarity with humankind is most crucial, in his
suffering, Christ was not really human. Not only does this bring our
redemption under question and do away explicitly with that central
conviction of St. Paul, the scandal of the cross, but it leaves us
213Grillmeier CeT 396-7.
2"14Doignon Hilaire avant "Exil 274-9.
215R. D. Williams 'Origen on the Soul of Jesus' 134.
50!
 The Rival Answers Emerge
uncertain as to whether such a figure can seriousl y act as our
Mediator.
s. Conclusion
Hilary in expounding his theology did ,,:ot fail to give attention to the
Holy Spirit, though, like almost all WrIters up to the second half ?f
the fourth century he devoted little space to him. Several chapters m
the Second book of the De Trinitate deal with the Holy Spirit and part
of the eighth book. He insists that the Spirit is a gift. 'He is given,
received, he is gained', he says, and 'so from now o~ sla~derous t~
should cease concerning whether he exists and IS gIv;n and IS
possessed and is ofGod.'216 His chief proof texts. for the SpIrIt are the
story of the Samaritan woman m John 4, endmg at verse 44 wIth
'God is Spirit', and 2Cor 3"7. He sees the Spirit's activity
conventionally as inspiring prophets and legislators in the Old
Testament, and as given to apostles and believers in the New so that
they could recognize the truth. 217 A curious contlation ofJn 16:7, 12,
13,14 and 14:16-17 precedes the statem~,,:t that this e,:pl,ains 'the will
of the giver and the purpose and condItIOn of the gIft, so that the
Holy Spirit assisis our faith in the Incarnati?';l by his in~ercessi~n"18
Hilary further illustrates Iris ideas on the SPIrIt by quotmg a m~xture
of Rom 8:14-15 and 1 Cor 12:3-II which supply us, he says, wIth the
Spirit's 'cause and rationale and power'. We must 'drink' ~fthis gift
of God by faith.>'> In the eighth book he defines the relatron of the
Spiriteo the Father and to the Son, basing himself onJn 16:12fi': the
Spirit receives from the Son and proceeds from the Father, but what
he receives from the Son lie also receives from the Father.220 He next
gives a long account of the inseparably close relationship of the Spirit
to the Father and to the Son, so that the word 'Spirit' (Spiritus) can
mean the Spirit of the Father or the Spirit of the Son or of the
Paraclete. 221 He ends with a summary of his doctrine on the Holy
Spirit:
il6De Trin. 11.29.]0 fact, as Smulders observes (La doctrine Trinitaire27b), me
IPropriety or peculiar characteristic of the Spirit is for Hilary munus or donum; ef.
De Trin. II. 1,33-34.
21711.31 ~ 32..
218
33 .
34 .
219
22°VIIl.2o,
22IVIII.2I-l9·
502
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poitiers
'They cannot be other than One whose characteristics (propria) are of
One (or from One): seeing that in the same Lord the Son and in the
same God the Father one and the same Spirit distributes in the same
Holy Spirit and perfects every thing.' 222
And in the De Synodis he makes the remarkable statement,
concerning the Holy Spirit:
'It is the height of impiety for him to be described as ingenerate
(innascibilem) who was sent by the Son for our comfort'.223
And a Iitde later he says that the Holy Spirit has substantiae suae
officium et ordinem, which presumably means 'the function and rank
belonging to his own Person' (substantia here meaning hypostasis),224
Moingt remarks that among the defects with which Hilary has been
charged is that of having no conception of the personality of the Holy
Spirit. 225 If this means ihat he tended to see the Spirit as an
impersonal intluence rather than as God encountered in a personal
mode, we may allow the charge. But ifit means that Hilary failed to
see the Spirit as possessing distinct existence from that of the Father
and the Son, we have seen enough to realize that this is not accurate,
and Moingt acknowledges this later.226 He points to a statement in
De Trinitate VIII. 19 where the Spirit is described as consistens (existing
alongside) the Father. Hilary's argument here (19-21) is that though
the Spirit proceeds or goes out from the Father he receives from the
Father and the Son. And in chapters 22, 23 and 26 Hilary is concerned
to show that the Spirit is both the nature of Father and Son (for both
are spirit) and also what he calls res naturae, by which he apparently
means a distinct manifestation of the divine nature. But in the same
passage Moingt also points out that in thus expounding his doctrine
of the Spirit Hilary makes it clear that the Spirit's role in the economy
of salvation for him is the Spirit's distinctiveness. He does not, as he
does in the case of the Son, identify his role in the economy with his
eternal existence within the Godhead. Hilary, however, says
222 39 .
22JDe Syn. 53 (519). Smulders (La doctrine' Trinitaire 265) remarks that Hilary
never actually calls the Spirit God.
224
55 (5 1 9).
2251n a list of defects charged on HHary, Hilaire et son Temps 159"-62.
226Ibid 166--7. Smulders (Le doctrine Trinita;re 86-8) admits that Hilary tends to
identify the Spirit with the divinity of Christ. This is the sign of a certain immaturity
of thought.
50 3
 The Rival Answers Emerge
explicitly that the Spirit is neither created nor generate. (De Trin.
XII.SS·)
Ifwe try to speak of Hilary's doctrine of the Holy Trinity, then we
must speak circumspectly, because he does not teach that the Holy
Spirit is included in the internal relations of the Godhead. Smulders
(La doctrine Trinitaire 267) notes that at De Synodis 32 (505) Hilary
explicitly approves the statement in connection with the 'Dedication'
Creed of 341 that the Spirit is united with the Father and the Son
rather by 'moral harmony' (consonantia, crull<POlvia) than by substance
(essentia). He can begin the second book of the De Trinitate most
impressively not only by referring to the baptismal formula and to
the Holy Spirit as 'the gift' and 'the one reward of perfect hope', but
also by coining one of his fine lapidary definitions: in Patre et Filio et
Spiritu Sancto, infinitas in aeterno, species in imagine, usus in munere,
which may be translated: 'infinity in the Eternal, revelation in the
Image, experience in the Gift'.227 But elsewhere, in those passages
where he is giving a particularly careful definition of God's nature he
usually, in accordance with his view that the Spirit can only be
defined in the 'economy', does not mention the Holy Spirit. For
instance:
'co profess God from God and God in God, not by reason of corporeal
relations hut divine powers, and not by flux of nature into nature but
by the mystery and power of nature. For God is not from God as a
result of amputation or extension or process (derivationem), but he
subsists by virtue of birth from nature into the same nature'.228
No room is made for, no account taken of, the Holy Spirit here.
Hilary certainly believed in the mutual indwelling of the Father and
the Son, but he would only have said 'in the Spirit' in the sense that
spirit is what constitutes God anyway?29 He believed in the equality
227Moingt (Hilaire et son Temps 173) renders the expression 'L'incognoscibilite de
Dieu est dans Ie Pere, qui est sans principe,l'intelligibilite de Dieu, dans Ie Fils, image
du Pere, et la science de Dieu se trouve dans l'Esprit, qui est Ie don de Dieu' - a
Targum rather than a translation. Thomas also refers to this passage admiringly,
Chriitology 6,7. Smulder refers to it, La doctrine Trinitaire 110, 191.
228De Trinitate. V.37. Smulders acknowledges this shortcoming briefly (La
doctrine Trinitaire 278).
229We can hardly agree then with Thomas (Chr;stology 59"'"62) when he says that
Hilary taught the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity; the expression
wi1l apply to the Father and the Son in Hilary's thought but cannot be said to be true
in the case of the Spirit. Thomas uses the word circumincessio, which I cannot find in
Hilary and which does not appear in Blaise or Souter and in Latham (Revised
50 4
The Western Pro-Nicenes I: Hilary of Poiliers
of the Father and the Son and says so explicitly in one of his most
careful defmitions of relationship:
'We are orthodox in proclaiming one substance, as long' as we
understand one substance as a likeness of characteristic, so that the fact
that they are One denotes not a singular, but equals. I say "equality",
that is uniformity of likeness, so that likeness should be regarded as
equality; but equality can be said to b~ One, because it is similar (par);
but One in which similarity is meant, but not so that One should be
upheld as singular. Therefore, one substance, as long as it does not
destroy the actual (subsistentem) Person nor divide one substance
separated into two, will be "declared orthodox; and this substance
because of the characteristic of the generation and because of the
likeness of the nat\lre is so uniform that it can be called One. '230
We cannot precisely call Hilary a Trinitarian theologian; he was, on
the whole, less of a Trinitatian than Athanasius, rudimentary though
Athanasius' Trinitarian theology was.23! But we cannot withold
from him the credit of having made great steps towards a Trinitarian
theology, of having striven valiantly to create a satisfactory
vocabulary for formulating the Christian doctrine of God, and of
having emancipated himself, in spite of scanty literary and
philosophical resources, from some of the difficulties and confusions
which had up to his day attended the great subject to which he
devoted his career and his principal writings. His native genius
overcame many limi~ations and made a permanent contribution to
the theological thought of the Western Church.
Finally we must note that Hilary is just as much aware as is
Athanasius of the inadequacy of human language in treating of the
Mediaeval ~ord-~ist (Oxford 1965)) is first instanced in the XIIIth century. Thomas
compares ~dary s doctnne t~ the Greek concept of 1t£ptXroPTJ<nC;. But this only
appeared With the Cap~adoClans several years after the last of Hilary's works.
Sm.u1~e~ frequently attributes the concept of circuminsessio to Hilaty (La doctrine
Tnnttatre 133, 255-62) but does not emphasize. the absence of the Spirit from it.He
adml~s that the word does not Occur m HIlary s works (256, n 144, agreeing with
Prestige and correcting Green).
230 De Synodis 67 (525). I take it that Hilary by 'likeness of characteristic'
~roprietatjs similitudinem) means that though the proprietas of the Father is to be
mgener~te and th~t of the Son to be generate their likeness or kinship is guaranteed
by "thel~ poss~ssmg ,the same nature. He never succeeded in completely
dlStmgulshmg Person (as we post-Cappadocians and post-Augustinians would
say) from 'substance'. Thomas calls attention to this passage Christology 63.
231See below PP.748-S3.
505
 The Rival Answers Emerge
deep things of God, and this not because of any particular
philosophical predilection. We are, he allows, compelled to use
human analogies in thinking and speaking about God, but
'every analogy must be thought more useful to man than suitable for
God, because it indicates the state of our mind rather than satisfies
it. '232
There is some advantage to be had in using the analogy of human
generation to understand divine generation, in spite of what Hilary
seems to think the shameful materiality of human birth, because
human generation is after all a communication of life from Iife?33
God is, after all, ready to accommodate himself to our understanding
by using examples from human birth. 234 Certainly - for
understanding the generation of the Son there is a point at which
human analogy breaks down: we must exclude 'coition, conception,
lapse of time, delivery~. 235- We do not even know how we ourselves
were generated, how we achieved life, feeling and understanding. Far
less do we understand the generation of the Son which is unknown to
US?3. Hilary fully appreciates the uncertainty of thought to
understand and of language to convey the idea of God:
'God is invisible, ineffable, infinite, and for speaking about him speech
falls silent, for exploring him intelligence is blunted, for grasping him
understanding is chained' ,237
And, a little later:
'Ordinary language collapses and words do not set out the matter as it
is ... Our confession when we name him therefore fails us and use
whatever form of words may be employed. They will not speak of
God in his reality and his greatness. Perfect knowledge is so to know
God that you may know him to be, not unknowable, yet
indescribable.'238
Assuredly Hilary does not open himself to the accusation of over-
confident dogmatism when he is writing about God.
232De Trin. 1.19.
233Ibid. VIl.28: tametsi elementa ilia inanima et turpia quibus nascendi causae
incohantur in hominem alterum dJluant.
234XI1.8: 'From the womb before the daystar I begot them', Hilary's version of
Ps 110(109) : J.
235VI.9; cf. Thomas Christology 57; cf. De Trin. VI.9. VII.28.
236 11.9; in 10 he produces the old proof-text Isa. 53:8.
23711.6.
238 7.
506
16
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
r. Eusebius of VercelIi and Lucifer of Calaris
One major and four minor figures encounter us when we seek for
further Western champions of the Nicene cause besides the figure of
Hilary of Poi tiers. The major figure is Marius Victorinus, and he will
be dealt with last. The minor figures are Eusebius ofVercelli, Lucifer
of Calaris, Phoebadius of Agen and Gregory of Elvira.
We can reconstruct the outlines of the career of Eusebius without
difficulty. He was apparently born in Sardinia, but had moved to
Vercelli, of which he waS chosen bishop, perhaps the first bishop of
the see, about the same time as Hilary was elected to Poi tiers. He was
summoned to the Council of Milan not only by his fellow-bishops
but by the express command of the Emperor. At Milan his attempt to
VInd,cate the doctrine of Nicaea was frustrated. He refused to sign
whatever was demanded of him, and was exiled to Scythopolis in
Palestme, placed in the custody of its bishop Patrophilus. He and a
number of clergy who had accompanied him were harassed and
subject to some deprivation while in custody. At the death of
Constantius he was no longer in Palestine but was in the Thebaid
along with Lucifer. He attended the Council of Alexandria of 362:
and later followed Lucifer to Antioch, but was unable to undo the
damage which his fellow-bishop had already wreaked there. 1
Eusebms presumably then returned to his see of V ercelli; we hear of
no intr~der occupying it during his absence. In 364 he joined with
HIlary In an unsuccessful attempt to have Auxentius of Milan
d~posed. He is usually thought to have died about the year 370. The
bIShop of Rome, Liberius, corresponded with Eusebius whom he
regarded as his ally in supporting pro-Nicene doctrine during the
years before his exile. But all that survives ofEusebius' literary work
1 See below, pp.643-4.
507
 The Rival Answers Emerge
is two letters, the first very short, merely expressing to Constantius
his intention of immediately setting out for the Council of Milan, the
second rather longer, describing from exile in Scythopolis, for the
benefit of his friends and supporters in Vercelli, the indignities and
deprivations which he is undergoing at the hands of Patrophilus. 2
It is impossible to reconstruct the details of Eusebius' doctrine of
God. All that we can glean from the Second Letter, written from
Scythopolis, is a kind of credal or Trinitarian formula, which runs
thus:
•Almighty God ... his only begotten Son born indescribably from
him who while eternal God for the sake of our salvation assumed a
perfect man ... the Holy Spirit ... the Catholic Church'. 3
It is also abundantly clear from the Second Letter that Eusebius
believes himself to be in exile for doctrinal reasons, because he has
opposed the' Ariomaniacs\ in defence of the true faith. He gives not
the faintest hint that his exile was decreed simply for refusal to
condemn Athanasius nor for some form of treason.
We have already had occasion to form no very high opinion of the
subtlety of thought or elegance oflanguage of Lucifer ofCalaris' His
talents lay in producing vituperation rather than constructive
theology.5 Lucifer was probably converted as an adult from
lBulhart printed the treatise De Trinitate in Cor. Chr. Ser. Lat. IX as from the hand
ofEusebius ofVercelli, but I follow the great majority of recent scholars in finding it
impossible to allow that Eusebius wrote this work. and even less possible to place it,
as Bulhart does, between the years 345 and 347. Not only is its theological
vocabulary much more developed than any which we could ascribe to Eusehius.
reminiscent indeed of the Church after 38 I. but even the short example ofEusehius'
Latin style which his letters afford us is enough to show that the style of the author of
De Trin, is quite different from his. The third letter ascribed to Eusebius, and printed
by Bulhart along with the other two, is now almost universally allowed to be a later
Luciferan forgery. Had Eusebius held the views expressed in it he could hardly have
brought himself to co-operate with Hilary in attacking Auxentius.
'Ep. 11, V.l(106).
4See above, pp. 32.0, 322-3. Almost everybody who writes about Lucifer finds
him an intolerable bore and bigot except G. F. Diercks, who in the Introduction to
his admirable edition of Lucifer's works in Cor. Chr. Ser. Lat. VIII mildly deprecates
such judgments. For Lucifer, see also Simonetti Crisi 443-5; Klein Konstantius II
121-5; on his theology Diercks op. cit. CXIV-CXVIll.
51 cannot help. in concluding this particular subject, giving one more example in
which Lucifer almost reaches eloquence in his vilification; calling Constancius: 'a
son of pestilence, a fountain of darkness, a whirlpool of every evil, the leader of
every sort of iniquity, a path of all blasphemies. an instigator of heresies, a root of
508
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
paganism to Christianity. 6 He was at some point, we cannot know
exactly when, made bishop of Calaris in Sardinia. He was a trusted
friend and confidant of Pope Liberius, accompanied Eusebius of
Vercelli to Constantius' court at Arles to convey Liberius' request to
the Emperor to call a general council, and was his representative at
the Council of Milan, and received confidential letters from
Liberius. 7 It is not at all impossible then, that Lucifer was originally
on the staff of the church of Rome in some capacity and was at
Liberius' prompting made bishop ofCalaris. He did not have enough
education to fill a more important see, but could be trusted to be
faithful to the Pope's orders. We have seen that at Milan he was one of
the few who refused to sign whatever was required of the participants
of the Council of Milan and was in consequence exiled. He spent his
exile, from 355 to 361, in three different places, in Germanicia in the
province of Cilicia II and the district of Commagene, about 75 miles
NE of Antioch, under Eudoxius who was then its bishop from
355-358; in Eleutheropolis in Palestine (when Eudoxius was
translated to Antioch), under its bishop Eutychius from 358 to 361;
and, when he proved too obstreperous for Eutychius to control, in
the more remote Thebaid in Egypt, from 361 to 362. In 361 on
Constantius' death he remained for some time in Egypt, and was able
to attend Athanasius' council held in Alexandria in 362. He left this
council before its conclusion, went on to Antioch, and there
anticipated the plans of everybody else by consecrating Paulinus, the
lay leader of the continuing Eustathians, bishop . • He then returned to
Italy. If we could take au pied de la lettre the statements made about
Lucifer in the Collectio Avellana we could reconstruct some of his
movemenrs at this point, but it is difficult to reconcile them with
known historical facts. All we can say is that he may have had a hostile
encounter with Zosimus bishop of Naples. 9 To the authors of this
bitterness, a tree destined for the fire and bearing deadly fruits, an enemy of God. a
foe of the Chur~h, ~ falsifier of truth, a supporter of wickedness, a lover of injustice,
an opponent ofJusttce, wholly steeped in darkness, and darkness from which there is
no escape, who has become more truly than the truth a temple of every daemon'.
(De Atll,",s;, l.XIX (35)).
6S0 he suggests De Non Conv. XIV (190).
'See above. PP.332-4. Hilary Coll. Ant. A.V11. 89-93.
8S ee below, pp.643-4.
9The story ran that Zosimus had succeeded at Naples Maximus who had been
exiled for his beliefs, and who continued to denounce Zosimus from exile but that
when Lucifer returned 'from his fourth exile' and arrived in Naples he r~fused to
communicate with Zosimus-with, of COurse, dire results for the latter. But Lucifer
 The Rival Answers Emerge
material Lucifer is of course a hero and confessor for the faith, as he is
to Athanasius toO.IO Whether Lucifer fmally founded a separate sect
ofLuciferans who protested against the leniency show'.' to those who
had temporarily yielded to Arianism, or whether trus was formed
after his death is hard to determine. Jerome in his book attacking the
Luciferans, written in 392, clearly does not know the answer to trus
question; he speaks of Lucifer gently and sp~ringly, and declares t~at
he cannot believe that he left the Cathohc Church, and that he
differed from us in words, not in facts'. 11 In favour of Jerome's
judgment is the fact that Hilary, in the few fragments of his Defence
against his Critics (Apologetica ad Reprehensores), among whom
certainly Lucifer was prominent, calls him 'brother' .12 He probably
returned to his see of Calaris but continued to make a nuisance of
himself until his death, which must have taken place within about ten
years of his return from exile.
Of Lucifer's literary work there survives one genuine letter, 13
briefly exhorting Eusebius ofVercelli to attend the Council of Milan,
and five vehement pamphlets written in exile, all attacking
Constantius. They are named Why it is wrong to associate with Heretics
(De Non Conveniendo cum Haereticis), probably to be assigned to the
year 355 or 356; Apostate Kings (De Regibus Apostaticis), probably
written in 356 or 357; Athanasius or Nobody should Try or Condemn a
Man in his Absence (De Athanasio, vel Quia absentem nemo debet iudicare
nee damnare), written in 358; We Must Not Spare Sinners against God
(De non Parcendo Delinquentibus in Deum) to be assigned to 359; and Be
Prepared to Die for God the Son (Moriundum esse pro Deo Filio),
composed in 361. The titles of these works betray their lurid contents.
The work defending Athanasius is little more than a string of passages
from the Bible applied to the cases of Athanasius and Constantius
without pattern or form except that the texts are taken in their
never endured more than one exile (is there a desire to match Lucifer in the matter of
exiles with Athanasius?) and when he did return there is no reason to think that
Maximus would not also have returned too and replaced Zosimus. See Epp. Impp.
Ponti. Aliorum (Call. Avell.) (.) 6.-64 ('3-'4); later a ten-year exile is wrongly
attributed to Lucifer, as well as four separate exiles (ibid. (2)85(32) and 89(32»·
'OApol. de Fuga 3.3-6(70).
IlDialogus contra LucYeranos 20(183).
12iii (PL 10:546). Diercks reconstructs much of Lucifer's career op. cit. VII-XVIII
and XXVII-XXXIV.
131n Dierck's numbering No. VII, p. 319. The other letters ascribed to Lucifer are
generally recognized as forgeries by ardent Luciferans.
SID
;, ':';
,i'
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
biblical order. Similarly there is little form in his earliest work, which
associates or identifies Constantius and the Arians with all the
enemies oflsrael in the Old and of Christians in the New Testament,
again keeping to the biblical order. It is remarkable that in his De Non
Parcendo he omits to use any texts from the Revelation of St. John;
though there is plenty of material for vindictive vilification lying to
hand in that book. To the very end his chief objective is the Emperor
Constantius and only secondly Arians in general, though he does not
spare these.
In the course of these invectives Lucifer betrays little knowledge of
history beyond that ofrus own day. He assumes that Athanasius was
the moving spirit at the Council ofNicaea, 14 and he confuses at least
two different early exiIes of Athanasius. 15 But on recent history he is
well-informed and accurate. He knows that Constantius did not
demand condemnation of,Athanasius from all Western bishops, but
only that they should communicate with the party which the
Emperor was favouring and that Dionysius of Milan was ready to
condemn Athanasius but would not sign a formula which he
regarded as unorthodox. 10 He knows that Constantius once wrote a
letter to the Church of Alexandria commending Athanasius to
them. 17 He has heard of Constantius' inconsistency in at one point
attacking Eudoxius publicly when he was bishop of Antioch and
exiling him, and not long after recalling him and approving of his
doctrine, I 8 and his wavering between radical Arianism and the creed
of Basil of Ancyra. 19 He is well informed about the intrusion of
George into the see of Alexandria, and about the misbehaviour of the
imperial forces there and in Egypt generally}O He numbers among
the desertets of the cause of orthodoxy not only Valens and Ursacius
but Saturninus (of Aries) and, twice, Epictetus (of Centumcellae,
modem Civitavecchia),21 but not Potamius of Lisbon nor Ossius nor
14De Athanasio I.xxvii (46).
"Ibid. l.xxix (49) ..
16Ibid. ILvii (90); viii (90, 91); it is at Moriundum II (268) that he refers to
Constantius' edict demanding doctrinal unifor.mity, but other references could be
adduced.
17Ibid. I.xxix (49); I1.xviii (r08). See above P.308.
"Ibid. l.xxx (50).
19Moriundum XI (288).
'ODe Arh.l.ix (16,17); xxix (49); Il.xxii (I14. lIS); Mo,iundum II (.67); Vll1 (.81,
.8.).
"De Non Conv. VII (175); Moriundum VII (.81); cf. De Alh. I1.iii (80).
5II
n..
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Liberius. He once mentions Hilary as reckoned to be an enemy of
Constantius (and therefore a friend of Lucifer).22
In the course of conducting his campaign of vituperation against
Constantius, Lucifer says surprisingly litde about the doctrine which
he is defending and which, in his view, Constantius is trying to
suppress. Abuse suits his style better than theological statements. But
occasionally of course he mentions the doctrine which is dear to him.
In the De Non Conveniendo he ventures a fairly long statement: 23
We affirm, he says, in contrast to Constantius' Arian doctrine, a
common deity between Father and Son. 'We have often said that,
seeing that there are tWO Persons (personae), Father and Son ... he
(God) desires us to follow no other doctrine than that there is one
eternity of Father and Son, one glory, one power and one majesty
(magnitudo) ... (quotation ofJn 10:30) seeing that the verb is plural and
manifests two Persons and one power of these two Persons, that is of
the Father and the Son'.
In the De Athanasio 2' a statement about the Incarnation appears:
'Antichrist, in whom Adus believed, in reality "was when he was
not",2S and on the contrary our Saviour, Lord and God the only Son
of God is not, as you prefer, Constantius, a creature, but is the Lord of
creation; he is eternal, beyond reckoning (inaestimabiUs). just as he is
whose Son he is. Now, he put on a perfect man in the last days from
the womb of the Virgin, but even though he had taken on the maD, he
remains immutable, beyond decay, indescribable and incapable of
alteration (inconvertibilis), just as he has been and he whose Son he is
(has been); for he could not as a result of assuming the man change into
anything other than what he had always been, seeing that he is in the
form of God his Father, seeing that he is the Son equal to the Father'.
The problems raised by this belief Lucifer does not attempt to face, as
Hilary tried to face them; incidentally, Arians never claimed that the
Incarnation changed the Son, only that it demonstrated that the Son
was not wholly like the Father.
"De Reg. Apost. V (145)·
23De Non Conv. XIV (188. 189).
24I.xxxiii (57).
25Fwit qwando non]uit, a very condensed way of saying 'there was a time when he
did not exist', and one which occurs quite often in Lucifer in one form or another; it
is a literal translation of ftv ot£ nOt£ O~1C 1\v. cf. ibid. Lxxxiv (57)~ XI (69)~ lLii (77)~
Lxx (I I I); De Non Conv. IX (178); XII (184); De Non Pare. XXIV (242); De Reg.
Apost. VII (150).
512
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
In another passage of the same work Lucifer includes the Holy
Spirit in the Godhead: 2•
' ... iflike the blessed Paul you believe that Jesus Christ is the true Son
of God, if you will have declared that he has always reigned with the
Father and will always reign. that is without beginning and without
end, if you do not resist the ringing statements of the Holy Scriptures
to the effect that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit enjoy a single
eternity'.
Lucifer more than once produces a Trinitarian formula.27 He speaks
of'the perfect Trinity and the single (unicum) Godhead of Father , Son
and Holy Spirit', 28 of ' a belief ... which confesses both that there is a
perfect divine Trinity and that it has a single substance' (substantia).2.
and of 'one majesty and one power in the Father and in his only
(unico) Son and in the Holy Paraclete Spirit'.'o
Lucifer, unlike Hilary, is well acquainted with a Latin version ofN
and quotes or refers to it, or to a loose form of it, several times.
Whenever he wishes to make a formal statement of his faith he
produces it.'1 At one point (De Non Pare. XVIII (229» he inserts
'maker of things visible and invisible' in the article dealing with the
Father. He always renders homoousion as unius substantiae cum patre,
quod Graeci dicunt 61100U<nOV ('of one substance with the Father,
which the Greeks call homoousion'),32 and in the one place where he
reproduces the anathemas he shortens the clause referring to 'of
another ousia or hypostasis' into vel ex alia substantia ('or of another
substance'). He could hardly at that point have rendered 'of another
substance or persona'!
This, ap~rt from his attacks on those whom he deems heretics, is all
we can distil of Lucifer's doctrine. It is not much. Lucifer was a
fighter, not a theologian. His theological thought consists of
formulae for which he is ready to do batde, and he does not pause to
26I1.xxxiv (132).
27 And he has no hesitation in using persona in such a context, e.g. Moriundum III
(27 1).
28De Non Conv. IX (179).
29De Non Parcendo XVIII (229).
JOlbid. XXV (246); cf. Moriundum XIV (298) patrern etfilium et Spiritwm Sanctum
perjectam esse trinitatem et wnam habere deitatem.
31 De Alh. I.x. I (68.69) a paraphrase; Il.xi (95); De Non Pare. XVIII (229), with its
anathemas.
32Cf. De Non Parco XXIV (242) 6jJooualOv t<i> natpi, which the Greeks say, but
we Romans say 'of one substance (unius substantiae) with the Father'.
513
 The Rival Answers Emerge
examine them nor analyse them. But his bare and stereotyped
doctrinal statements are enough to assure us that he owes nothing to
the teaching of Hilary. His acquaintance with N as the doctrine par
excellence to defend, his use of unicus, which Hilary eschews in
Trinitarian contexts, preferring unigenitus for the Son, his facility in
the employment of persona, all point away from the direction of
Hilary. He never uses natura of God. He knows the word 'substance'
(substantia) and can use it in distinction from persona, but he prefers to
use in order to denote what the Persons of the Trinity have in
common some such word as 'eternity' or 'Godhead' (dealitas or
deitas). Though Lucifer sometimes quotes homoousion in the original
Greek, he is innocent of any knowledge of Greek theology. The
distinction between or identification ofousia and hypostasis does not
come within his cognisance. The inheritance from Te.rtullian is
obvious, but what influences can we detect in his thought more
recent than Tertullian? He can hardly have learnt his theology (such
as it is) in Sardinia. It is wholly likely that what we see in Lucifer is a
stereotyped, even vulgarized, version of the theology of Liberius.
Perhaps disgust at the thought that Constantius has seduced his
master into heresy has contributed to render his abuse of the Emperor
all the bitterer.
In one place Lucifer refers to a variety of heresies." SabeIlius
'was he who dared to defend the view that Father, Son and Holy Spirit
are one Person, because he dared to say that Father and Son and Holy
Spirit are the same; he waS cast Qut because he did not hesitate to say
that the Father himself was incarnate in the womb of the Virgin and
had suffered ... Mardan denied the Incarnation. Paul of Sam osat a, the
master ofPhotinus. was excommunicated because he said that the Son
of God was "only a man'" (hominem tantum, not hominem purum).
But of course the deviation which Lucifer attacks constantly and
savagely is Arianism. Ifwe ask how much he knew of Arianism, we
must answer that he derived his knowledge of Arianism, as he
probably did his knowledge of any other part or version of theology,
from text-books and not from original texts. He sometimes sums up
Arianism in a series of catch-phrases repeated in almost· the same
terms, 'that God had no true Son, that he was when he was not (or
'there was when he was not'),34 that he was made from nothing',35 to
"De Non Conv. IX (178)
"See above, p. 512 n 25 "DeAth.l.x.1(69).
5 14
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
which he sometimes adds other propositions, 'that there is not one
power (potentia) of Father and Son'.'6 He constantly repeats the
accusation that the Arians teach that the Son is not a real (verus) Son
and that he was made out ofnothing, or is notthe only (unicus) Son of
God,37 or that the Son was only 'adopted'. 38 On several occasions he
accuses Constantius of idolatry.'" He does not usually say why this
charge can be justified, but of course the reason is that the Emperor's
Arian leanings lead him, in Lucifer's view, to worship a creature, the
Son. He also charges the Arians with teaching that the Holy Spirit
was made out of nothing, 40 and that he is not the real Spirit ofGod. 4'
They deny the homoousion,42 and Constantius wishes to abolish N. 43
At one point Lucifer makes a fatuous comparison of Constantius (as a
theologian) to Photinus:
Next, I ask you to answer, What difference is there between you and
your companion in darkness whom the people of Sirmium called,
reversing the true order, PhotinuS?44 ... Photinus professes that the
Son of God was only a man (hominem tantum), he says that before the
Virgin Mary he did not exist. Your profession also is this; that he is the
Son of God before everything indeed, that is, before the heavens, the
earth, the sea and everything that is in them, but that he exists from
non-existence, but that he is a creature. What difference do you think
is there between you and Paul of Samosata or that companion in
darkness (conscotinum) your disciple [i.e. Photinus], except that you say
"before everything", but he "after everything"?'45
This is a theology of slogans or catchphrases, bandied about for
propaganda purposes. Lucifer's intellectual level never rises higher
than this.
l6De Non ConI!. XII (185); another rather similar list De Ath .. Il.xx (I 1 I); De Non
Parco XXIV (2.42).
37E.g. De Ath.Lxvi (29); Il.ix (93); xxiii (ll 5); De Reg. Apost. VII (ISO); IX (155);
De Non Parco XXIV (242).
l8De Non Parco XXV (242).
"E.g. De Ath. Lvui (.6); ILxxiii (lIS); De Non Parco XIII (220).
"De Reg. Apost. VII (ISO). "
41 De Non ConI!. IV (172).
42De Non Parco XXIV (242).
4JDe Ath. Lxx (36).
44Lucifer is making a very feeble and indeed, when we consider how often the
silly pun is made in Patristic literature, we may .say threadbare play on words:
Photinus in Greek means 'Light giver'; Lucifer calls him Scotinus 'Darkness-giver'.
The pun isa Greek one. Lucifer must have known some Greek, though assuredly he
never read a Greek theological book. Similarly he always calls Eudoxius Adoxius.
45De Non Parco XVIII (228, '229).
SIS
 The Rival Answers Emerge
A sect ofLuciferans, who were strong enough to move Jerome to
write a book against them as late as 392, was formed perhaps during
Lucifer's lifetime and ifnot then shortly after his death. 4• Their chief
points of difference seem to have been a refusal to agree to the lenient
policy of Hilary and others after 360 in re-admitting to communion
bishops who had lapsed into countenancing heresy, and, at least at a
later date when they were led by somebody called Faustinus, a refusal
to admit three hypostases (Latin substantiae) in God. 47
2. Phoebadius of Agen and Gregory of Elvira
Phoebadius was the first-known, and perhaps in fact the first, bishop
of Agen (Aginnum or Civitas Aginnensium, about 75 miles SE of
Bordeaux) in the province of Aquitania II. He must have been
consecrated to the see some time in or before (but more likely before)
357. He attended the Council of Ariminum, took a prominent part
there in defending N and inducing Valens to make apparent doctrinal
concessions, but finally signed the document which Constantius
required the assembled bishops to sign. We can readily conjecture
that on Julian declaring himself independent of Constant ius, or even
before, in 360, he joined those who were repudiating the work of
Ariminum and demanding a return to N. He was present at the
Councils of Valentia in 375 and of Saragossa in 380. He lived. to
extreme old age. When Jerome was compiling his De Viris Illustribus,
about 392, he said that Phoebadius 'was still alive though fallen into
senility'.48 A single work of his survives, Liber contra Arianos, written
as a reaction to the Second Sirmian Creed, and therefore in 357 or
46S ee above p. .5 10.
47See the Collectio Avellana pp. 1-46; the Faustin; presbyter; confessio (which is also
called the Fides Luciferi) Diercks, ,Corp. Chr. Ser. Lat. VIII, Introd. xxxi-xxxvii and
Appendix; Jerome Dialogus contra Luciferanos; Moreira Potamius 86-94; Simonetti
Crisi 443-5. The sect existed in the East as well as in the West. In 383 or_384 they
appealed to Theodosius to stop their being harassed by local Italian ecclesiastics and
he ordered that this was to stop. According to Simonetti, Gregory of Elvira was
their leader in the West, and in the East an anonymous bishop of Oxyrhyncus.
According to Jerome (Dial. contra Lucif. 22 (185) and 26(189)) a certain deacon
Hilarius (who just may have been the deacon Hilarius who was flogged by
Constantius' order at Milan in 355) started a sub-sect even of these.
48,;ivit usque hodie decrepita senectute, De Vir. Ill. CVlII. But this only means that
Jerome had not actually heard ofPhoebadius' death. See for Phoebadius Simonetti
Crisi 284, Kelly Early Christian Creeds 287; Moreira Potamius 114-15, 223·
516
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
358.49 He knows no Greek. He has read no work of Hilary, with the
possible exception of the first part of his original historical work. He
writes an elegant and correct Latin. He knows the arguments of the
Arians (presumably the Latin-speaking ones) pretty well. He has read
some of the lost works of Potamius of Lisbon. 50 He is deeply
influenced by Tertullian's Adversus Praxean; in fact he attempts, not
without success, to use Tertullian's book against a Monarchian
account of the Christian doctrine of God to repudiate a quite different
account, that of the Arians.
He knows, admires and defends N, calling it 'the perfect rule of
Catholic faith'.51 He knows the Arians' arguments in favour of their
theology much better than Lucifer does, that the Son is shown to be
inferior to the Father by his accepting a reward, by his reference to
the Father as the sole true God, by his disa.vowal of goodness, by the
limitation of his knowledge On 20:17; Phil2:9;Jn 11'3; Luke 18:9;
Matt 24:36). He meets them all by saying that all these apparent
derogations from deity apply to the man assumed by the Son, not to
the Godhead. And he describes the incarnate Word in precisely the
language used by Tertullian in his Adversus Praxean - 'a double
condition', which the Arians wish to envisage as 'mixed not
associated' (Tertullian had said 'associated, not mixed'). 52 He knows·
that the Arians say that God (the lesser God) suffered, and he quotes a
contemporary Arian (perhaps Potamius of Lisbon) as writing 'the
Son of God himself assumed a man from Mary and by means of that
man he suffered with him'. Phoebadius does not like this doctrine:
'Look!,' he says 'if God is immune from passion he is obviously
immune from compassion'.53 And in the same passage he reverts to
Tertullian's use of 'substance' (substantia) to denote the two elements
in Christ: human and divine.
But he is capable also of using substantia in a different (but also
Tertullianic) sense, apparently to translate ousia, which he is
defending because it occurs in N. He defines 'substance' as:
49Brennecke, somewhat imaginatively, conjectures that the work represents the
encyclical of an otherwise unknown Gallic council which condemned Saturninus in
357 or 358 (see. Hilarius von P. 325-34) cf. Smulders La doctrine Trinitaire 37.
50See above. p. 117 and n 91.
51Liber contra Arianos 6 (PL 20:17).
52Duplicem statum, Contra Arianos 4(15, 16).5(16). and conJusum non coniunctum
(5(16)). .
53Ibid. 19(27); the last quotation runs: Porro autem si impassibilis Deus, utique et
incompassibilis.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
'that which eternally originates in itself: that is, what subsists by its
own intrinsic (intra se) power; and this force applies to the sole and true
God'.54
He also alleges that virtus (power, Gk. dynamis) is a synonym for
substantia and that this word is applied to Christ at Col 1:29 and I Cor
1:24.55 The Arians, he says, cite Isa 53:8 to show that Christ's origin is
later than the Father, but they are wrong because 'Who can describe
his generation?' means that nobody can describe a beginning which
never took place. 56 And shortly afterwards he directly avows belief
in the eternal generation of the Son. 57 And here he has moved
beyond the doctrine ofTertullian. But his identification of substantia
and ousia becomes less convincing when he describes in further detail
what he means by the Son being the 'true image and express figure of
his substance' (Heb 1:3):
'that is the Word of God, ~ot the sound of a voice but the substantial
reality (res) and because substance, corporeal' (corpulentiva). And
. Phoebadius goes on to speak of the Spirit as the. body (corpus) of the
Word in language reminiscent ofTertullian. He is a 'body of its own
type' (corpus sui generis). invisible and incomprehensible spirit, but still
corpus. And he applies Prov 8:27 and 30 to the Holy Spirit, notto the
Word, which is unusual. The Spirit is Wisdom. 58
This is precisely the use of the concept of substance which Arius and
Eusebius of Caesarea were anxious to avoid and which Athanasius
was anxious to disavow in his use of the word ousia.
Phoebadius, as we might expect, is appalled by the drastic
subordinationism of the Second Sirmian Creed:
'If this is the case, then we are committing blasphemy every day when
we render. thanks and offer sacrifices',59
The fault of Sabellius, he says, was to teach that the Father and Son are
.547 (17). He goes on (18) to give a list of passages in the Bible which he alleges to
contain the word substan'ia - Ps 69(68):): 139(138):15; 39(38):8, 6(LXX);
109(I08):II(LXX); Wisd 16:':Jer .): •• (LXX): Prov 10:15: IJ:22; Tobit ~:9, 7; IJri
3:17; Luke 19:8; 11:1 (bUI nowhere the obvious places Heb 1:3; lI:li Phoebadius
certainly had Hebrews in his canon).
"8(18).
569 (19).
57 11 (21), one should perhaps say his eternal birth. Phoebadius is not directly
borrowing from Origen.
58 20(28); at IS (24) he refers Prov 8:22 to the Son but not the incarnate Son.
59 12 (21).
518
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
one Person, of Arius to say that they are two substances. The Catholic
faith teaches two Persons and one substance. 6o And later he declares
that if we say one God we are liable to fall into Patripassianism, but if
we admit number into the Godhead we are in danger of Arianism. So
we must follow the Rule of Faith and believe that the Father is in the
Son and the Son in the Father Un 14:20). This Rule
'preserves one substance in two Persons and recognizes the structure
(dispositionem) of the Godhead'. And we must add that the Spirit is
from God: 'he who was a second Person in the Son has also a third in
the Holy Spirit Un 14:16). So the Spirit is distinct (alius) from the Son
just as the Son is from the Father. So there is a third Person in the Spiri;
as there is a second in the Son: but all are one God, for the Three are
One' (unum).61
Phoebadius is an intelligent theologian whose thought has been
almost wholly formed by Tertullian and perhaps Novatian, but who
is struggling, equipped with inadequate resources, to face the
problems and decisions in the theological field thrown up by the
contemporary doctrinal crisis. It is difficult to determine what other
influences apart from these two have reached him. There is no serious
sign of Hilary's theology in his. It is possible that some of the features
of the thought of Marcellus of Ancyra, whom Phoebadius did not
mention in his one surviving work, have played a part here; he and
Athanasius, after all, had spent some time in the West about twenty
yea:s before Phoebadius wrote. It is possible that their ideas, though
theIr works can hardly have been translated into Latin, had
percolated into the thinking of intellectuals of the Western church.
Gregory of Elvira (Illiberis in the province of Baetica in S. W.
Spain) wrote a work called De Fide Orthodoxa as his contribution to
the doctrinal crisis. We know almost nothing about his life, except
that he was after Lucifer's death regarded as the leader of the
uncompromising party who refused to accept a policy of leniency
towards those who had temporarily veered towards Arianism.
Jerome says that he wrote several other works in indifferent Latin as
well as this De Fide in good Latin, and that he survived to extreme old
age and was still alive when he wrote (i.e. about 392).62 His De Fide
6° 13 ('3).
6122(29, 30), quotation 30.
62!J~ Viris lllustribus CV. Some short treatis~s on various parts of the Scriptures,
consIsting almost wholly of aHegorising which s.trikes the modem reader as
519
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Orthodoxa was first written about 360, but, on the author's own
admission, revised four or five years later, and both versions
survive.63 His main. reason for making this second edition appears to
have been a desire to escape the reproach of Sabellianism. 64
Gregory has a good appreciation of the particular doctrines of
Arianism which he dislikes. Rigorist as he is, he rejects the
Homoiousian argument as Arian but he has a proper notion of what
it is.6s He says that the Arians accused the pro-Nicenes .of
worshipping homoousion rather than the Son. 66 He meets the Anan
objection that homoousion was not Scnptural by an. unusual
argument: he asks whether the ten,;, is wrong because It IS not
mentioned in the Bible or because It IS not to be beheved, quotIng
Rom 10:10 to distinguish between what is believed and what is
said.67 Next he launches into a fuller account of Arian doctrine:
'The statement of the Arian fault (is) that it denied that the Father and
the Son are of one substance (substantiae [essentiae]) for this reason, that
it presents the Son of God as made, sometimes from nothing,
sometimes from the Father. but out of a different substance, when he
chose and as he chose, invariably pretending that he has come into
existence from some other source and not from that which the . Father
is. And although it says "born". yet it does so only to this exteIit that in
turn it understands everything which is born to be made, just as we are
said to be born of God, and it is agreed that we are creatures. '68
He exposes the old trick of '(a creature but) not as one of the
creatures'.69 And he cites two Arian objections to the use of
'substance'in describing God, one of which is quite new: it implies a
corporeal conception of God, and every substance must have a
contrary, yet God cannot have a contrary.70 It is obvious that
Gregory is not simply, like Lucifer, bringing out old and threadbare
exegeticaUy worthless, have been identified wit~ some confidence as Gre~ory's.
They contain very little useful to the theme of thiS book, but th~y a~e occasIOnally
referred to. They are to be found in the Supplementum to Mlgne s P,L, Vol. I.
63The words of the later version (N), as edited by Bulbart, are given whe~
necessary in the text in square bracke~s:
64See Simonetti Stud; 82-3 and CrlSl 285-6·
656jlOlOUOlOY, id est similemjactori Su? {similitudinem g~nitorisl De Fide 22,(225).
Likeness does not imply, Gregory replies, that the Son IS what the Father IS.
66De Fide 32 (228).
67Ibid. 33. l4 (228).
6')5 (228. 229).
6'37 (229).
70 45 ; 46 (23 1).
520
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
versions of Arianism as an Aunt Sally to aim at, but knows what
contemporary Arians were saying. He may well have known Greek.
Even when he reproduces the very old Arian argument that the Son is
made out of nothing, an argument which had long been abandoned
by most Arians, he attributes it to Arius himself, and not to the Arians
of his day.7l His account of Arianism also makes it likely that there
were in circulation at that time more than one Arian work written in
Latin apart from those which have survived. Perhaps the theological
works of Val ens and Urscacius were among them.72 It is interesting
to note also that Gregory takes the same unconventional
interpretation of Pro v 8:22f as does Phoebadius, regarding Wisdom
as the Holy Spirit, not the Son, and relegating createdness not to its
nature but to the effect of its operation. 73
Gregory, like Phoebadius, has the distinction between Persons
(personas) and substance (substantia) derived from Tertullian firmly in
his mind. Because in his first version he had said 'one God' some
people thought, Gregory tells us, that he was 'denying the Persons'. 74
And his second version corrects most references to 'substance'
(substantia) into 'essence' (essentia). So he can change 'from the
Fathers' tradition of substance' to 'from the Fathers' tradition of one
essence'.75 And in his second version he changed 'with the Father one
substance' to 'with the Father of one substance'. 76 And he can
employ a much-used formula to distinguish the Persons as well:
'But which of the Catholics does not know that the Father is really
(vere) Father. the Son really Son, and the Holy Spitit is really Holy
Spirit?'"
His version of N has 'of one substance (unius substantiae) with the
Father, which the Greeks ca1l6"ooucnov', and omits the ambiguous
anathema against those who deny that the Son is of the same ousia or
hypostasis as the Father. 78 In order to rebut the argument of the
7123 (226) ut idem Arius tradidit [dixit].
72See above, PP.301, 305-6 and below P.533.
73 27- 29 (227). Simonetti (Studi 82-83) sees here the vestiges of Tertullian's
concept of the two-stage production of the Logos, still archaistically retained within
a group which had largely embraced the doctrine of the eternal generation of the
Son.
747 (222),
75 18 (224),
")6 (229).
77 10 (222, 223).
78 1 (221).
521
 The Rival Answers Emerge The Western Pro-Nicenes II

Arians about the contrary to a substance, Gregory defines the word which Gregory proceeds to enumerate and explain. 84 Later still
'substance', as far as it applies to God: 'What is the substance of God? Gregory asks:
That very thing which God is.' God does not have a contrary.'· God
cannot be 'something empty and vacant ... therefore God to know 'What is the Son (who is) from that which the Father is?' And he
answers:
whom is eternal life exists in his substance'. He is indescribable and
incalculable (inaestimabi/is).80 Gregory is here freeing himself 'He is distinct (alius), for this is 'The Son of God is this which
effectively from becoming involved in the formal terms of why he is called "Word" the Father is, not something
philosophy. He goes on to elaborate this point: (verbum) because he proceeds other (a/iuel), that is, he through
from the very divine mouth.' whom all things were made, for
'Therefore the very thing which is, that is [will be] the substance of the this is also called word'
[this] thing whose existence is asserted.' We cannot describe nor (verbum).85
comprehend what he is, all that we can say is that he is, and is of such a
sort that 'from that which God is there is derived a Son so that he is a Gregory has clearly altered his wording to avoid the charge both of
real (verus) Son and the real Father is in the Son and the Son in the regarding the Word as a mere utterance of syllables and of making an
Father. This will be 6J.1.oo6o\o<; that is of one substance [this is of one Arian division between the Father and the Son. But he is not less
essence] with the Father' (quotation of]n 14:10: 10:30; 14:9)." anxious in the original version of his book to avoid falling into
You cannot compare God with any other object: ditheism: :i

'in fact it is enough that God, to whom nothing can be likened, should
be believed in as himselfbeing perceived [to exist], since he desires that
he should be believed in, not judged [nor analyzed],.82
You cannot, for that matter, explain or describe 'what the expression
applied to the Son, which the Arians accept, 'Light from Light'
'But in case anyone takes [seizes] a pretext from my asserting two
Names or two Persons (personas), that is of the Father and the Son, (to
believe that) I am declaring two gods, in the same way as they (the
Arians) pretend that there are two, we so mention Father and Son that
in these Persons and Names we teach one God. '86 . ,
"

And two careful statements reinforce his position:

means. 83 Unlike Lucifer, who accepts doctrinal formulae as
statements to be believed in without understanding them, Gregory 'When I declare Father and Son, I register (assigno) a unity of nature
knows not only what he believes but why he believes it. We may (generis), and in divide it (the unity) into Persons. yet the distinctions ,,
,

detect in this anti-Arian reasoning the recognition on Gregory's part
that the pro-Nicenes are facing a new kind of rationalising Arianism
(which will. be examined in a later chapter). In this he is more au fait
with the situation as regards the development of argument about the
Christian doctrine of God than was Hilary.
Later, Gregory sets himself to give an account of the distinction
between the Father and the Son. There is, he says, a certain principle
(ratio) which the Greeks call Logos whereby the Persons (personae) of
the Father and the Son are distinguished; and the Son himselfis called
'principle' (ratio), as also he is distinguished by a host of other titles,
7.50 ('3')'
8°S I ('32).
81 52 (232, 233).
"57 ('33).
83 5 8, 59 (.3J, '34).
522
of Persons in tum by the principle of the association of nature allot
those Names to the unity'. 87
Some of the vocabulary here is borrowed from Hilary, such as unitas
(unity) not union (unio), and genus for nature. And again:
'Do not imagine that I am speaking with that arrogance by which
Sabellius was carried away which confesses that the Father himself is
the Son himself. We do not thus force all into a single substance
[essence]. so as to be caught by the deceit of other heretics. But because
8463 ('3 6).
856 4 (23 6): the right-hand version here is not from the MS which contains the
later edition (N), but from a work which Buthart calls 'Ps-Augustine' and which
o~viously represents (at least ~n part) another recension or tradition of Gregory's De
Fide Orthodoxa, and one whlch more resembles (N)'s version.
86
68 (23 8). The later versions omit the reference to Arians teaching two gods.
8769 ('39).
523
 The Rival Answers Emerge
in this word "Persons~1 (personarum) the Wldifferentiated Sovereignty
is recognised, and the Son gains his name from the Father not by his
nature (genere) bu~ by his Person (persona liter), it follows that ,!,C assign
all that the Son is [has1to the Father and all that the Father IS [has1to
the Son ... and since it is agreed that the Father and the Son are of one
substance, so each one is called one GOd.'88
Gregory also tackles the subject of the Incarnation. The Arians
think, he says, that for God to have a real Son would mean a
degradation and change of circumstances for him. 89 God is almighty,
invisible, eternal. Such a Being could not have become visible and
changeable so as to appear, for instance, to the patriarchs under the
old dispensation. Only somebody who was of a different substance
from the supreme God could have thus involved himself in change
and transience. And this is even more true when applied to the·
Incarnation. 90 Gregory's first point in meeting this argument is that
when the Son of God appeared to men he did not appear simply as
God is but as men can accept him, and he revealed himself to different
people differently as they were disposed to comprehend him:
'he may change his condition, he does not alter his substance, and he
does not lose the characteristic of his nature (proprietatem qualitatis),
but he adjusts the quality (temperamentum) of his majesty according to
the merit of him who is seeing him'.91
Before the Incarnation nobody could see the Son of God except in a
disguised and provisional form:
'For who could behold the Son of God before he adopted material
which could be observed in the manner which he chose [which was his
choice] or condescended to put on humanity (hominem) itself?'92
Even in the Incarnation nobody saw God nakedly. 93 The whole
Godhead did not appear then, but rather a mirror-image (imaginem
veritatis, non ipsum Deum).9' Consequently,
'Even when he condescended to assume human nature (hominem) he
did not introduce a fault into eternity so as to convert Spirit into flesh,
6672 (239, 240).
"73 (240).
90 74 , 75 (240, 241).
.91 76 (241).
9279 (242).
9'86 (243).
94
87 (243, 244)·
524
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
but so as to supply immortality to the assumed humanity and the
eternity of the heavenly life. For although the Apostle says that he
emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, we do not interpret
"emptied" so tha't he became anything other than what he was, the
same Spirit, but so that he should put on a human body having
temporarily laid aside the glory of his majesty, and by putting on that
he should become the salvation of the nations.' It was like the sun
going behind a cloud. 9 •
When he became incarnate, the Son of man altered neither his nature
(status) nor his rank (ordo) nor his substance. 96 And when we speak of
Christ dying,
'because anything which that man was suffering was all referred
(riferebatur) to the originator (auctorem), therefore the death and
passion of the Lord is signified [was spoken of].'
And Gregory goes on to reproduce Tertullian's 'two substances (i.e.
human and divine) in one person (persona).'97 If we accept the
attribution to Gregory of the Tractatus de Epithalamio we can throw a
little more light on his doctrine of the Incarnation. In this at one
point 98 he says
'For ever since Christ the Son of God condescended to come as a man,
and to take the flesh and soul (carnem anjmamque) of a man like a Bride.
from then on the Law and the prophets ceased'.
This obviously implies that Gregory followed Hilary in attributing a
human soul to Jesus. And two more quotations from works recently
ascribed to Gregory also suggest that he followed Hilary in his ideas
about the Incarnation:
'so even in Christ's flesh. even though the substance of God and man
was mixed and (there was) a mingling like the noon-day atmosphere,
yet the spiritual heat prevails more than the fleshly weakness
functioned';99
and again:
'If he had endured the weaknesses of the flesh only, he might have
been thought a mere man (purus homo) but because he did divine acts
95
88 (244); I have omitted alternative versions in this passage.
96 93(245) .
"94 (26).
96Tractatus de Epithalamio 1.475.
99lbid. 11.481.
52 5
 The Rival Answers Emerge
and also bore human (limitations) he as it were looked through
windows or through lattice-work at men, so that he should seem God
from his miracles, and be hidden·as a result of his sufferings, and yet
· nurac
should be recognised as more t han human bY hIS . Ies. "00
Towards the end of the De Fide Gregory produces one of the
earliest statements of the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit. 'He sent
the Holy Spirit to us', he says, 'from his own and his identical one
substance [from one and the same substance] as Defender, Sanctifier
[Sealer] and Escort to eternal life' .'0' And he concludes the work by
setting out a Rule of Faith ending with the words 'three Persons of
one substance' (tres personas unius substantiae), and a reference back to
N.'02 These terms are however less impressive than they might
appear to be because Gregory is, as Phoebadius was, si,:,",ply
reproducing Tertullian's concept of substance. Had the pro-Nlcene
Eastern theologians known that this was the meaning of the use of
'substance' by these Westerners, they would have recoiled from it as
reproducing precisely that concept of corporeality which they were
anxious to disown in their use of ousia and of homoousion, and which
their Arian opponents constantly accused them of adopting.
A few more pieces of literature representing the work of pro-
Nicene Westerners may be briefly noted here. Potamius of Lisbon in
his orthodox phase, which is the only period of his life represented by
the extant literature attributed to him, apart from a few fragments,
wrote a Letter to Athanasius congratulating him on his maintaining the
true faith and in particular on teaching the substantial unity of the
Father and the Son. His proof-texts for this doctrine areJn 10:30; 14:9
and 28 and I: 1. His instances of the use of the word substantia in the
Bible areJer 23:22; Ps 69(68):3; Ecclesiastes 2:8; Luke 15:13 (none of
them relevant to his argument). He believes thatJn 6:38, adduced by
the Arians for their own purposes, refers to the activity of the
incarnate Son.'03 Of the Son's relation to the Father he says 'the
IOOExplicatio in Cant. Cantjeorum cap I, p. 507. . of the biblical quotations in the De Substantia occur also in the Epistula and that De
101 De Fide Orthodoxa 96 (246). The Tractatus de Libris 58 XX.47Q-472 gives a
long list of the functions of the Spirit but nothing about his nature or status.
102 9 8 (246, 247). cr. Tractlltus de Libris S8 XIV.443 'Nobody conquers except
him who believes in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit of equal power and
undifferentiated might.' , thought they could) a deliberate intention in De Sub. of contradicting the Second
I03Epistuia ad Athanasium PL8:1416-1418: his congratulation and proof-texts
1416. his treatment of In 6:38 1417. his instances of substantia in Scripture 1418.
There is a better text of Potamius' De Lazaro in A. Wilmart's 'Le De Lazaro de
Potamius de Lisbon' 298-3°4. Wilmart justly observes of Potamius' style, 'd'un
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
order implies priority but the substance is not divided."o, If we
could attribute to Potamius the work known as De Substantia we
would know more of his thought. This is a short piece written in
Latin on the meaning of substantia. It defines substance thus:
'The substance of a thing is every thing through which it exists. For
substance either stands under something or indicates that something is
standing under it.' 105
The writer is quite ready to use persona, speaks of 'double persona,
single Godhead'.'o. uses 'nature' (natura) as a synonym for
substance.'o, stresses the unity of activity and will of Father and
Son'os and can write 'of course the substance of the Father, that is
Christ, had not yet arrived in the flesh."o, He makes almost no
reference to the Holy Spirit, so that he cannot be placed late. His
theology, while certainly pro-Nicene, seems to be uninfluenced
either by that of Hilary or by any Greek writer. He is still a devout
disciple of Tertullian."o
mauvais gout, d'une obscurite et aussi d'une fatuite qui n'ont pas ete souvent egalees'
(op. cit. 289). Potamius seems to have had a taste for the Grand Guignol atmosphere
in'literature,' See' above. p. -117 and n 91. A better text of the Epistula can be
found edited by Wilmart Rev. Benedict. 30 (J 913) 579-80.
104Ep. ad Alh. 1417. ordo praeponitur, non substantia separatur.
10SPotamius Epistula de Substantia Patris et Filii et Spiritus Saneli (Migne PL Suppl.
I) 3 (203); cf. I I (206) substance res est cuius est res, and 18 (208).
106Gemina persona, singularitas deitatis 10 (206).
107 13 (2 0 7),
108'9 (209).
109 20 (2 0 9).
110The reason why I cannot ascribe this work to Potamius is the very marked
difference of style between this work and the other works known as Potamius'. De
Lazaro, De Martyrio Isaiae Prophetae and the Epistula ad Athanasium. Wnmart CLe De
Lazaro' 297) remarks upon this change of styl~ ('il etait capable acertains moments
de bien 'ecrire, simplement et clairement') though he still thinks that Potamius wrote
the De Substantia. Simplicity and clarity do not distinguish any of the works
attributed to Potamius except the De Substantia. It is true that most (though not all)
Sub 20 132 (209) to (210) 12 are almost the same. word for word, as Epistula 1418
Ih8-43. But this may mean no more than that one author has copied the other. The
mention of the Council of Ariminum occurs at the inscription of the Epistula and
cannot with confidence be attributed to the author. Ifwe can detect (as some have
Sirmian Creed of 357. at whose production Potamius was present. it is even less
likely that he wrote the work. It is. moreover. hard to imagine that even the
leniency of Hilary would have pardoned Potamius, so deeply had he implicated
himself in the Arian cause, I do not believe that the fragment of an otherwise
527
 The Rival Answers Emerge
There is also extant a Latin Commentary on the Nicene Creed
which probably dates from abont 370.111 It may have been wntten
against Urbanus bishop of Parma, whose depoSItIOn the councIl of
Aquileia asked the Emperors to confirm in 381. It foll~ws a
conventional distinction of substance and Persons, meets the kmd of
Arian arguments that were current at the time (e.g. that the Son was
produced simply by the will, not from the substance,. of the Father),
shows no sign of wishing to combat either Apollmanamsm n?r
Macedonianism, insists upon the eternity of the Son a.nd bases Its
defence of the homoousion firmly on the fact of revelatIOn:
'and from this invisible God the Father he wished to become visible
for the sake of the human race, so that we might be able to see the
invisible God through the visible.'l12
Finally there is a curious little work called Altercatio Heracliani Laid
cum Germinio. l13 It describes an interchange between three laymen,
Heraelianus, Firmianus and Aurelianus, and Germinius, the Arian
bishop ofSirmium, and it is dated quite certainly to the year 366: by
which time the Western Emperor was Valentinian, who was aUlaoUs
not to involve himself in ecelesiastical disputes. The dialogue takes
place in the presence of a mob hostile to the laymen, who have been
brought out of prison, and who (in the person ~f Heraclianus o'.'ly)
defend the Nicene cause. The mob IS hosttle, not, as Zeiller
ingenuously suggests,I14 because they have been coerc~d by the
Arians, but because they are sincerely attached to their Anan bIShop
Germinius, as their predecessors fifteen or twenty years before had
been genuinely attached to Photinus, and regard. the pro-Nlcen:s as
sowers of dissension in their city. The argument (m which Germmlus
is the chief interrogator for the anti-Nicene side) mainly revolves
round the equal divinity of the Father and the Son, and ~pends .a
surprising amount of time on the divinity of the Holy Spmt .. It IS
conducted at what is intellectually a pretty low level on both Sides.
Heraelianus had apparently been prominent earlier in opposing
unknow.n letter of Athanasius to PotamiU5 quoted by A1cuin (PL IOI(I 14). cap 61 of
his Contra Felicem Urgellitanum Episcopum) is part of a ge~uine letter.
11lTo be found in Turner EOMIA Vol. I, 330-47 and Migne PL Supp. I. 220--40.
112Tumer 340 (I, 2).
llJMost readily available in Migne PL Supp. I. 345-5 0 .
U40r;gines 293--?·
52 8
The Western Pro-Nicenes II
Photinus, and his theological authorities are Hilary and Eusebius of
Vercelli. When he comes to set out a formal Trinitarian statement it is
taken almost word for word from Tertullian. He takes the model of
the sun and the sunbeam, and remarks that God has not changed his
'material' (materia). I IS Germinius cites 'Eusebius' as his theological
authority, by which he probably means Eusebius of Caesarea, whom
he could have known when he was a young man. The pro-Nicenes
are roughly handled by a fervent deacon and a pious lector during the
interrogation and at the end the mob want to hand them over to the
imperial authority for execution (probably on the charge of inciting
sedition). But Germinius protects them and insists upon their being
released.
All these Latin-speaking champions of the Nicene cause, with the
exception of Hilary in the middle and later stages of his career, were
writing without the benefit of an adequate knowledge or
understanding of what had been happening in the world of Greek
theology during the previous hundred years, unless they had picked
up some conception of it at second-hand, not through written works.
They did not know Origen; they had never read Eusebius of
Caesarea. They knew of Athanasius but had not read his works. Their
great authority was still Tertullian, who had written some ISO years
before their day. An exception should perhaps be made of the case of
Zeno bishop of Verona who is unknown apart from one reference
(Ambrose Epp. 15.1, PL 16:891) which makes it probable that he was
recently dead in the year 380. Because of his eulogy on an obscure
Mauretanian martyr, (Tract 1.39), he is generally thought to have
been of African origin. But two books of altogether ninety-two very
short essays or sermons (Tractatus) have survived. He is no
philosopher; he calls himself 'a man of very little skill and no
eloquence',ll6 but he writes vigorous and colourful and not
inelegant Latin. He has a nasty streak of anti-Semitism and a strong
desire for social justice. He is a disciple of Hilary; his allegorisation is
like his; he sometimes quotes pieces from Hilary's work on the
Psalms; in as far as he uses Trinitarian language it is Hilary's
(substance, nature and occasionally persona). He insists again and
again on the equality of Father and Son (and even of the Spirit) in
substance, dignity and Godhead: e.g. 'a double person, a double
115Page 350.
116homo imperit;ssimus el elinguis, Tractotus II.Li.I (145).
529
 The Rival Answers Emerge

name, but tbere is One substance of original eternity and deity' ."7 He
allows readily that the Son took flesh, human narure (homo), and that
this constirutes his mediatorial work,"8 but without affecting his
Godhead. He is quite ready to say that God died.'" But though there
is one reference to Arianism (a purely conventional one),120 he is
remote from the controversy. He is no intellectual, tbough an
attractive writer. Arianism cannot have been much in evidence in The Western Pro-Nicenes III
North Italy. He must be placed late rather than early in the period
360-80. We now turn to a Latin writer of a different stamp who was
well au fait with what had been happening at least in the world of I. Marius Victorinus: Introduction
Greek philosophy.
Marius Victorinus was a pagan rhetor and philosopher who had
written several works on philosophy; among others he had translated
into Latin Porphyry's study of Aristotle's thought called Isagoge,
though none of his works written when he was still a pagan survive,
except an Ars Grammatica, a suitable production for a rhetor.' He was
an African, though his career lay in Rome. About the year 355 he was
converted to Christianity, and Augustine gives a lively and rhetorical
account of his conversion, as he had heard tbe story of it thirty years
later, in his Confessions VIII.2. Marius Victorinus had never been one
of tbose pagans hostile to Christianity; Augustine is probably correct
in representing him as sympathetic, but as only seeing the necessity of
baptism and public profession of his new faith late in life, as an old
man. On Julian's accession he resigned his position as official rhetor in
Rome, probably because he would have been expected to deliver
speeches at pagan rites and perhaps to allude to pagan deities as ifhe
believed in them. He must have died in 363 or shortly afterwards.
He was a Neo-Platonist philosopher in the tradition of Porphyry, i.e.
of Porphyry's interpretation of Plotinus. He must also, like
Porphyry, have had an interest in Aristotle's logic at least. He is in fact
regarded as one of those responsible for bringing the knowledge of
Aristotle's thought to the West and so inaugurating a kind of
renaissance of Aristotelian tbought, the same revival which in the

tFor an authoritative survey of Marius Victorious' philosophical thought see P.

Hadot, Marius Victorinus. Hadot is not in that book greatly concerned with Marius'
t 17 duplex persona. duplex vocabulum I sed originalis perpetuitatis at deitatis est una theological work. Simonetti Crisi 287-98 gives a good brief survey of this. Hadot's
substantia. Ibid. 1I.8.ii·4 ('77). edition of Marius' surviving works is used here, together with his informative
'\811. I2.ii.4 (.8S). Prolegomena to that edition. See also Grillmeier CeT 405-6, and Mary T. Clark
'19E.g. 1.)6.iX.29 (99). 'The Neo¥Platonism of Marius Victorinus the Christian' in Blumenthal and
'201I.8.i.. (176). Markus, Neo-Platonism and Early Christian Thought.

53 0 531
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Eastern Roman Empire was contributing to the emergence of the
New Arianism of Aetius and Eunomius. But we cannot classify
Marius Victorinus as an Aristotelian philosopher. He was a late
Platonist, and had a far greater understanding of Platonism, at any
rate of developed Platonism, than any of his contemporaries in the
West known to us. This may explain why he appears to have had
virtually no influence on any of the Christian theologians in the
Latin-speaking world of his day. Jerome says that he wrote books
against the Arians 'which were couched in a dialectic form and very
recondite, which could only be understood by scholars'. 2 Augustine
indeed appears to be the first Latin author known to us who, long
after Marius' death, was influenced by him. But certainly he had a
knowledge of contemporary philosophy vastly in excess of that
possessed by any of the pro-Nicene Western writers whom we have
so far considered, and his approach to the Christian doctrine of God is
correspondingly more sophisticated than theirs. It goes without
saying that he knew Greek. Indeed he frequently quotes Greek terms
in his text.
His anti-Arian works have fortunately been preserved. Hadot
divides them into twelve short volumes, as follows:
I Candidi Epistola I (Candidus the Arian on divine generation
addressed to Marius Victorinus the rhetor). Candidus is no
historical character but a fictitious name invented by
Marius to serve as a straw figure against which he tilts.
II In Candidum (Marius Victorinus the rhetor of the city of Rome
in reply to Candidus the Arian).
m Candidi Epistola II (Candidus the Arian's reply to the Right
Honourable Marius Victorinus).3
These three works must be dated before the year 359, perhaps in 357
or 358, evoked, like so much other literature, by the startling Second
Sirmian Creed of 357.
IV Adversus Arium I (Against Arius Book 1), dated to 359·
V Second Part of the same Book I.
'De Vir. Ill. CI.
3By 'Right Honourable' I am translating VC which means virum c1arissimum, a
formal title of honour conferred by the Emperor. He is given this title in the
headings to several other of his works.
532
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
VI Adversus Arium II (Against Arius Book II; alternative title,
The Book about Homoousios against the Heretics in Greek and
Latin).
These last two are to be assigned to the year 361. They are concerned
with the events of 359 and 360 as far as they touched the Arian
Controversy.
VII and VIII Adversus Arium III and IV (Against Arius Books III
and IV; alternative title On Homoousios) , non-polemical
works discussing the whole subject of consubstantiality.
They must be dated 362 (see Adv. Arium II.2.35).
IX De Homoousio Recipiendo (On accepting Homoousios),
written in 362.
X, XI and XII consist of hymns about the Trinity written at
uncertain periods by Marius Victorinus; Hadot tentatively
dates them 358-359. It is possible that Adv. Ar. II is a reply
to a book put out by Valens and Ursaciusjustifying the
proceedings of both Seleucia and Ariminum. 4
If we ask how much Marius knew of the Arianism which he
attacked in his works, we must answer that he knew more than all
and also less than all about Arianism. The first letter of Candidus to
Marius (whose author is of course Marius himself) produces a
coruscating array of arguments against the Son being consubstantial
with the Father, arguments concerned with 'existence' and
'existentiality', substance and simplicity, and nine different modes of
generation from God. This kind oflanguage would have been quite
beyond any Western Arian writer known to us, Potamius, Palladius,
Ursacius, Valens or Saturninus, virtually incomprehensible to Hilary
and wholly so to Lucifer, Phoebadius and Gregory. It could be
conjectured that Marius Victorinus is producing the arguments of
some very learned Western Arian wholly unknown to us, but this is
in the last degree unlikely. Nor does his parade oflearned argument
reproduce the language and thought of Aetius and Eunomius in the
East. Marius is simply giving an exhibition at once of his erudition
and (more legitimately) of his competence to tackle the subjects with
which he proposes to deal. At the end of this first letter of Candidus
4For works which we have reason to infer were written by this pair but which do
not survive, see above pp. 301.305-6,521. I have here omitted reference to M.V·s In
Epistolas h. Pauli. Liber ad lustinum Manichaeum and De Verbis Scripturae (PL
8:1145-1294).
533
 The Rival Answers Emerge
he suddenly trots out a number of conventional well-used Arian
arguments and proof-texts, and among them the doctrine that the
Son was produced from nothing, This last argument had long been
abandoned by Arian writers, as even Phoebadius knew. When
Marius comes to write Candidus' second letter to Marius Victorinus,
it is surprising to find that the letter consists simply of a Latin
translation of Arius' Letter to Eusehius of Nicomedia (1(49-51»,
followed by a translation of part ofEusebius ofNicomedia's Letter to
Paulinus of Tl're (2(51-53». These extracts are preceded by the
following statement, written in the character of Candidus:
'M y friend Victorinus, you may heap together a lot of arguments and
examples by which you may strive to prove that the Son is born, not
made; but Arius, a man ofkeen intellect, and his disciples and Eusebius
who was outstanding among the best of them, produced ideas on the
subject in their letters. And we now lay these letters before you'
(1(49)). .
In short, there is no satisfactory evidence that Marius Victorinus had
any genuine knowledge of Arianism as it was in his day. He could
exercise his intellect more rhetorico in producing arguments which he
was later to refute, and he could reproduce some old Arian
documents which had long become the stock texts for controversy,
but that was all. He occasionaIly refers to Marcellus and Photinus, but
shows no cIose acquaintance with their doctrines.
2. Marius Victorinus' Christology
Marius Victorinus' conception of God was eminently Platonic. He
tends to use apophatic language in defming God, and to do so with
little concern for making himself readily intelligible:
'If therefore God is not what is not, yet he is above that which is really
existent (!Iv) the potentiality of the existent (tau !lv~oc;) itself, which,
once its activity in generating had been aroused, generated by an
ineffable action the existent (to !Iv) perfect in every way, wholly the
existent from the totality of potentiality; God is therefore wholly
outgoing (np6LOv) but Jesus is the same total existent (!Iv) yet now in
existence (existentia) and life and understanding (intelligentia), the
universal existent perfect in every way'. 5
5Ad Candidum 2 (18). At Ad",. Arium 1.40 (U7) he curiously quotes Arius'
534
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorin"s
But because God is potentiality and beyond being he is also the cause
both of what is and of what is not. 6 There are four definitions of ' that
which is not':
(i) What is altogether deprived of existence.
(ii) What has changed from one thing to another.
(iii) What does not yet exist, is in the future and still could
exist.
(iv) What is above all things that are.
Clearly God falls into the fourth category. He must be described as
above the existent (-to 6v), in fact as 'the not existing' (to 6v) not
because he is void of existence, but because he is the cause for the
II"
purpose of generation (generationem) of those things that are.' God, in
short, is existence above existence, pure potentiality. Marius explains
this doctrine further in the same work:
'What then really is God, ifhe is not even one thing (unum), nor what
really (vere) are nor what are, nor what are not really nor what are not?
For God stands behind (praestat) all these as cause for them all. Yet it is
wrong to conjecture that God is among these things which really are
not. We necessarily shall say that God, by reason of superiority and
excellence above the existents (trov 5vtrov) is above all existence
(existentia); above all life, above all knowledge, above all that is (ov)
and that really is (OVtOlC; (lvra), in fact unintelligible, infmite, invisible,
without intellect, insubstantial, unknowable, and as above everything
having nothing to do with those things which are and, because
beyond that which exists, shares nothing with those things which are.
Therefore God is not existent (1'1\ ov).·
He can describe God as beyond all existence and conception, 'prior to
all essentiality, substance, subsistence.'" And he plunges into paradox
deliberate travesty ofwhat Alexander taught without apparently realizing that it is a
travesty, and without knowledge of any of Alexander's writings. He also of course
knows and dislikes the Second Creed ofSirmium (357), quoting from it Adv. Ar.1.9
(66, 67).
'Ibid. 3 (19)·
'Ibid. 4 (19, 20).
8 13 (30). Marius has earlier (8 (25)) distinguished in a descending order of
existence: 'really existent' (6VTCilIi 6VTa), 'existent' (6v'ta) 'not really existent' (JlTJ
6vtf.tl1i 6v'tu) and 'not existent' (p,'I) 6vta). Here he is distinguishing nihil de his
'nothing concerned with' and nihil ex his 'nothing from among'.
9 Adversus Arium 1.49 (143, 144), essentitatem, substantiam, subsistentiam.
535
 The Rival Answers Emerge
in attempting to do justice to this superessential abstract Deity:
'a thrice-potent in the power of <?neness of spirit (or 'a thrice pot~nt
spirit in the power of oneness' tripotens in unalitate spiritus). p~rf~ctlOn
and beyond spirit ... himself his own place and dweller (m It) ...
existing everywhere and nowhere ... the power of oneness of co-
union. without any co-unioo'.10
And when he expresses this in terms of substance, either ousia in
Greek or substantia in Latin, it appears as the statement that God is not
enousios (equipped with substance) but anousios (without substance)
not in the sense oflacking substance but of being beyond substance
(hyperousios). He is his own substance, primal (prima) substance,
'substance prior to substance'. And he can after all be described as
enousios (equipped with substance) in that he made everything and in
that he is Father." It is scarcely necessary to say that this account of
substance in relation to God is as far as possible removed from
Tertullian's idea of substance which provided the theology of the
early Hilary, of Phoebadius, Gregory and Heraelianus. When
described in terms of number this account of God is thus set out:
It is one thing 'to be in that which is', another 'to be in that which is in
a certain mode' (ita); the former denotes substance, the latter quality.
This holds good for sensuous and mundane things, but not for the
eternal and divine. In these. 'Everything which is here is simple
(simplex), and God is this, as Light, as Supreme Good (optimum). as
Existence (existentia), as Life, as Understanding ... Everything
therefore in this case is substantially (substantiaUter) simple. without
parts (inconexa), one, one in number, and not Qne in number but one
beyond number (or beyond the number one), that is beyond the one
that is in number, in fine simple. sole, so that it is inconceivable that it
should be other'. Consequently the image born from this Godhead
cannot be section nor emanation nor effulgence nor extension but
manifestation (apparentia), not the duplication of potentiality but the
activity of potentiality (potentiae actio).12
God, he says in a later work is 'thrice potent (Tp1ouvaIlO<;), that is,
possessing three potentialities, to be, to live, to understand'," and
though he is existence, life and mind he must also be described as
,, ,.
'Olbid. 50 (145).
"Adv. A,ium II (169).
"Adv. A,ium 111.1 (193).
13 Adv. A,ium IV.2J (247).
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
'without origin, without being, without mind, without life
(uvtiltapKTo<;, uv6ucno<;, livou<;, li~OlV), without existence, without
substance, without knowledge (intelligentia), without life, 14. not of
course KaT" CJ'tEP1]O'lV, that is by way of deprivation, but by way of
eminence' (supralationem, that is being beyond these attributes).
And Marius goes on to coin words like 'super-existence' (praeexist-
entia), 'super-knowledge' (praecogniscentia) and 'super-livingness'
(praeviventia), with corresponding verbs. 15 Porphyry, Plotinus'
disciple, Mary Clark observes, was, unlike Plotinus, able to attribute
Being, Life and Intelligence to the One, but in such a way that they
do not imply multiplicity nor dependence nor comparability to
anything else. This was how Marius Victorinus was able to reconcile
the Neo-Platonic doctrine of the One and the Christian doctrine of
the Trinity.'6 But of course he did not repudiate Plotinus. On several
occasions in his works he quotes direcdy from the Enneads. Like all
Neo-Platonists, Mary Clark goes on, Marius 'rejected the tradition of
a first immobile God and a second creative God. The One-One was
for Victorinus the One-All. Plotinus made possible the reconciliation
of the divine simplicity with the divine activity by his own discussion
of the mode of begetting among divinities (Enneads V. 1.6-8)'. True
substance is first movement, and a kind of movement which is a state'
of r<~pose (Adv. Arium 1.30, 20-26)."
Marius Victorinus deals In a sophisticated way with the subject of
the Son's generation. Writing as 'Candidus' the Arian he lists nine
different modes of generation, and then eruditely explains how none
can apply to the Son of God,' 8 and then abruptly throws in some
conventional Arian objections to the generation of the Son,19 on the
. obsolete assumption that the Arians were teaching that the Son was
made out of nothing. In reply Marius argues that God did not
produce the Logos from some other source, nor from nothing, but
out of himself, and the Logos was 'the existent' (T" ov) or 'the
outgoing' (T" ItpOwv) which is above the whole range of existents
(generale OV genus) and of really existents (OVTOl<; OVTU). When Moses
14Marius is here simply translating into Latin the Greek terms which he has just
used. for the benefit of his less educated readers; hence the apparent repetition.
"Ibid. 23 (260, 261); cf. 24 (262).
16'The Neo-Platonism of Marius Victorinus' 155.
17Ibid. 158.
"Candidi Bpistula 1.4(5) - 6(1l).
09IO(12)-II (13).
537
 The Rival Answers Emerge
said 'If! am asked who sent me, what am I to say?', he received the
answer 'Say then, the Existent' (dicito 6 {bv, Exod. 3:13-14).20 In the
same work Marius Victorinus defines what he means by the Logos:
'3certain potentiality p,ut into action from the Father (patrica) which is
both in motion and which itself constitutes itself so that it is in action
not in potentiality.' The high God is also Logos, but 'Logos silent and at
rest'. and also of course Logos which is not generated. 21
Marius Victorinus has effectively overcome the traditional difficulty
that the Son must appear inferior to and separated from the Father
because he thinks of the Son as the activity of the Father who is pure
potentiality. He does not approach the subject of the Christian
doctrine of God by, as it were, trying to fit the Son into the Father.
'These are two; I mean two according to power (virtutem). but
according to the conception of simplicity one and sole. If therefore
Being itself (ipsum esse) is the cause of activity he (the Son) is generated
from that which is Being (ab eo quod est esse). The Father then is Being,
the Son therefore is action' (operart).22
Marius argues for the acceptance of the homoousion because to act and
to be are identical in God, so if the Logos is God acting he must be
consubstantial. 23 In no circumstances does God ever make things
purely out of nothing (far less the Son), because he never produces
anything which does not have the possibility of existing. But there
can be no such possibility in things which do not exist. 24 Had Marius
h~d any genuine acquaintance with Arian theologians he might have
dIScovered that they were ready to concede this last point. Asterius
had produced a statement not unlike it.25 Marius raises another
difficulty about this subject, only to answer it. 'How can (we say)
homoousios when no substance exists?' (i.e. no substance in God). In
fact ?f course only a Neo-Platonist could have raised this objection;
thIS IS not an Anan argument. He answers it quite readily: . and arriving at perfection, and by motion is rendered fulness, is made
'Names are devised and taken from those things that are of later
origin, from things which are more recent than God. And because it is
20 Ad Candidum 14 (3 1-32).
2117 (35).
22 20(37, 38).
"23 (39);· cf. 27 (42, 43).
2424 (40).
"See above, pp. 33. 35 (frag. IV).
538
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
impossible to fmd a name worthy of God, we name God from what
we are familiar with, re:alizing that we are not really naming him. '26
This is how he explains awkward texts such as Prov 8:22, 25; Acts
2:36;]n 1:3-4 and Gal 4:4. Apparent referencesto the Son being made
or created really mean, 'not that he was made in order to exist, but
that he was brought about (effectus sit) to be as he is'. These texts do
not in fact apply to his existence, 'but to his activity and the
implementation of his potentiality and power'. 27 This is a new and
ingenious argument, of which no other contemporary Latin-
speaking pro-Nicene writer known to us would have been capable.
When he comes to describe the relation of the Father to the Son in
detail Marius Victorinus is, as in other points, ingenious and original
beyond any Western theologian before him. He who is the Logos
through whom all things were made, he states, cannot be from no
underlying reality (subiecto). And he who was in the beginning must
have always existed. The Son is 'main cause' (principa/is causa) of
everything, but the Father is 'super-cause' (praecausa). The difference
between the Two is this:
'So the Son will be different in this, that he is moved and acts for the
purpose of revelation (ad manifestationem), as the Father by his mighty
Godhead operates in a maIUler unknowable to US.'28
What the Father is as Being, the Logos is as activity. 29 The Sonl Logos
is both equal to the Father and unequal, his inequality does not,
however, consist in his being incarnate (which is not mentioned):
(The Father) 'again is, however, greater, because his movement is
inactive (inactuosa); for he is more" blessed because he is without
disturbance and impassible and the source of everything that is, in rest,
perfect in himself and needing nothing. The Son however receives his
existence and (the power to) act on that which is, moving from action
everything which is. But because all things come into existence in him
and to him and through him, he is eternally fulness and eternally
receptacle; and by reason of this he is both impassible and passible.
Consequently he is both equal and unequal. So the Father is greater'. 30
2'Ad Candidum 28 (43).
27lbid. 29 (44).
28Adv. Arium 1.3 (58-59).
"Ibid. 4 (5g-;\0).
3Olbid. 13 (71, 72); cf. Adv. Ar. 1.37 (122).
539
 The Rival Answers Emerge
A little later he sets out in a long passage the subordination of the Son
as a matter oflogical rather than ontological order: the Father is 'that
which it is to be' and the Son 'that which it is to act'. Action is only in
the Father potentially, but actually in the Son, and this makes him
lower (iunior). The Son is also 'that which it is to be', but proceeding
from the Father into activity:
'Since the Father is one according to that which it is to be, and the Son
one according to that which it is to act, each at the same time existing
in the other, as has been shown, therefore (they are) homoousioi'.31
In his next book he compares Father and Son in relation to substance.
Because God exists, we can say that he has substance, though in fact
he is above substance, and that substance is called 'spirit' or 'true
light'. Just as in the material sphere there are bodies, and in the
incorporeal sphere there is soul (anima), so spirit is God's substance, or
super-substance, or at any rate potentiality of substance (potentia
substantiae). Christ has substance from the Father, 'Light from Light,
God from God'. He is not only potentiality but also activity (and the
Father activity in him). 32 Or rather 'the Father is potentiality and the
Son activity' (actio).33 Elsewhere Marius says that the Father is the
unmoving cause of the moving Son:
'It is the characteristic of that which primally is Being to be at rest; but
it is the characteristic of the Logos to be moved and to act, and not to be
moved locally nor by removal into a place. but by a motion which
pertains to the soul, higher and more divine, and which by its own
motion gives life and brings forth intelligences, subsisting in itself and
not divided for purposes of acting from its proper potentiality. '34
The Son exists 'according to motion', the Father 'according to rest'
(cessationem).35 Later he can say that both Father and Son are motus
(movement), but the Father is 'movement at rest, that is interior and
nothing else than movement', not movement in motion (motione),
but the Son is movement in motion, though both are movement. 3 •
Marius can also describe the Son in terms of existence and motion
"20 (86).
J2Adv. Arium 11.173, 174.
33 175 ; cf. Adv. Ariurn IV.7 (232-5).
34Adll. Ariurn 1.27 (102).
"[bid. 28 (IOJ).
36Adv. Arium IV.29 (269). This is the sort of thing which must have mystified
Jerome, as it might mystify anybody.
540
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
distinguished, according to which as motion and life and Word from
the Father he quickens and creates and grants mind to everything. 37
And he can relate this concept of motion to substance also:
'So movement is life which, whether existing in itself and turned in on
itself, is its own substance for itself, or whether it looks outwards, and
is better called movement; for inward movement is rest or rest in
motion (mota) and movement in rest. For God must be of both sorts, I
mean rest and movement and parent and substance itself, because as it
were by association and by form he is the source of both, himself
simple and one and eternally one and sole and, as we have said already,
whole' (totuS).38
He has no difficulty either in relating the Father and the Son in
terms of will, though he shpws no awareness that contemporary
Arians were proclaiming that the Son is the product solely of the
Father's will, not of his nature:
'Moving himself out from himself (he is) Father, generating himself
from himself, Son; for the Son is will ... the will of course proceeding
into activitated potentiality, not, however, departing from the
substance, by its own and same motion. For these three are one,
substance, motion, will. The Father is substance and by the same token
(iuxta id ipsum) motion and will. Again the Son is motion and will, and
by the same token also substance. And this is homoousios'. 39
Marius can revert to this argument later,"O again without betraying
any acquaintance with contemporary Arian ideas upon the subject,
nor, for that matter, with Athanasius' arguments about the priority
of nature to will. He can also relate the impassible and the passible by
invoking this relationship:
The potentiality of vision is at rest when vision itselfis in motion, 'and
the passions exist in connection with vision, while the potentiality of
vision remains impassible and without passion generates vision.'41
37Adv. Arium 1.51 (1.46, 147).
38Adv. Arium m.2 (194). Similarly he can meet the difficulty presented by the
subordinationism of I Cor 15:28 by distinguishing motion from potentiality: 'when
everything has been emptied out, active potentiality is at rest, and God will be in
himself according to what it is to be and according to what it is to be at rest, but in aU
other things spiritually according to his power and his substance', Adv. Arium 1.39
(126).
39Adv. Arium 1.32 (112).
4°Adv. Arium 1lI.9 (206).
41Adv. Arium 1.24 (127); cf. 42 (132).
54'

The Rival Answers Emerge
He can also express the relationship in terms of'image' and of'form':
'For in the Father everything dwells potentially, and therefore Jesus
the Logos is the image of God the Father; this very thing which is
potentiality to be. this is now what to be activity is. For everything
which results in activity is also the image of that which is potentially,
and the Son of that which is potentially is that which is in activity.
This is why Son and Father are homoousios. '42
The Son can be called the 'image' and 'countenance' of God (with
appeal to Phil 2:6 and Col I: I 5 and Exod 33:20 and 23 (posterganea mea
videbis, an odd reading, Vulg posteriora)). The Father must be
distinguished from the Son because the te«t 'who raised his Son from
the dead' (Rom 8:II) implies this distinction. But Marius prefers to
put the matter thus:
'So with the "form of God" (Philz:6). the form is one thing, God is
another. There is indeed a form for God, but the Son of God is the
form revealed (in manifesto), (the form) of God is hidden.'''
A word which Marius Victorinus likes to use in order to describe the
actual function of the Son/Logos in distinction from that of the Father
is apparentia, which meanS manifestation. In a passage in which he has
been pulling out technical terms many of which, one suspects, have
been coined by him for the occasion - existentialitatem.
substantialitatem, essentialitatem, with their Greek equivalents added,
and where he has been contrasting God the Father as above mind and
truth. as potentiality (and therefore not form), and also as silence and
cessation. with the activity and communicating function of the Son,
he returns to this word apparentia. From such a super-essential
unmoving God movement and act do not mean leaving behind what
is moved from, but rather apparentia: 44
'This activity. if God is silence. is called Word, if (God is) rest, (it is
called) movement, if being (essentia), life, because, as we are
explaining, in that which is being (esse) is also life (vivere), in that
which is silence is also an unspoken (tacem) Word and in that which is
quiescence or rest there inheres either a hidden movement or a hidden
activity. '45
'2Ibid. 25 (98).
"Ad•. A,ium IV.30 (269. 270); cf. Ad•. A,. I (Vol IV) 19 (83. 84)·
44Adv. Arium Ill.7 (202).
"Ibid. 7 (203).
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
Like a good philosopher, Marius Victorinus defines his terms
carefully. and. as we would expect, his range of theological and
philosophical words is largely different from that of his
contemporaries. We have already seen him introducing the word
homoousios, almost always in the original Greek, several times and
throwing light on what is the meaning which he attaches to it.46 At
one point he justifies this practice, realizing that his readers may
object to his constant reversion to the Greek term, on the grounds
that there is no Latin equivalent of it (neither consubstantialis nor
eiusdem substantiae appeal to him). The Greek word was approved by
the Fathers ofNicaea and also by the father of the present Emperor. 47
He produces at one point an extraordinary argument in favour of
homoousios. He quotes I Cor 2:8, 9 and declares that God is
'incomprehensible or scarcely comprehensible'. He then observes
that other,less satisfactory, accounts of the relation of the Father to
the Son are quite comprehensible:
'What can you say in the light of these verses of Christ being thought
to be from non-existence or of like substance? They are
understandable and definite. But to be homoousion not only is
incomprehensible but contains many contradictions. For if he is
homoousios, is he also ingenerate? If homoousios, how can he be distinct,
how can there be Father distinct from Son? Ifhomoousios, how did one
suffer and the other not?48
In short, homoousios is right because it is incomprehensible, just like
God! In the next book. however, Marius is rather more luminous. He
here explains that to say that two things are homoousios is to say that
they have the salne substance (Godhead, Light, Logos, Spirit). but
different qualities: the Father's qualities are pateruity, omnipotence,
goodness, infinity, the Son's filiation, being a Saviour or being]esus
Christ. 'Consubstantial'means having the same substance in two or
more manifestations: 'deriving the same substance simultaneously
not from any other source than from God's eternal potentiality' .49
But Marius prefers to think of the adjective in terms of simultaneity.
Homoousion means to have substance at the same time
'simultaneously· endowed with substance (substantiatum):
46S eeabove, pp. 541, 542.
47 Adv.Arium 11.9 (183-5). This shows that this work must have been written
some time before the end of 361. It is at 12 (IS9) that he rejects Latin equivalents.
48Adv. Arium I.So, Sx.
49Adv. Arium H.w (ISS. IS6, quotation from IS6).
543
 The Rival Answers Emerge
simultaneously God and Logos, and from eternity everlas?ngly
Father and Son simultaneously'. 50 This simultaneous possessIon of
substance means having 'an equal force and power of existing and the
same nature of substance' in the Father and thS e on. 51M" anus
definition of substance is relatively simple: it is 'to be that which is' . 52
At one point he elaborately distinguishes existence (exsistentia) and
substance but admits that they are to all intents and purposes.
identical, ,and that he will treat them as the same. 53Hh e as at ~!s
fingers' ends all the conventional proof-texts alleged for the BIble s
mention of substance. In one particularly obscure passage he appears
to identify substance, being and life. 5 ' 'Candidus' had argued, m the
Arian cause but with a reasoning which no Arian ever used, that God
was above substance and existence, S5 but, as we ·have seen, Manus
was able to accept this contention in one sense, as he was able to say
that God is above ousia. 56
Marius Victorinus defines what he means by Logos thus: 'a certain
paternal activated potentiality which also is in moveme~t and which
itself constitutes itself in such a way that It IS m activIty, not m
potentiality'. 57 But when he approaches the difficult problem of how
to describe what God is as Three which he is not as One he runs mto
trouble. One remarkable feature of his vocabulary here, which has
not been sufficiently noticed, even by Hadot, is the persistent and
explicit refusal of Marius Victorinus to use the word persona in a
Trinitarian context:
'It is therefore wrong to say "two Persons (personae) one substance".
but: two, Father and Son, out of one substance, as the Father gives
substance from his substance to the Son in this, that he has generated a
Son, and consequently they are both homoousioi'. 58
This is a quite deliberate rejection of Tertullian's vocabulary which
"[bid. 10 (187); cf. 2 (172).
51Adv. Arium IV.IO.240.
52Adv. Arium I.3I (IIO), illud quod est esse.
53Adv. Arium 1.30 (I07. 108).
54Adv. Arium IV.9 (238): non ut substantia sit et sic "ivens, sed ipsum quod est "ivens
hoc ipsum substantia est. Neque enim cum ipsum vjvens ac vivit et v!vere esse .et
quodammodo esse inteIligatur, non suum sibi esse quod sit substantia est. Let hIm who wIll
translate this.
"Adv. Arium [(1)-4(4).
S6S ee above pp. 534-'7.
"Ad Candidum 17 (:l5).
s8Adv. Arium I.II (69).
544
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
had hitherto eqjoyed undisputed popularity among Latin-speaking
theologians. Marius may indeed be regarded as positively anti-
Tertullianic in both thought and vocabulary. It is not easy to see why
he so flatly refuses to use the term persona. He seemed to think that it
did not sufficiently distinguish the Persons. The use of it, he says in .
one passage, lands us into Patripassianism. 5 ' In fact the question of
,,:hy TertulIian used persona and why the fourth-century theologians
dId not use It has yet to be explored properly. Marius is of course well
aware of the Greek word hypostasis, and does not hesitate to use it. At
one point he tries to explain in what sense he uses the word:
'Whatever is endowed with form (formatum), this is existent (esse): but
form is that which makes that which is existent intelligible. To be
existent then we ascribe to God, but form to Christ, because the Father
is known through the Son, that is, what is existent (is known) through
the form'.
He then goes on to say that both God and the Son are ti1t(lP~IC;
(individual entity),60 and that 'potentiality is prior to that which is
form'.6! The existent (5v) exists with form and it can be called
subsistentia (subsistence) and exsistentia (existence) and substantia
(substance). Whatever has form and substance is called hypostasis. So
the Son can be called hypostasis, but also the Father:
'Subsistence therefore is properly named in both cases, and that is
substa~ce, because ~hat w~ch is original existence (esse principale) with
form IS caUed subsIstence, though it can also be called substance. So
we can say 'three subsistences are from one substance, so that that
whi~h is exi~tence subsists in three forms (tripliciter), God himself, and
Chnst, that IS Logos, and the Holy Spirit'. Subsistentio can also be called
hypostasis. 62
Ma~ius next proceeds to maintain, confusingly, that hypostasis and
ousla.mean the same thmg, and tries to prove this from Scripture by
quotmg Jer 23:18 and Ps 139(138):15, both by now conventional
proof-texts in the hands of pro-Nicene writers, and then from the
Parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:12-13). And that hypostasis and
59lbid. 41 (129). Here he says that to use persona, ipsa substantia est et egit omnia et
passa est. We are not, he says, Patripassians.
6°Adv. Arium 11.4 (176).
·'Ibid. 4 (177)·
.'. (177. 178).
545
 The Rival Answe,s Eme,ge
ousia are synonymous is a proof that Father and Son are homoousioi. 63
As we shall see, Marius' chief theological weakness is a tendency to
fall into Sabellianism, and here ·he has done so. That he had the
authority of N in identifying hypostasis and ousia is scarcely sufficient
defence. Certainly this excursion into terminological exactitude is
calculated to create rather than dispel confusion. He can elsewhere
repeat in almost the same words the formula 'one substance, three
subsistences' (una substantia, t,es subsistentia},64 and he can later say
that each of the Trinity has the same substance but each his individual
existence (exsistentia), 'existing, that is, distinctly' (singulis quidem
exsistentibus}.65 But he does not maintain this vocabulary consistently
throughout his works. He has in fact, having thrown away pe,sona,
nothing to put in its place. He can say that it is as divine substance that
the Father and the Son coinhere; the Father, as Father, cannot be in
the Son, nor the Son, as Son, in the Father. We can say of Christ 'God
of God, Light of Light', but we cannot reverse the proposition. 66
But, though this is clear, it does nothing to establish a consistent and
viable vocabulary.
Part of the purpose of Marius Victorinus in writing his books
Against A,ius is to oppose the doctrine of Basil of Ancyra and his
school, whom he always thinks of as Homoiousians, though in fact, as
we have seen, their watchword was 'like according to ousia'.67 He
knows quite a lot about the antecedents and history of this school of
thought. 68 His objection to homoiousios is basically philosophical:
immaterial substance cannot be like in substance to anything, ouly
material substance can be that. And if we say that one substance is like
another, we allow that it is other and not the same. 69 Indeed, he
63Ibid. S (178, 179). 6 (179). In De Homoousio Recipiendo I (278) he makes the same
identification (hinting that he could distinguish them, but has not space to do so),
and says that the Greeks use both indiscriminately whereas the Latins have only one
word, substantia, and adds that a few Greeks only use ousja, and they seldom, but aU
use hypostasis. This shows a complete ignorance of Athanasius' works at least.
64Adv. Arium 111.4 (198).
65 Adv. Arium IV.33 (277).
66Adv. A,ium II.II (188).
67S ee Hadot, Marius Vic/orinus 263-6.
68Cf. Adv. Arium 1.28 (103)-29 (105); and 43 (132) where his reference to the
IIlyriciani. those Balkan sees where Western . Arianism seem to have found its
greatest strength, is interesting.
"Ibid. 23 (93),24 (97), 43 (132); cf. 30 (107). We should probably accep' Hado,'s
emendation at 15 (75) of Non igilur omnino OIlOOU(]'\OV to non igitur omnino
0j.1010Uc:nOV.
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
thinks it blasphemous to call the Son homoiousios because if we accept
the distinction (originating from Philo and publicised by Origen) of
man's rationality as that in which he is the image of God, but his
progress in moral goodness as that in which he is the likeness of God,
then to say that the Son is like in substance is to say that he is so by
gradual moral effort.70 He has some knowledge of the Ancyran
document issued by Basil in 35 8 (though none apparentl y of the later
Lette, ofGeo,ge of Laodice a issued by the same school in 359), because
he says that the Basilii (Basil and his disciples) attribute the Son's
production to a combination of generation and creation, and he
strives to rebut this view.71 His later work De Homoousio Recipiendo
(Vol. IX), written after the death of Constantius and during the
revanche in the West in favour of the Nicene cause is a brief treatise
composed in an eirenic spirit designed to convince Homoiousians
that they really believe in the homoousios, much in the spirit of
Hilary's De Synodis. Most of the venom of the attack on the school of
Basil by Marius seems to be confined to Adve,sus A,ium I.
3. Marius Victorinus' Doctrine of the Incarnation
Marius Victorinus takes care to include a doctrine of the Incarnation
in his theology, though it does not playa very prominent part there:
we are given warning of this when he asks in Adve,susA,ium II, 'If
homoousios, how did one [the Son] suffer and the other [the Father]
not?'72 And he argues from the Incarnation to the Son's
consubstantiality with the Father. Christ, he says, did not 'assume
man', but 'was made (or became) man' (Phil. 2:5-II). This means
that he assumed the form of the substance of man. If, as Paul says, he
was originally in the form of Cod, then he must have been in God's
substance too. And in the same passage Marius asks 'What then is this
"he emptied himself'? The universal Logos is not universal in as far as
he is the logos of flesh and became flesh.'73 This leads to a discourse
about passibility and impassibility, which are the main subjects raised
for Marius by the doctrine of the Incarnation:
7Olbid. 20 (88); cf. 22 (90).
"Ibid. 45 (137)·
72 18 (81); cf. 14 (74) 'and it is not to be thought that the Father suffered· for it was
not he but his humanity' (homo). •
"Ibid. 22 (90, 91).
547
 The Rival Answers Emerge
'It is said then of the Son that he is impassible and passible, but his
passion is in his career (in progressu), but particularly in th~ final part of
that career, that is, when he was in the flesh. The followmg however
are not called passions, his generation from the Father, his primal
movement and his being creator of everything.'74 It must be
remembered that for Marius Christ's 'career' (progressus) when he was
liable to encounter 'passion' began with the history oftheJews at latest
and perhaps with the creation of the world and the converse of the
pre-existent Son with Adam and Eve in the Garden ofEden~ and ~so
that the word 'passion' had for him a much wider range ofmeanmg
than it has for us, comprising all transience and change and all human
experiences.
Marius Victorinus is always conscious that he may be accused of the
heresy of imputing to God the Father the experience of suffering. In
order to avoid this charge he describes the relationship of the Father
and the Son as 'one, not sole one, but one and one, an impassible one
distinct (a/jut!), and a passible distinct'. 75 He sets this out in detail next:
'And according to this argument he (the Son) too is unchangeable
(inversibilis) and immutable, but in those things which fall into the
categories (genera) of objects which are different from each other (alius
et alius), by this very fact that he is the cosmic (universalis) Logos,
remaining the same with the Father. When then do human
experiences (passiones) come in? Neither in the Father nor in the Son,
but inasmuch as they in their category do not contain the whole
power of the cosmic Logos, for each thing of any sort exists and he
gives to it its proper force, whether of angels, potentates, thrones,
dominions, sensuoUS things, and flesh itself. Passion therefore is in
them, and according to this theory (iuxta haec), but does not belong to
the Logos. Therefore the Saviounuffered according to the flesh, but
according to the spirit he was without passion.'76 .
Marius then goes on to a detailed analysis of suffering. He insists that
the divine nature of the Son cannot suffer, but appears to want to
establish two principles: first that in referring to God we use
expressions like 'suffering' as an accommodation to our limited
understandings, because we can only speak of God in terms of our
own experience; secondly that as not merely the soul but the reason
and the spirit associates itself with the suffering, so God in a sense
7422 (92).
7SIbid. 44 (134)·
"44 (134. 135)·
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
associated himself with the suffering of the assumed human nature. 77
Elsewhere, comparing the Father to the still fount and the Son to the
stream issuing from the fount and running, he says that in the course
of his running the Son:
'accepts passions, not in as far as he is substance, but in activity and
functioning.' He endured suffering not only in his Incarnation and
Passion, but also 'in the primal act of his existence, as we have learnt
from many books, the passion of departure from the Father was
present. '78
This is drastic and unusual doctrine, and he produces doctrine as
unusual when he adds that the Son was in the body as the Holy Spirit
is in us, 'not completely - for God is everywhere - but as part of him. '
But in all divine things the part is as the whole, as the soul in the body,
as courage and discipline are in souls, as the sun or its light is in our
eyes. 79 This idea is expressed rather more clearly in a kind ofRnle of
Faith which he sets out in Adversus Arium I:
'Jesus Christ . .. the same unalterable, unchangeable . . . in respect that
he is Logos and that he is eternally Logos. but in respect that he is the
creator of everything and particularly that in matter (hyle) he
experienced activity impassibly, like the source of any river
unchangeable. impassible. beyond all motion, when it flows and
becomes a river, it is believed to suffer from its bed and the types and
varieties of the terrain, it continually preserves the potentiality of its
water and in the form of a river irrigates the ground without
experiencing any diminution as far as its being water goes, so Christ is
that river of which the prophet speaks (Gn 2:6) ... 80
Later he can speak of the Son 'enduring apparent reduction
(diminutionem) and being born of a virgin and in the very apparent
reduction by dint of his paternal power. that is his diviner and primal
existence, rising and being renewed and returning to the Father, that
is to the Father's existence and potentiality.'·'
Marius leaves us in no doubt that the Son when he was incarnate
had a human soul. At one point he states that the Son assumed
universal human soul or mind in order to save men's souls:
7744 (135, 136); but Marius is by no means dear here.
78 Adv. A,ium 3 I (273).
"Ibid. J2 (274).
80 47 (139. 140).
81 5 1 (147. 148).
549
 The Rival Answers Emerge
He took the whole (universalem) logos of flesh. 'But he also took the
whole logos of soul. For it is clear that he had (the logos) of soul, since
the Saviour says' -and then follow a string of texts from both Old and
New Testaments designed to show that Christ, both pre-existent and
incarnate. had a human soul. He showed anxiety, anger and desire. s2
Later in the same book Marius explains that God is never said to have
a soul. He is discussing Jn 10:17-18, where Jesus speaks of laying
down his soul (life, psyche) by his own authority. Divine spirit,
Marius says, is far superior to soul:
'We must therefore conclude that logos and pneuma 3fe superior to the
soul by reason of their higher substance, and that the substance of the
soul is very different and inferior, because it was breathed in by God
and generated' (genita).83
The soul, he goes on to say, which was made in the image of God is
inferior to God and to the Logos, and not to be identified with either.
It can be taken up or laid down. It can be called homoiousios with the
Logos (but not, one is left to infer, homoousios). Spirit. when it assumes
anima (soul) descends to the world and when it lays down the soul it
leaves the world.·'
Marius Victorinus, then, accepted, at least in theory, a full doctrine
of the Incarnation, in which the Son assumed not only human flesh
but human soul and made some tentative attempts at explaining how
this could take place within the theological framework which he
adopted. But, being a thorough Platonist in the tradition of late
Greek philosophy, he inevitably showed more interest in the relation
of the Son/Logos to the Father and to the world than in the doctrine of
the Incarnation.
4. Marius Victorinus' Doctrine of the Trinity
Marius Victorinus does not neglect the doctrine of the Spirit. He
declares on more than one occasion that God is Spirit:
,':
;~
82Adv. A,ium Il!.3 (196 (from which the quotation comes), 197). The texts are
Matt. 26:3; Ps 16(15): 10(11); Ezek. 18:4; Matt. 10:15 (which MV mistakenly
imagines to have been spoken at the incident of the cursing of the fig-tree); Matt.
26:39·
83 11 (210, 211. quotation 211).
84Ibid. I2 (211, 212).
550
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
'If God is spirit and Jesus is spirit and the Holy Spirit is spirit, the three
are, ~r~m one sub~tance, a~d so the three are homoousion. The Holy
Spint IS from ChrIst as Chnst is from God and there One is Three. '85
God is 'spirit, perfect and beyond spirit'.·6 The word 'spirit' means to
live and to be life and to give life. God is spirit both as Father and as
Son and as Holy Spirit, and so to the same conclusion, the three are
consubstantial.· 7 The Spirit is the substance of all three, but there is a
difference, which he does not at this point elucidate, except to say,
confus!ngly, tha( it 'belongs to substance' (substantialis).·. The Spirit
IS also. th~ p,?mal inw.ard movement, w?ich is the Father's thought'
(excog,tatto) , that IS, hiS thought about himself. For super-thought is
higher than thought.'·' There is, he says later, 'a double potentiality
of the Logos towards God, one revealed (in manifesto), Christ in the
flesh, the other secret (in occulto), the Holy Spirit ... So all Three are
One, the Father silence which is not silent, but a voice in silence; the
Son, next, the voice, the Paraclete the voice of the voice'. 90 The
reference to the Spirit as secret means the Holy Spirit in the hearts and
minds of believers, as is evident in a passage in a later book:
:Next the Holy Spirit is in another mode Jesus Christ himself, secret,
mward, conversing with souls, teaching (the foregoing) and giving
ways of understanding, generated (genitum) by the Father through
Chnst and In ChrIst, because of course Christ is the only-begotten
(unigenitus) Son'.91
This is in one sense fairly traditional, but not in another. What does it
mean to call the Holy Spirit 'voice of a voice'? And if the Holy Spirit
IS generated (or begotten), then either the Son is not only-begotten or
he IS Identical with the Spirit.
Marius tries to explain the relation of the Son to the Holy Spirit in
other passages:
'But Jesus and the Holy Spirit are motion, indeed motion in
movement, operating then outwardly, but Jesus is the Spirit openly,
"Adv. Arium I(IV)14 (74); cf. 8 (64,65), and 16 (78).
, "Ibid. so (145).
87 Ad,,: ~r.jum IV ..IO (238, 239). Cf. Adv. Ar. 1.15 (75) where he insists that the
Holy Spmt IS also light and substance along with the Son and the Father
"Adv. Arium 1.55 (152). .
'9Ibid. 57 (156).
9°13 (72); the formula is repeated Adv. Arium 111.16 (21 9).
91 Adv. Arium IV.33 (27 6 ).
55!
 The Rival Answers Emerge
that is in the flesh, but the Holy Spirit is the secret Jesus, for it is he who
inspires ways of understanding. no longer he who does miracles or
speaks in parables', 92
If God is homoousios with Christ, then Christ must be homoousios with
the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit consequently also homoousios
with God. The Holy Spirit has come forth from God ... he is
knowledge and understanding and existence and power and
potentiality for knowledge. The text 'he has all things from me'
shows that the Spirit is distinct from the Son, because 'he' and 'me'
are distinct. 93 Marius also thinks that the Triple Name in which
Christ commands baptism to be given at Matt. 28:1!)-20 shows that
Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the same (idem) 'distinct of course in their
method of operating, because one teaches understanding and the
other gives life'. And thisshows that not only God and Christ but also
the Holy Spirit is homoousios. 94 In his hymns Marius also refers to the
Holy Spirit as 'begotten' or 'generated', and also calls him notio,
(recognition or knowledge, but nearer the former) and conexio (link,
an idea which he does not develop in his prose works).95
There are several Trinitarian formulae to be found in the works of
Marius Victorinus:
'But the Three are One and the One Three and the Three are thrice
One, and the One is the same and sole.'96
They occur more often in his hymns, 'Love, Grace, Com-
munication', or 'Majesty, Movement out, Return' or 'Substance,
Form, Recognition',97 or 'Existence. Life, Understanding',98
The last formula Marius actually turns into a model for the Trinity
92Adv. Arium III.I4 (215).
93 Adv. Arium IV .17 (249.250). MV's staccato and note-like style makes it difficult
to determine his exact meaning: 'He has all things from me' is a kind of summary of
In 16:14-15. MV often quotes the Bible in a carele~s way. cr. Adv. Arium 1.47 (141)
'So we confess the Holy Spirit also who has all things from God the Father, because
the Logos, that is Jesus Christ, gives him everything which Christ has from the
Father'.
94Ibid. 18 (251,252). It is not clear which Person does what, but on the whole it is
likely that MV means that the Spirit teaches but the'Son gives life.
9SHymn III, lines 104-5 (298) and 151-4 (300); 242--7 (303). This new concept
suggests that the hymns should be put later in MV's theological development than
Hadot postulates.
96/n Candidum 31 (47).
"Hymn III lines 42-45, 71-'4 (296, 297), 151-4 (300).
"Adv. A,ium 111.4 (198).
55 2
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
which was destined to be taken up by Augustine many years later. He
calls it an 'example' (exemplum), and instances the possibility of sight,
s~eIng ItSelf, and understanding. 99 He occasionally attempts to
dIStIngUIsh the Persons, but never in any way that gives promise of
clarity. He can speak of all three
'having substance and always simultaneously homoousioi, but
p?s~essing their own subsistence [by which he means Person] with
dlvme love (affectione) according to their activity.'10o
In a carefully phrased passage he states that there is no existence which
precedes the three:
'For the Father is the generator of his own substance and is the
originating existence (fontana exsistentia) of the others according to his
supreme position (secundum verticem) - and yet in spite of this fact
~either the existence nor the potentiality is divided in the very Being
~m eo 9uod est esse) of these three as far as majesty ... which generates
Itself IS concerned - for the Father confers both very Being in a
particular mode and very Being. 101
This is an attempt, though not a markedly successful one, to
dIStIngUISh the Persons. And so is the very odd statement which
follows soon after that the Son is he
'who is in the middle in the hinge (angulo) of the Trinity, he declares
the super-existent Father and completes the Holy Spirit to
perfection'. 102
. For Mariu.' Victorinus, says Mary Clark, if the One is in any way,
It must have ItS Logos, but 'latent and hidden, so that to be Logos itself
IS "to be", or rather the Logos itselfis nothing other than the very "to
be"', and this 'to be' includes life and understanding. 103 This is one
wa y of envisaging a philosophical Trinity which shall not be
inconsistent with the Christian Trinity. And Simonetti can describe
this writer's doctrine of the Trinity as 'the most organic and
profound put forward during the controversy, rich in points which
.
could have been fruitful'.'04 Both these statements are true, and yet
.
99Ibid. 5 (199, 200), visio, videre. discernere.
looAdv. Arium 1.16 (7 8).
IOIIbid. 55 (152, 153).
IO'Ibid. 56 (154).
1030 p. cit. 157.
l04Crisi 298.
553
 The Rival Answers Emerge
there is a serious flaw in Marius' Trinitarian doctrine. He cannot
avoid giving an impression of near-Sabellianism in his theology,
because he does not appear to have the resources to distinguish the
Persons of the Trinity satisfactorily. We have seen that he describes
God as Spirit in all his manifestations, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
but he finds it difficult to distinguish the precise mode of proper
existence of the Holy Spirit and he appears at times to identify Christ
and the Holy Spirit. This was, of course, a widespread problem in the
fourth century and no theologian can be said to have dealt with it
quite adequately. When he wishes to distinguish his ideas from those
of Basil of Ancyra and his school he comes close to saying that the
Three enjoy a numerical identity of ousia with almost no saving
clause to suggest that they are not just aspects of the one God. And to
say that God is existence, life and understanding, with human vision
as a model, is to ignore, what Augustine when sailing in the same
waters did not ignore, that their application to a single subject
strongly suggests Sabellianism if the model and the application of the
model are not qualified. 'And so', he can write, 'the Son will be the
same as the Father, or neither the Father nor the Son existed before
the movement outwards (egressumforas) but there was a sole One'.'os
This is Marius' idiosyncratic way of expressing the eternal generation
of the Son if we assume (as we are entitled to) that he prefers the
former alternative. But it leaves a decidedly Sabellian taste in the
mouth. Even in those passages where he tries hardest to distinguish
the Three, he scarcely succeeds in distinguishing more than three
functions of the one God, origination, activity, recognition (or
cogitation or ratiocination).'06 The Father is existentia and
substantialitas, the Son the act or movement of that existence and
supply of substance - and the Spirit? Well, his last word is probably to
be found in the third Hymn: the Spirit is recognition (or idea or
cognition - notio), but all recognition is recognition of form and all
form is of substance. So we have (in reverse order) Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, the blessed Trinity.,07
It only remains to be noted that Marius Victorinus is well aware of
the difficulty of speaking in human terms of God. His apophatic
theology is a sufficient guarantee of this. It is indeed, he says, a sin to
l05Adll. Arium IV.26 (266). Hadot notes this passage in Marius Victorinus 271.
l06E.g. Ad". Arium III,I7. 18 (222-223).
'·'Hymn II1.187"""!>I (lOI).
554
The Western Pro-Nicenes III: Marius Victorinus
speak about God~ his existence and its mode and not adore but to wish
to explain divinity in human speech. But because we have the Holy
Spirit we have 'a partial knowledge' (partilem cognoscentiam) of God,
but we also suffer from ignorance of God as well as knowledge. In
faith, however, we have 'perfect knowledge' .'08 Presumably he
means, perfect knowledge as far as it goes. Certainly Marius is no
Gnostic. He is quite sure that knowledge of God is available to us, and
is ready to explain how:
:For when the k~owledge is latent and within itself, not entering into
Itself from outsIde, but according to its nature, immersed in that
which is Being, is immanent, it is of such a form that it could be
kno~able; when knowledge is aroused, as it were moving out,
look,?g all round itself, it has made itself knowledge, by knOWing
Itself It becomes knowable, having been rendered knowable to itself'
(cognoscibile suum Jacta).109
This is an intensely philosophical statement. Marius Victorinus
cannot be otherwise. But it allows that man can know God by
revelatIOn by God's self-communication.
It is customary to point out that the work of Marius Victorinushad
virtually no influence upon his contemporaries, and nobody could
deny thIS fact. It IS also customary to deplore this lack of influence.
We must certainly admire the competence, the erudition and the
originality of this writer. He deliberately turns his back on Tertullian.
He works out his own theology using his own resources, which are
mdeed much greater than those of his contemporaries in the West.
But, in the first place it is highly doubtful if any of his Latin-speaking
contemporaries could have understood him, even had they read his
works, and Jerome more than hints at this. And in the second place
Manus V,ctonnus was completely unacquainted with the work of
any contemporary Eastern theologian (except Basil of Ancyra),
sk,lled m Greek though he undoubtedly was. His theology might
have been rather better balanced if he had had this acquaintance,
rather less rarefied, rather more aware of its weaknesses. One could of
Course prefer the theory that Marius knew of the work of Athanasius
but that he chose to ignore it. But it comes to much the same thing. It
was for understandable reasolls that Marius Victorinus was not read.
1081n Candidum 32 (47. 48).
109 Adv. Arium IV.24 (261, 262); cf. I1I.6 (200-2).
555
 The Rival Answers Emerge

He was, however, appreciated. Thirty years ~fter his death AU~d';,'t~:

heard the story of his conversion recounted m Mdan wl~:r h . d
may not have been understood. He was remembered an onoure, 18
and his theological works were preserved.

Homoian Arianism

I. The Identification of Homoian Arianism

It is very easy to confuse Homoian Arianism with Neo-Arianism, but

they are in fact two distinct schools of Arianism. There are distinctive
features in Neo-Arianism; by this term we mean, following
Kopecek's useful label, the Arianism of Aetius and ofEunomius, the
brand of Arianism favoured by Philostorgius and attacked by the
Cappadocian theologians, and especially by Gregory of Nyssa. It is
distinguished by a careful use of Greek philosophical terms, of
Aristotelian logic and late Platonic philosophy, by a disinclination to
allow that the Son was begotten rather than created, by a conviction
that knowledge of God is easily open, not only to the Word, but to
everybody, and by a frequent and indeed critical use of the concept
and term 'ingenerateness' (agennesia), and it is virtually confmed to
Greek-speaking theologians. Homoian Arianism is a much more
diverse phenomenon, more widespread and in fact more long-
lasting; but it too has, within wider limits, certain recognizable
features. It occurs both in Greek-speaking and in Latin-speaking
writers. It is little interested in philosophy on the whole.
The identification of Homoian Arianism is rendered all the more
difficult because its two leading exponents tended at times to betray
its principles or stray outside its limits. Akakius at one point
apparently accepted the homoousion and Eudoxius on occasions
patronised Neo-Arians until the later part of his career. Homoian
Arianism is that theology which was most notably expressed in the
Second Creed of Sirmium of 357 and in the creed of Nice-
Constantinople which was temporarily registered as ecumenical in
360. It was a development of the theology ofEusebius of Caesarea in a
direction which can be thought of as distinctive ofArius' theology
because it always sedulously avoided introducing the word ousia or
its compounds into accounts of the relation of the Father to the Son. It
556 557
 The Rival Answers Emerge
usually preferred to describe the two as 'like' without further
qualification. This was not, on the whole, because it wished to leave a
wide margin for diverse interpretations of the word 'like'; if that
were its raison d'2tre it could not have objected to homoousion. But it
genuinely held that further qualification of the term 'like' was bound
to introduce elements in the likeness which contradicted the account
of the Father and the Son in the Bible. Homoians of course had no
objection to the expression 'like according to the Scriptures', but they
realised, as everybody else must have realised, that this left wide open
the question of what the Scriptures said about this likeness.
Though Homoian Arianism derived from the thought both of
Eusebius of Cae sa rea and of Arius, we cannot with confidence detect
it before the year 357, when it appears in the Second Sirmian Creed,
and immediately precipitates a crystallisation of a number of different
theological positions which had till that point been confused or no
more than latent. In trying to give an account of it, therefore, we
must be careful only to use those sources which we know to reflect
Arianism at or after that date, and which are not merely giving us
conventional ideas of what Arius himself or early Arians were
supposed to have held. The views of people whom Athanasius in his
works called 'the Arians', for instance, cannot be taken to represent
Homoian Arianism, nor the ingenious but unrepresentative
'Candidus' of Marius Victorinus, nor Arianism as described by
Lucifer of Calaris. The later Hilary, Phoebadius of Agen, and some
sources within the Historia Akephala, on the other hand, will give us
fairly trustworthy information about it. So will Epiphanius and
Ambrose if we use them with care, for neither was a subtle critic of
Arianism, and so will Philostorgius, if we remember his strong
prejudice against any views which were not those of Aetius and
Eunomius. And there is quite a large range of original Arian
documents to help us in our examination. It is perhaps not widely
realized that we can discover no less than twelve creeds or rules of
faith which are Homoian or at least produced by authors who were at
one time Homoian, some of which we have looked at already. They
are as follows:
1. The Second Sirmian Creed of 357 (see above, PP.344-5).
2. The Creed of Nice (Constantinople) 360 (see above, p. 380).
3. The Creed put forward by Akakius at Seleucia, 359 (see
above, PP.373-4).
558
Homoian Arianism
4· The Rule of Faith of Vlfilas (see above, p. 105).
5· The Creed uttered by Vlfilas on his death-bed 383 (see
above, pp. 105-6). . '
6. The creed attributed to Eudoxius, part of which is quoted
above (p. 112).
7· The Creed of Auxentius of Milan, 364 (see above, pp. 46~).
8. The Creed which Germinius professed when corresponding
With Valens and Vrsacius (see below, p. 594).
9· Palladius' Rule of Faith (see above, p. 104 n 19), given by
Gryson ScoUes Ariennes 234, (39).
10, 1 I, 12. Three credal statements to be found in the fragments
of Mai/Gryson and Turner, all of them drastically
subordinating the Son to the Father. 1
As we examine the content of Homoian teaching we shall see the
vanous articles of these creeds or rules of faith exemplified one by
one.
It is often alleged that the Arians tended, in distinction from others
to aVOid allegorising. It is not true that they completely eschewed th~
practice. Almost no expounder of the Bible in the ancient world is
free from some use of allegory.2 But they tend to take Scripture
lIterally m the sense that they insist upon the actual meaning of
metaphorical. or ~nalogical language used of God, scarcely
recogmzmg I~S equivocal nature. They prided themselves on their
appeal to SCripture. They were touching a raw spot with the pro-
Nlcenes when they pomted out that homoousios and ousia did not
?ccur in the Bible. 'We do not call the Holy Spirit God', says a writer
m ~~ Mal/Gryson fragments, :because Scripture does not call him
(so). Maxlmmus, debatmg With Augustine, declares
'We believe the S~riptures. and we respect those divine Scriptures;
and we do not WIsh to pass over a single jot, because we fear the
danger which is set out in the Scriptures themselves' (Deut 4:2).4
At every point of COurse the Arians produce their trump card, Prov
IGryson Scripta A,riana Latina Fr. 14(250) and 22 (263-4) [Mai Script Vet N
C;0Il.l.zID-II]; Fr."6(z37-8) [VIII 223-4]; C. H. Turner 'An Arian.Ser~on; p ~8
hnes 2-8. .
2Z eiIler observes, Origines 504. that the anonymous Arian Commentary on Job uses
allegory freely.
lGryson Scripta Arriana 23 (265) [1I(212)].
4Collatio Augustin; 13 (7~O).
559
 The Rival Answers Emerge
8:22; here quite plainly God had written that he created Wisdom (Le.
the Logos) the beginning of his ways. They insisted that the Greek
word 'created' (;;"ncr&v) meant exactly what it said. They pointed out
that the word 'god' in the Bible was in several places applie~ to bemgs
much inferior to God Almighty (and was therefore apphcable In a
reduced sense to Christ), e.g. Exod 7: I, Ps 82(81):6. S Like everybody
else involved in the controversy, they used Isa 53:8 ('His generation
who shall declare?'), but in their case it was cited to preclude
impertinent speculation about the Son's birch from the Fa~her's ousia.
So certainly the composers of the Second Creed of SlrmlUm .of 357
had argued. 6 Hilary sets out a long list of texts used by Arrans to
demonstrate the incomparability of the Father: he alone IS God (Deut
6:4, Mk 12:29. I Tim 2:5); he alone is wise (Rom 16:25-27); he alone
is in generate and alone true (Isa 65:16;Jn 17:3); he alone is good (Mk
10:18); he alone is powerful (I Tim 6:15); he alone is unchangeable
and immutable (Mal 3:6; James 1:17), and so on for another eight sets
of texts. 7 From the same source we learn of the texts which they
adduced to show the ignorance of the Logos - Mk 5:30, 9:32;Jn I I :34
and 14, 16:30.8 The anonymous Commentator on Job believes that
the book ofJob must have been originally written in Arabia before
the Exodus' Syriace', which may mean in Syriac, or in Aramaic, and
was translated into Hebrew by Moses; such lofty affairs as the
conversation of God with Satan in heaven could only have been
revealed to someone as inspired as Moses, and he compares the
interchange between the Father and the Son (as he takes it) at Gen
I :26. He apparently took both conversations as having literally
happened." But he does not carry his literalism to extremes. You
must not be surprised, he says, to find the angels descrrbed as conung
to stand before Job Gob 2:1): in the Psalms God can even be described
as 'like a strong man with a hangover' (Ps 78(77):66(65))! Clearly
neither is meant to be taken aU pied de la lettre.'o But he insists that Job
must have spent three and a half months (not as some said, years, in
5S 0 Hilary De Trin. VII.IO; cf. Phoebadius Con. Arianos 3(15). For Arian proof-
texts see Meslin Les.Ariens 230-43.
6Cf. Simonetti Studi 17S n 79.
'De T,in. IV.S.
'[X:66.
9PG 17:373. 374. But at 1(401-2) he modifies this; the devil could only have stood
before God in thought and in intention.
1011 (449): the quotation runs tanquam potens crapulatus ,a vino.
560
H omoian Arianism
imitation of the length of our Lord's earthly ministry) on the
dunghill because at Job 1'3 Job complains that he is 'allotted months
[not years] of emptiness'." The strict word of Scripture must be
adhered to. Gryson remarks the peculiar emphasis laid by Arians on
the fact that their faith was Scriptural: 'What I read I believe', he
quotes, and 'truth is discovered not from argument but is proved by
reliable proof-texts'. '2 Epiphanius alleges that the Arians rejected the
Epistle to the Hebrews as non-Pauline, and in this he is supported by
13
Theodoret. But as a little later Epiphanius, with characteristic
inconsistency, says that the Arians take Heb 3:1 (,faithful to. him that
made him') as a proof that the Son is a creature, we need not take this
statement seriously, 14
. Gwatkin ~peaks of th~ 'spe~ious charity and colourless
mdefimteness ~f the HomOlan Arrans.'s But this charge is quite
unJustified. Their formul~e .of 357 and 359/60 were not designed to
mclude a large range of opmlOns, but to state specifically what in their
view could be said of the Son's relation to the Father within the limits
of Scripture. The hostility which they manifested to Homoousians
Homoiousians a?d ultimately to Eunomians when they gained
control of Imperral pohcy does not suggest an irenic spirit ready to
welcofi';e all comers. Gryson points out that they always maintained
that theIrS was the true, tradmonal faith and were ready on occasion
to. appeal to remoter prede~essors such as Cyprian and Theognis of
Nlc~ea, and they always disavow the epithet 'Arian'.'. Palladius,
arraigned by venomous and prejudiced judges at Aquileia, knows
very well where he stands and can on occasion leave the officious
Ambrose uncertain as to what to say. To hold wrong doctrine about
God, says the Arian Vandal king Thrasamund, is to blaspheme him
and wrong him. 17
"II (474) .
.12ScoIies Arie.nnes I7S~. But Gryson is, ~istaken in thinking that Palladius (his
chief s<:>urce of mformao<>.n here) was a disciple of Eunomius. He is manifestly an
Homman, not an Eunomlan.
13E . h .
pip amus Panarion 69.37.2(185). Theodoret Praef. Comm. on Hebrews (PG
82:673).
14Epiphanius ibid. 69.37.1, 3 (I8S).
lsSA 168.
16Sco lies Ariennes 178'"""9.
17Fu~gentius ofR~spe Obiectiones Regis Trasamundi (Fraipont) 69. On Arian rites
of baptIsm, see Meslm Les Ariens 382-'7.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Z. The Theology of the Homoian Arians
From Epiphanius and Ambrose, neither of whom penetrated very far
into the raison d' 2tre of Arianism, we can gam an outline of the stock
arguments used by these Arians . They pointed to the ig~lOrance of
Jesus as a sign of the limitations of the Logos, and to hIS apparent
disavowal of goodness.'· They claim that the Son is a creature,'· that
20
he was chosen and called by grace and not produced by nature.
They say that the Son was produced wholly from the will of the
Father and that the word 'beget' when applied to him must be taken
metaphorically (though references to his being created are literal).2.'
They produce Christ's being raised from the dead as a proof of hiS
inferiority to the Father.'2 The Agony in the Garden shows hIS
infirmity.23 The reference by Christ to 'the only ~rue God' (In 17:~f!)
indicates that he himselfis not true God,24 and hiS askmg something
of the Father in prayer shows that he cannot be equal to the Father .2'
Inevitably the Ariaus argue Christ's subordination from Paul's
explicit statement of it at 1 Cor 15:28. Ambrose superficially
summarizes Arianism in a brief account:
the Arians say that the Son is unlike the Father, that he began in time,
that he is created, that he is not good [this is wholly untrue), that he IS
not true God nor almighty for creation was made, not by him, but
only through him, and that his divinity is not one with the Father's.26
18Epiphanius Ancoratus 17.2--6 (25. 26); 18.1, .2 (26); Panarion 69.57.1 (204);
Ambrose De Fide V.I6.189-9a (a87, 288), 19Jtf (a89ft) , 198 (29 1).
19Epiphanius Ancoratus 46.1, 5 (56).
2·Ibid. 49.2 (58).
21 52.1-5 (60,61); 53.1-8 (6I-J).
22Panarion 69.59.1 (206,207); c( Liebart Deux Homelies 1.25.90 .
"Ibid. 69.60.1, 2 (208).
2469.27-1-'7 (176-'7), J.I (180). . not dying, the relation of one is placed above the other in his
2569.29.1 (17 8). The Arian reproach to the pro-Nicenes that 'they are opposmg
the imperial commands and the inclination.ofthe Empero.r Vale~s' (69.34.1 (182»
shows that Epiphanius is here dealing wlth ~e J:iomOlan Anans and not ~he
Eunomians whom Valens did not favour. Meshn gIVes a good summary of A?an
arguments 'us Ariem 303-23. except that he does not distinguish the Homolans
from the Eunomians.
26De Fide 1.$.34-42 (16-18). It is in this passag~ that Ambr?se p.r~duces hIS
famous statement that 'it did not please God to save his people bydIaiectIc (40 (11.))'
We do not wonder that a few years later Ambrose fou~d it difficult to cope wI.th
Palladius' arguments. The reference to I Cor IS:28 IS to be found at De Fine
V.I2.148tf (269ft).
Homoian Arianism
If we take Homoian doctrine detail by detail, we shall fmd that its
main pillar is the incomparability of God the Father, but not
specially, as with the Eunomians, his ingenerateness. Hilary says that
the adjectives which the Ariaus apply to the Father are 'alone good,
alone powerfnl, alone immortal', and they allege that he is of a nature
which is 'unapproachable, invisible, inviolable, indescribable,
infinite, provident, powerful, benevolent, active, penetrating and
immanent within and without everything in everything'.27 The
same note is struck in a fragment from Mai/Gryson. Here we are told
that
'the Father is a unique simple spirit. alone good, alone possessing
immortality and dwelling in light unapproachable. The Son is unique
in that proper nature which the Father has given him, for he cannot be
compared to the Father. Nor can the Spirit be compared to the Son for
he was made by the Son and according to the Scriptures comes in third
place. Nor can anything which received its being through God's
providence be compared with him.'28
The Sermo Arianom", given us by Augustine in a series of brief
propositions sets out the symmetrical subordination of the Son to the
Father and of the Spirit to the Son. The Father is incomparably
greater than the other Two, has no equal and no creditor, and is
different from the Son in all sorts of respects - nature, order, rank,
relation, dignity, power, activity.2. Palladius, in the fragments of his
reply to Ambrose printed in Gryson's Scolies Ariennes, comes to deal
with the pro-Nicene epithet applied to the Persons of the Trinity,
'similar' (indifferentes). He deals with it by producing a careful
theological statement wholly repudiating it:
'When you say that the Three are also similar you do not realize that in
the titles of Father as much as of Son, and in generating and in being
born, and in taking a body and not taking it, in dying also for us and
guaranteed rank, that is the Father is superior to the Son - further
because the Father sends the Son, and the Son sends the Paraclete. the
Father delivers the Son to suffering, the Holy Spirit in the function of a
servant everywhere proclaims the Son, and again the Son glorifies the.
.
27De Trin. X1.4.
2'19 (a58-9) [III (aIJ)J.
29Serm . At. PL 42:13-31 (680--2).

The Rival Answers Emerge
Father and the Paraclete Spirit the Son, the Son bears witness to the
Spirit, the Holy Spirit is the witness to the Son with the apostles and
through the apostles, the Son speaks what he hears from the Father,
the Holy Spirit brings to the apostles what he has heard from the Son,
the Sonissent in the name of the Father, the Holy Spirit in the name of
the Son the Father redeems the Church by the suffering of the Son,
the Hol~ Spirit gathers and teaches the church redeemed by Christ's
blood by his superintendence, in fact he appoints bishops in it for the
honour of his Lord and orders ministries and distributes grace - a clear
and obvious dissimilarity (differentia) can be seen in the Persons and it is
certainly not satisfactory to refer to the Three as similar .'30
Because Palladius' 'Trinitarian' doctrine consists of one High God,
one demi-god and one superior angel, function alone will suffice to
differentiate. He hardly needs distinctions of Persons (though he can
use the term personae) because he already recognizes distinctions of
ontological condition.
Homoian Arianism does not maintain that the Son was created by
the Father 'out of non-existence' (&~ OIl" l)VTOlV) though its opponents
constantly accuse it of holding this view. We have seen that Palladius
shows no disinclination to use the language of generation and birth of
the Son. Hilary says that the Arians argue that nothing can be born of
one, but only of ""0, and therefore the Son cannot really be
generated by God:
'God who is unchangeable can give no birth to anyone born from
him, because that which is not changed is not capable of accepting an
addition, and the nature of him who is solitary and single does not
possess in itself a capacity to generate.'31
We cannot dogmatically state that the Homoians did not teach this,
but the doctrine is more like that ofEunomius than that of Palladius.
Maximinus in controversy with Augustine explicitly denies that he
teaches that the Son was produced from non-existence:
'We do not teach, as you libellously allege, that just as the rest of the
creation was made out of nothing, so he (the Son) was made from
nothing like one of the creatures. [n fact just listen to the authoritative
statement of a council, because in Ariminum our fathers, among other
3°318,320.136. I have found it necessary at one or two points to tidy up Palladius'
somewhat breathless syntax.
31De Trin. VII.3.
Homoian Arianism
statements, said this "If anyone says that the Son is from nothing, and
not from God the Father, let him be anathema"" And Maximinus
quotes IJn 5:1 which explicitly ascribes generation to Christ. 32
Thrasamund declares robustly that God created, generated and
established the Son. 33 Fulgentius in his reply challenges Thrasamund
to say whether, if the Son is not from the Father's substance, then
from what is he, 'from nothing, or from some other source?' But he
knows the answer that the king will make: 'the Son is born from the
will of the Father'. 34 Thrasamund will not say 'from nothing'.
This was in fact the stock teaching of Homoian Arianism on the
origin of the Son. He was created from the Father's will, not his
nature, and this could be called either creation, though it must be
distinguished from the creation of everything else, or begetting. 35
Everything concerned with Christ's origin and mission was done at
the will and command of the Father. 'The Father generated the Son
unchangeably and impassibly by his will; the Son by his power alone
without effort or weariness made the Spirit'.36 And the Father's will
superintended the Son's creation of the world, his Incarnation and
death. 37 The Father:
'With consciousness. power and will created, established. generated.
made the Son before everything, according to what he, God the
Father almighty, wished, determined and ordered for the Son, so that
through him all things created, established, made and born existed and
are ruled by the command of the Father. '38
The Homoians were just as anxious as the pro-Nicenes to protect
God the Father from suffering, perhaps even more so. But they were
perfectly ready to say that God the Son suffered. Indeed, their
Christology was specifically designed to do so. Here, whatever we
32Collatio 13 (730).
33Fulgentius Obiectiones 67.
34lbid. Responsa 81.
3SSee the very full exposition of this point in Gryson. Scolies Ariennes 185"""95. C£
also the statement attributed to Demophilus the Arian bishop of Constantinople by
Philostorgius. above p. 101. Demophilus was certainly an Homoian, not an
Eunomian.
36Sermo Ar. 687.26.
"Ibid. 679.4, 680.8, 682.34.
38Gryson Scripta Ar. Frag. 5 (234). Cf. the Anonymous Commentary on Luke which
insists peremptorily that the Father begot the Son (at a particular point, of course)
Gryson Scripta Ar. 1.31-2 (204-5).
 The Rival Answers Emerge
may think of their Trinitarian theology, they were on stronger
ground than the pro-Nicenes, whose Christology always seemed to
push them towards the position which they always wanted to avoid
of concluding that the full, authentic Godhead suffered. We have seen
that the Western bishops after Serdica in 343 accused Valens and
Ursacius of saying that the Spirit was crucified and died and was
buried and rose again .. " Phoebadius accuses a contemporary Arian
whom he does not name as holding that 'the Son of God himself
assumed human nature (hominem) from Mary and through it suffered
along with it.'40 The Mai/Gryson fragments witness not
only to the Arian doctrine that the incarnate Word lacked a human
mind or soul, but that the Homoians taught that 'God the Word,
though he was impassible, suffered in the flesh and the incorruptible
God endured corruption, so that he might transform us into
incorruptibility'. But the same author goes on to insist that all that the
Godhead actually experienced was 'insult' (iniuria); the Godhead did
"not die. 41 The anonymous Commentary on Job has a rather different
explanation. Christ at the Agony in the Garden showed sorrow and
fear not because the Godhead was afraid, but because it was necessary
to demonstrate that the flesh was genuinely human. 42 This author
does not disclose whether he thought that Jesus Christ had a human
soul, but it is most unlikely that he did. Even as late as the time of
Fulgentius ofRuspe, the Vandal Arians were maintaining this denial,
and they do this, says Fulgentius, in order that the Son's Godhead
may be exposed to and feel the effect of human infirmity.43 Ambrose
alleged that the Arians ran the risk of saying that the Father
suffered. 44 He failed to see that this was precisely the risk which their
whole system was designed to avoid. Athanasius is approaclting
closer to the heart of the problem which faced both pro-Nicenes and
Arians when he says that what made the Godhead tolerable to men
was the human nature assumed by the Son, not a reduced divinity.4'
It was certainly an item in the Homoian faith that a doctrine of
39See above, P.30I.
40Con. Arianos 19 (27); cf. Liebart Deux Homelies 1.24.88 olh&ycip lbc:mv 6 eeOC; bl
'to cnaupucov 7tap&ytv£t'o 1tu9o<;.
"20 (260) [XIII (228)].
421II (SIS).
43Ad Trasarnundum 1.7.2 (103. 104).
"De Fide 1II.2.13 (113).
450r. con. A,. 11.64.
566
Homoian Arianism
Incarnation meant a reduction of divinity. Its devotees produced
texts to prove that Christ's acceptance ofIncamation showed that he
was a God inferior to the Father-Jn 20:17; Phil2:9,Jn 17:3; Lk 18:9;
Matt 24:36. 46 When the Son became incarnate there must have been
a corruption or reduction of the Father's substance. 47 'How', they
ask, 'did he come to (take) flesh if he is from (tIC) the Father? How
could that illimitable nature put on flesh, ifhe was from the Father by
nature?'4. A fragment from Mai/Gryson contrasts the Father and the
Son in a number of respects, among them' one sends, the other is sent,
one is visible and the other he whom no man saw nor can see, one is
impassible and the other suffered for us ... the Son who said that he
did not know the Day, and the Father who placed (it) in his power',
all to exhibit the Son's inferiority.4> The same sign of inferiority, 'he
does not know the End' (nescitjinem) occurs in another fragment. 5o
Ambrose has also to meet the argument that Christ did not know the
date of the Last Day. 51
Ever since the Second Sirmian Creed of 357, which was the first
clear declaration ofHomo ian Arianism, a drastic subordination of the
Son to the Father had been the keynote of this school of thought.' 2
'Why', says Palladius in his polemic against Ambrose, 'do you speak
of the Father, whose relation to the Son you attack as not consisting in
goodwill, whereas in fact he begat a Son rather subordinated
(subiectum), as he chose, than equal, as you wish?'" The Sermo
Arianorum maintains that the Son is eternally, constitutionally,
subordinated to the Father, even after the necessity of doing anything
to promote our salvation is past. 54 The author of Liebart's Two Arian
46Phoebadius Con. Arianos 4 (15. 16).
47Gregory of Elvira De Orthodoxa Fide 69 (239).
48Epiphanius Panarion 69.15.5 (165).
49 17 (255) [IV 215»). But the Sermo Arianorum declares that Christ is omniscient
(69?4); later Arianism may have shifted its viewpoint here. See above p. tI9. Cf.
Mal/Gryson 22 (263). [I (211)] Hune non proficientem in posterum sed statim perfeetum
... quidem potuit totam virtutem et totam sapientiam in substitutione fiU eonsignans. Hilary
may be travestying Arianism when he attributes to it the doctrine that the Son is not
mature or advanced enough to know the Father's thoughts, De Trin. IX.68.
50Gryson 1.32 (205).
"De Fide 11.11.93. 94 (91).
52S ee Gryson SeoUes Ariennes 191 n 2.
53Ibid. 272.85.
5.4682-3.34. In fact this author in this passage puts himself in the odd position of
saying that the Son obeys because he has to! He regards him as speaking 'from the
Father's foreknowledge', but (as we have seen) still thinks him omniscient. Logic
was not this writer's forte.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Homilies sees the whole of Christ's work, earthly and heavenly, as a
consistent pattern of subordination to the Father. 55 The conviction
that the union between the Father and the Son was one of will, or
goodwill, and not of nature nor substance, was part of this regular
subordination, as Hilary points out in Contra Auxentium. 56 One
could cover pages with passages from Arian writers who construct
elaborate contrasts between the superiority of the Father and the
inferiority of the Son, did one not fear to tire the reader. 57 Some
Arians maintained that God could have been called 'Father' even
before the Word existed and we have seen Asterius adumbrating this
view. 58 But others believed that he could not have held this title until
the Son was created. After the death of Ullilas in Constantinople in
383 the Arians in that city split into two groups over this very point.
Marinus, a Thracian bishop, held the former view and a Syrian called
Theoctistus who was a pastry-cook (hence the sect was dubbed
Psathyropolistae, 'Confectioners') the latter. Dorotheus, Arian
bishop of Antioch, took the more drastic line. 59 The Homoian
Arians, in contrast to the followers of Aetius and Eunomius, were not
particularly interested in philosophy. They do not therefore specially
emphasize, as Arius and his early followers certainly did, the role of
the Son as a convenient philosophical device whereby an
unapproachable, remote God is connected with transience and
human affairs.
It is characteristic of this type of Arianism to teach that the Father is
the God of the Son. The anathema in the Ancyran Document of Basil
of Ancyra directed against this view is pointed at the Homoians, as
Hilary saw. 60 The 'Creed ofEudoxius' describes the Father's nature
as 'not such as to give worship because it is superior' and the Son as
'pious (EU<rE/3ii) because he worship; the Father.'61 'But the Father'
says a Mai/Gryson fragment, 'is God to the Son whose author he is as
551. I 1.70; cf. 1.5.64. where 6 /lEta XU'tEpa tij~ KtiO'ero~ B£<J1t6t;oov must surely mean
'control1ing after the Father'. not, a5 L. translates '[oi Ie maitre de creation avec Ie
Pere',
566.612B.
"See Mai/Gryson 5 (2)6), 14 and 22 (250, 26)-4) [I.2lD-II]; 6 (2)7-8)
[VII.22)-4]; 9 (242-) [X.225-<i]; Turner/Gryson Homilies 1II.65-<i8 (168);
IX·42-'7 ()16-?).
58See ab'ove. p. 33 (frag. IV).
59S ocra tes HE V.27.
"Hilary D.e Synodis 24 (498-9).
61Caspari Aile und Neue QueUen 179-81; Hahn Symbole §I9I, 261-2.
568
Homoian Arianism
he is of everything.'62 The Son worships the Father, but the Father
worships nobody, and has no equal nor creditor', says the Sermo
Arianorum. 63 The Homoians adduced Jn 4:22 for this doctrine, 'You
do not know what you worship, we know what we worship',
pointing out that Christ prayed to the Father. 64 Another way of
putting this was to call Christ the High Priest of the Father, patTis
sacerdos. 65 Hilary says that they appealed to Hebrews 3:1-2 'You
know the apostle and high priest of our confession, Jesus Christ, who
is faithful to him who made him.'"" They also had the habit of
emphasizing, for some reason, that the Father did not judge, but put
all judgment into the Son's hands. 6'
This theology looked very like a doctrine of two gods, one higher,
one lower. Several pro-Nicene writers perceived this. Athanasius had
said at a relatively early stage that the Arians believe in two gods who
differ both in their natures and their powers. 68 The Arian Trinity,
said Hilary, of three diverse Persons is not a unity but a disruption
(discidium).69 Gregory of Elvira had made the same remark,'o and
much later Vigiliusof Thapse echoed the sentiment. 71 But the
Homoians' basic assumptions drove them towards this conclusion,
and they did not try to avoid it. Palladius agrees readily when
questioned by Ambrose that Christ is the visible God (the Father
being the invisible one) and that Christ is not the immortal God (for
he is mortal, that is capable of in some sense encountering death, in
contrast to the Father who is immortal).72 'One God is worshipped
by us', says Maximinus in the Collatio, 'ingenerate, unmade, invisible,
who does not lower himself to human contacts and to human flesh.
But there is a Son according to the Apostle, not a small but a great
62 17 (256) [IV.216].
~368I.24.
64Ambrose De Fide V.4.49. 50 (236).
65Anon. Commentary on Luke 5.14 (220).
66De Trin. V.II. So much for Epiphanius' claim that the Arians rejected the
Epistle to the Hebrews!
67Mai/~rr~on 17 (~S5). [IV.2IS] ,qui, iudjcatu~us es!filius et qui neminem iudicat pater
sed omne JUdiCIUm dedit fillO. The dlgmty of a Just Judge is reserved for the Only-
begotten, Sermo Arianorum 680.9.
68
0,. con. AT. III.I6.
69Coll. Antiar. BII.II.4 (153).
7°De Fide O. 68 (238). first version.
7lDial. con. Arianos PL 62:1.4 (182-3). Gryson. ScoUes Ariennes 191-8, makes the
same observation.
72Gryson ScoUes Ariennes 290, 292.106, 107.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
God'.. And he makes it clear that though he calls the Son God, the one
God is the Father." 'We confess one, and one God', says a
Mai/Gryson fragment, 'not two gods, for we do not describe him as
two ingenerates or two Fathers'.74 And the same fragment makes it
clear that the Arians profess to believe in a Trinity only because the
Scriptures supply them with the three Names of Father, Son and
Spirit. Auxentius of Milan puts the matter a little more tidily:
'I have however never taught two gods: for there are not two Fathers,
so that two gods should be named, nor two Sons: but one Son from
one Father, Sole from Sole, God from God ... consequently we
preach one Godhead.'75
Hilary alleges that the Arians argue, with almost mathematical
precision,
'If there is One, whoever this Other may seem to be he will not be
(God). But if there is Another, then this will not be One, since the
natural order does not permit that where there is Another, there there
will be One, or where there is One, there there will be Another. '76
An Arian Homily edited by C. H. Turner ends with a reference to the
day
'in which the Holy Spirit is sent so that the order of the Trinity should
be recognised: first the Son is sent by the Father, and now the Holy
Spirit is sent by the Son, and the third hour (Acts 2: 1 5) comes in order
that he should manifest himself a third and as bearing a third Person
and having a third substance.'77
One could call this a Trinity; but it consists of a high God who does
not mingle with human affairs, a lesser God who does, and a third -
what?
We have already seen part of the answer to that question: the Spirit
was as rigorously subordinated to the Son as the Son to the Father.
The cherubim and seraphim, says that author of Liebart's Homilies,
cond uct on high a sincere and pure prayer to the Paraclete, the
Paraclete to the Only-begotten, and the Only-begotten to the
"13 (718).
7.22 (264) [I (211)].
75Hi1ary Con. Auxentium IS (618).
76De Trin. VIII.).
77C. H. Turner 'An Ancient Homiliary' I.VII (176). Notice that the three are
apparently of different substances.
57 0
1
Homoitm Arianism
Father. 7• The status of the Spirit in Homoian teaching is
emphatically short of divine. In the Altereatio Heradiani Germinius
argues that the Holy Spirit is created,79 and this certainly implies that,
unlike the Son, he is not God.
'We declare' says a fragment from Mai/Gryson, 'that the Holy Spirit
whom we traditionally say in our creed and our baptism is in the third
place from the Father after the Son is not God the creator, because
nothing is created by him or through him.'80
The Sermo Arianorum says that the Spirit not only is subordinated to
the Father, but that he worships and gives honour to the Son as the
Son does to the Father, and he intercedes with the Son as the Son
intercedes with the Father.· ' This subordination seemea necessary to
the Arians if they were not to conclude that the Holy Spirit is Christ's
brother.· 2 A Mai/Gryson fragment puts the status of the Spirit
concisely:
'He is the first and great work of the Father through the Son, created
through the Son, holy in his nature and possessing a sanctifying power
so as to directly sanctify believers ... this Holy Spirit is neither God
nor Lord, neither creator nor maker, and not to be worshipped nor
adored ... and this Holy Spirit is before all things and on behalf of all
things and above all things, and with all things he alone without a
mediator worships the Son by whom he was made before all things;
just as the Son worships the Father before all things and above all
things, and gives thanks without a mediator alone suitably to him
who begot him before all things.'·3
On this view, we are removed from the Father by a double
mediatorship, that of the Spirit and that of the Son. But Arian authors
are ready to say more positive things about the Holy Spirit than this.
A Mai/Gryson fragment describes him as 'an unique (singularis)
sanctifying power', and says that though he is not God nor Lord
78 11.1.96.
79PG SUPP.1.34s-6; c£ SermoAr. 680.10; 681.6, the Spirit made through the Son;
Mai/Gryson 7 (239) [VI (221)].
8°5 (237) [LX (231)].
81
680-1.13.21; c£ Turner 'An Ancient Homiliary I', II. 166, ergo est unus unigenitus
aput ingenitum patrem, quem ipse Spiritus Sanetus veneralur.
8.250 Germinius Altercatio 349. Maximinus, Collatio IS (733) uses the same
argument.
8321 (261) [XIV (22!r30)]; cf. Vigilius ofThapse Contra Arianos etc. 11.34 (220).
Gryson, Scolies Ariennes 19S-6, gives a good account of the Arian doctrine of the
Spirit.
571
 The Rival Answers Emerge
because he is not a creator but only 'the minister of Christ the Son of
God' in order to sanctify and illuminate everything created by Christ,
still his functions are manifold, and it gives a list of them:
'he teaches and admonishes (us) to keep the command of Christ, and
distributes grace to all believers; he assists- the weakness of our prayer
and intercedes for us with unutterable groans, and at the bidding of
Christ he forgives the sins of the penitent and leads them to the true
and certain knowledge of Christ. He does not speak from himself but
speaks whatever he hears, and he teaches and declares the future to
believers. He confesses that Christ is his Lord and God. '84
The Sermo Arianorum can say that 'the Son is the living and true,
proper and worthy image of the whole goodness, wisdom and power
of the Father, and the Spirit is the manifestation of the whole wisdom
and power of the Son' .85 Elsewhere an Arian writer can call the Spirit
'the Paraclete not a begetter nor begotten but the teacher and leader
and light of our souls'. 86
3. Homoian Arian Polemic
In defending their own theological position and attacking that of the
pro-Nicenes the Homoian Arians were under the constant necessity
of disavowing a position which their opponents as constantly
ascribed to them - that of Anhomoianism. This was the doctrine that
the Son was positively unlike the Father without further
qualification. It is doubtful if anyone ever actually held this
viewpoint, though the Eunomians could perhaps be thought to come
nearer to it than the Homoians. Gwatkin is quite mistaken in saying
that Aetius and Eudoxius gloried in the slogan anhomoios. 87 Arius had
at one point apparently said that the Son is anhomoios as far as
resemblance to the Father in ousia and la~tTJC; (peculiar nature) are
concerned,88 but of·course he would have said that he was like the
8419 (2jg--60) [III (214)]. It is interesting to observe that the writer goes on to
quote Psalms 110:1 and 45:6 to support the last statement. Were the Arians peculiar
in interpreting some of the Psalms pneumatologically rather than Christologically?
85 681.22.
86C. H. Turner 'An Arian Sermon' 28; cf. C. H. Turner 'Maximus of Turin
Contra Judafos' X.30S, where the Spirit is calJed 'Iight.giver' (lucifer). This sermon is
not by Maximus and is clearly Arian, as Turner later acknowledged.
"AC 75.
88See above. pp. 14. 15·
572
Homoian Arianism
Father in other respects. Hilary is certainly travestying any Arian
point of view when he attributes to the extreme Arians (whom he
calls Anhomoians) the view that because the term substance cannot
be applied to God and he cannot generate, therefore there is no Son nor
any like to God. 89 Socrates has an account of a council held in Antioch.
under Euzoius·as bishop of the city, in 361 (Socrates gives the consuls'
names), evidently before the death of Constantius in the November
of that year. Those who attended, Socrates says, were followers of
Akakius who were beginning to regret the formula 'like according to
the Scriptures' of Nice/Constantinople, and wanted to delete 'like'
altogether, openly declaring that 'the Son is altogether unlike the
Father, not only in ousia, but also in will' (Kata POUA.TJ(Jlv). And they
argued that the Son was 'from non-existence' (e~ O\;K 5VtOlV). The
followers of Aetius at that time agreed with this opinion. This is why,
the historian says, the Pro-Nicenes called them Anhomoioi and
Exucontians. But the ventilating of these views roused such opposition
that the Council in the end did no more than re-affirm the Creed of
Nice/Constantinople!O It is conceivable that the more extreme
followers of Aetius might have held views like this, but Socrates hints
that even Aetius withdrew later from this position. Certainly
Eunomius would never have agreed to these doctrines. It is significant
that they could not command support at the council. Arians of all
complexions were sensitive to the charge of Anhomoianism, and
perhaps the Eunomians (one of whose watchwords was heterousion, of
a different ousia) most of all. Philostorgius says that Aetius was, on the
prompting of Basil of Ancyra, accused by the Emperor Constantius
of holding Anhomoian opinions, but he denied the charge stoutly,
saying that, far from holding this position, he believed that the Son
was 'unchangeably like' (u1tapaA.A,UKtOl, O~OlOV) the Father'" and
indeed there is no reason (as we shall see) to doubt this. He would not
of course have said 'unchangeably like in ousia'. But it is interesting to
• observe that in the same passage Philostorgius shows that he thinks
that the expression 'like according to the Scriptures' is not adequate,
1
89Contra Constantium'12 (591).
90Socrates HE n.45; also Sozomenus HE IV .29.1-4. It has been suggested that the
extreme Arian views listed by Epiphanius at Panarjon 72.21.3 (293-4) reflect the
opinion of this radical group. But a careful reading of this passage will show that all
polemic against likeness there is against likeness in ousia, and does not at all exclude
likeness in will.
91Philostorgius HE 4:12.
573
 The Rival Answers Emerge
and prefers to it the watchword heterousion. He evidently considers it
insulting that a believer in the heterousion should be credited with the
title Anhomoian, for he relates elsewhere that Eunomius denied the
anhomoion and accepted readily 'like according to the Scriptures'. 92 It
is even more unjust, it need hardly be said, to brand the Homoian
Arians with the stigma of Anhomoianism.
Stead in an article written some time ago pointed out that, at least
in the intellectual climate of the fourth century, it was quite logical to
maintain that the Son was God or divine while not being fully equal
to the Father, and that the assumption that there was no plausible
halting-place between full divinity and ordinary creaturely status was
by no means obvious. Alexander of Alexandria, he notes, had used
the expression 'a mediating only-begotten nature', and Arius had
declared that the Son's nature was, though created, as much above
that of angels and thrones as theirs is to the nature of worms and
beetles, and had once called the Son 'full God' (7tA.1\Pll<; OBO<;).93
Hilary says that at the Council of Seleucia in 359 he met an Arian who
believed that the Son was like the Father, qua Father, because God can
make anything like himself that he chooses, but not qua God, not in
his substance. 94 Another way of putting the Homoian teaching on
the likeness of the Son to the Father, found frequently in Arian
writings, is to maintain that they were alike in energy or power or
activity (tvtpYBla, virtus. potestas) but not in substance. This view was
condemned in Basil's Ancyran Document, and this condemnation
was approved by Hilary.95 Simonetti points out that these
distinctions left room for a good deal of apparent agreement among
Arians and those whom we cannot properly categorize as such, at
least until events tested the precise nature of their belief.96 Asterius
had of course been ready to say that the Son is the image of the ousia
of the Father'" but Asterius can hardly be taken as a guide to the
92Ibid. 6. I.
93Stead 'Rhetorical Method in Athanasius' 129-30; for the expression of
Alexander, see above, pp. 141-2; Arius' term is to be found in Opitz Urk III. No. 1.4
(3). But when Stead goes on (134) to reproach Athanasius for not taking seriously
the Arian argument that if the Son is wholly like the Father he in his turn should
have a son, it seems to me that he is doing Athanasius an injustice. He was ready to
examine the nature of language about God (see above. pp.435--6) whereas the
Arians, at least those against whom Athanasius is writing, show little sign of having
done so.
94Con. Constantium 14 (592-3).
"Hilary De Synodi, 19 (495).
96Studi 175-8. 97See above, P·36.
574
.;
Homoian Arianism
opinions of Arians nearly thirty years later. Simonetti also maintains
that the Arians who followed Akakius wanted a political solution
above all, and therefore favoured 'like in all things', because this was a
vague formula which could cover all points ofview. 98 It may be that
at one point Akakius was prepared to accept this formula in order to
bring about peace in the Church. But in fact we do not fmd this
expression in any recognizably Homoian creeds or rules offaith. We
know that the followers of Basil of Ancyra welcomed it as capable of
including their favourite term, homoios kat' ousian, and that it was
omitted from the Dated Creed, the Creed of Nice of 359 and the final
Creed of Constantinople of 360. It is not a characteristically Homoian
expression. And Homoian Arians showed little inclination to tolerate
other points of view once they had obtained power under
Constantius from 360 to 361 and under Valens from 364 onwards.
The old idea that Homoian Arianism was a purely political creed
does not correspond to the facts.
In their attack on the Nicene doctrine, Homoian Arians take
several different lines. One is to accuse their opponents of confusing
three different divine realities. The author of Liebart's Two Homilies
in testifying to his orthodoxy claims 'I keep realities (7tpaYl1ata)
unconfused, I do not mingle the hypostases' .99 There is a faint echo
here perhaps of the West's obstinate clinging to the formula of one
hypostasis in the middle of the fourth century. Similarly, Maximinus,
commenting generally on the behaviour of the pro-Nicenes at the
Council of Aquileia, bursts into invective:
Demanding the same divine status for the Son and the Holy Spirit, is 'a
horrible idea' (nefas cogitare). It means 'Three Unbeginning with
common equality, Three Eternals, that is Three Ingenerates, Three
without origin, just as their book treacherously witnesses, or else
Three lndistincts (inresolutos), which of course the falsehood of
Sabellius maintains. '1 00
The accusation that in maintaining the consubstantiality of the Three
the pro-Nicenes are lapsing into Sabellianism is found elsewhere.
Thrasamund says that to use the term homoousion is in effect to say that
98Crisi 266--].
991.12·70.
100Gryson Scolies Ariennes 230, 232.36. The book referred to was some pro-
Nicene profession offaich referred to by Palladius in his book against Ambrose. See
Gryson op.cit. 23 I n 4.
575
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Father, Son and Holy Spirit areidenticaJ.1°1 And the Sermo Fastidiosi,
an Arian tract included in Fulgentius' works, so that he can attack it,
also says that the Homousianiin teaching that the Three are
inseparable and equal identify them.,02 The same charge appears in
an Arian sermon printed by C. H. Turner.,ol Later, in his Col/atio,
Maximinus objected that if you argue that the Holy Spirit is of the
same substance as the Son you are making him a Son of the Father
also. Further, he says, this talk of 'substance' is corporeal, material.
Souls do not generate souls substantially. But he still allows that
'generate' is a proper term to use, for it is used of God in Scripture (Isa
53:8). God effected this generation by power and by will.'04
Curiously, Homoian Arians also managed to accuse the pro-Nicenes
oftritheism as well as of Sabellianism, though they could hardly have
been guilty of both errors. Liebart's Homiliarist ranks along with the
Sabellians 'the children of the heretics who vainly imagine a
consubstantial triad ofgods'.'oS The Anonymous Commentary onJob
suggests that the three bands of raiders ofJob 1:17 allegorically point
to the Nicene party:
'the devil made three horns [which is his inaccurate translation of the
word meaning companies] in the type and figure of that trionymous
sect, and of that heresy of three gods, which has filled the whole earth
like darkness, which sometimes worships the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit as if they were Three, and sometimes worships them as
One, just as the Greek language records, Trinity (triada) or homusion'.
And he complains of their persecution of his c~urch.l06
The strongest expression of this accusation of tritheism comes from
the pen of Palladius writing against Ambrose not many years after
the Council of Aquileia and reflecting with indignation on that
council. In this particular passage he is, however, referring to a pro-
Nicene Council ofSirmium of378,1°7 and he retaliates upon the pro-
Nicene habit of referring to the Second Sirmian Creed of 357 as 'the
101 Fulgentius Obiectiones 68--g.
'02Ibid. Sermo Fastidiosi 2 (28r).
tOl'An Arian Sermon' 23. Mai/Gryson 7 (238--g) [VI.22D-rJ simply complains
that the Pro-Nicenes teach the equality of the Three, falsely call themselves
'orthodox' and persecute the faithful; the writer consoles himself with the thought
that the persecutors are destined for hell. Cf. ibid. 9 (242-3) [X (225-6)].
104Collatio 14 (730-1).
I05Il. II . I06.
106[ (4 2 8).
I07See below, p. 595, n. 173.
Homoian Arianism
Blasphemy ofSirmium' by stigmatizing the utterance of this council
of 378 as another (and this time authentic) 'Blasphemy ofSirmium':
'You thought it right to approve of this sort of biasphem y at Sirmium,
which exhibited to the churches of God a crime of idolatry unheard of
in all past ages. For, as the confession placed in your book proves, you
thought we should believe in three almighty gods, Three eternal,
Three true, Three co-active, Three seated together, Three indistinct,
Three confused, Three lacking nothing in irrationality'
(impossibilitatis).'o,
And Palladius goes on to give a detailed refutation of every adjective
applied to the Three by the pro-Nicenes. We can see how the Arians
managed to believe the pro-Nicenes guilty of two apparently
inconsistent heresies, though anger (not unjustified as far as the
Council of Aquileia is concerned) may have blinded them to the
contradiction.
Finally we must look at a curious document which is certainly
Arian, but the question of which category of Arianism it falls into is
difficult to decide. It is to be found in the Historia Akephala 4.6 (154,
15 6, 15 8), in indifferent Latin. The author has just (ch.5 (154))
mentioned Eudoxius as encouraging the heresy of Aetius and
Patricius bishop ofNicaea, and Eudoxius also, we are told, accepted
thiS creed when he communicated with Euzoius the Arian bishop of
Antioch, and caused Macedonius and Hypatianus to be exiled
because they would not accept 'unlike' and 'creature of the
uncreated'. The author calls the creed 'the Profession (expositio) of
Patricius and Aetius who communicated with Eunomius, Heliodorus
and Stephen."o, It runs thus:
'T~ese are the attributes of God, he is not born, he has no beginning,
he IS eternal, he cannot be commanded, he is unchangeable, he sees
everything, he is infinite, incomparable. almighty, he knows the
future without needing prevision. he has no ruler, and these are not
I08Gryson Scolies Arienn_es 310, 312:128, 129.
I o9~his Patr~cius is otherwise unknown, and it is not easy to fit him into the
successl0~ at Nlcaea ·as far a~ it is known. Heliodorus, bishop of a see in the Libyan
Pentapohs and Stephen ofLlbyan Penta polis both were present at Seleucia in 359 as
followers of Akakius and signed the creed which he presented there (Athanasius De
Synodis 12 (256), Epiphanius Panarion 73.26.4, 7 (300, 301)), and were threatened
with deposition by the Council of Constantinople of 360 because they would not
agree to the condemnation of Aetius (Theodoret HE 1128.3; Philostorgius HE
Vll.6). Cf. Martin Hi't. Akeph. n 105 p. 198.
577
 The Rival Answers Emerge
(the attributes) of the Son. For he is subject to command, is under
authority, comes from nothing (ex nihiQ, has an end (jinem), is not
comparable to the Father (who) surpasses him as the origin of Christ,
he exists llO in dependence upon the Father, he does not know the
future, he was not God but the Son of God, the God of those who are
later than he, and in this he possesses exact likeness to the Father in that
he sees everything that the Father sees, in that he is not changeable in
goodness, but (has) not a Godhead nor nature like his. For ifwe say
that he is born from Godhead, we are saying that his generation is like
that of a serpent and it is an impious statement. l l l And just as a
(bronze) statue produces rust from itself and is eaten away by that rust,
so if the Son is created from the nature of the Father he will eat away
the Father. But the Son is God by the action and initiative in action (of
the Father) naturally and not from his nature but from another nature
. like the Father's but not from himself. 112 For he was made the image
of Goct; and not from God. and by God. If everything derives from
God then the Son (does so) by some means or other (ex alico negotio).
Just as iron when it has rust is reduced. just as a body which produces
worms is eaten away. just as wounds which give out a discharge are
consumed by it, so he who says that the Son is from the Father's
nature. but denies that the Son is like the Father, let him be outside the
church and let him be anathema. Ifwe say that the Son of God is God.
we introduce two ultimate principles (duos ,ine initio). We say that (he
is) the image of God. Anyone who says that he is from God. falls into
Sabellianism, and if anyone says that he does not know the generation
of God. he falls into Manichaeism. And if anybody says that the
substance of the Son is like the substance of the ingenerate Father, he is
blaspheming. Just as white lead and snow as far as their whiteness goes
are like but as far as their nature goes are not like, so also the substance
of the Son is different from the substance of the Father, for snow has a
different whiteness. But if you shut your eyes and retreat from what
the eye (sees) externally. you can say' 13 that the Son is like the Father
It0Repperitur, literally 'is found', an odd term which may disguise a translation
from Greek tupicncEtal, 'is gained, produced',
111 A serpent is taken as an example of one of the vilest of creatures, with whose
birth the Son's birth would on this supposition have some resemblance.
112E/ non ex natura sed ex alia natura similiter ut Pater nee ex ipso is a very obscure
statement which is not much elucidated by Annik Martin's translation 'et non partir a
de la nature du Pere rnais d'une autre nature J semblablement au Pere et non de Lui-m2me',
nor by her n I 13 p. 200 on the words. If we read nee ex alia natura for sed ex alia natura,
then this would be a hit at the Homoiousians, 'nor from another nature like that of
the Father'.
113 vultis audire does not mean 'you can say'. though Martin translates 'on peut
dire'. There may be a mistranslation of original Greek here.
1 Homoian Arianism
in their actIvltIes. Just as the angels cannot comprehend nor
understand the nature of archangels, nor archangels the nature of the
cherubim, nor cherubim the nature of the Holy Spirit, nor the Holy
Spirit the nature of the Only One (unici). nor the Only One the nature
of the ingenerate God.'
This is at first sight a clearly Eunomian document. It reproduces
many ideas to be found in the work of Aetius and ofEunomius, and
Annik Martin in her notes on it in the edition of the Hi,toria Akephala
takes it as such without hesitation. In particular. the objection to
saying that we do not know the generation of God is characteristic of
Eunomius, though this may be simply a counter to the Homoiousian
doctrine on the subject. But. in the first place. though in those notes
she speaks of both Eunomians and Homoians. she does not attempt to
distinguish them. And in the second place'there are certain features of
this creed which do not agree very well with Eunomius' doctrine. It is
doubtful ifEunomius could have said that the Son does not know the
future. And it is quite against his principles to maintain that the Son
cannot understand or comprehend the Father. Of course there are
many points of resemblance here to Homoian doctrine also. It is odd
to find 'from nothing' applied to the Son. because at least developed
Homoianism and developed Eunomianism did not embrace this
doctrine. And neither would have held that the Son has an end
(though both would have ascribed a beginning to him). To say that
he does not know the future but that he sees all that the Father sees is
inconsistent. Again it is noteworthy that the polemic of this work is'
not directed against the Homoousians. but against those who held
that the Son was 'like in substance' to the Father. Further, though the
writer produces one or two interesting analogies, not known
elsewhere. to support his case. there is little or no appeal to
philosophical principles. There is no reason to think that the author of
the Historia Akephala is dating the creed incorrectly when he places it
in the year 360. Perhaps we have here a witness to a phase of Arianism
when the Homoian doctrine had not yet clearly distinguished itself
from that of Aetius or of Eunomius.
4. Homoian People
Akakius of Caesarea is usually regarded as the leader of the Homoian
Arians par excellence. He succeeded Eusebius as bishop of that see in
579
 The Rival Answers Emerge
339 or 340, and remained there for at least twenty-five years. He was
clearly a devoted disciple of his predecessor. ll4 Except for some
extracts from a work against Marcellus written early in his career
given us by Epiphanius, which we shall examine in due course, and
his creed presented at Seleucia which we have already seen.''' no
work which we can with confidence assign to him survives. His role
seems to have been rather that of an eminence grise than of the head of a
vanguard."· Akakius attended all the major Eastern creed-making
councils during the reign of Constantius - Antioch 341, Serdica 343
(when he was among the Eastern bishops), but not apparently
Sirmium 357. He was present at Eudoxius' Council of Antioch of 358
which approved of the controversial Second Creed of Sirmium
(Sozomenus HE IV.12.5), but not at the Council ofSirmium of 359
which produced the 'Dated Creed'. He took a prominent, albeit in-
effectual, part in the Council of Seleucia of 359, where he produced an
entirely colourless creed.''' which did, however, commend the 'Dated'
Creed. He attended the Council of Constantinople early in 360 and
must have approved of the depositions there enacted of those who
belonged to the party ofBasil of Ancyra. We have seen that he at one
point earlier in his career had supported and advanced Cyril of
Jerusalem, but that he had later fallen out with him, though probably
not for doctrinal reasons. llS He was present at the debacle over the
appointment, probation and rejection of Meletius of Antioch"· in
361. And he was also there when at a gathering in Antioch in 361
extreme Arian views were publicly canvassed. 120 But we have no
t 14Socrates HE 11.4.
115S ee above, pp. 373-4.
116For estimates of the role and significance of Akakius, see Gwatkin SA 2IO;
Harnack History of Dogma IV.90; Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichtc' 166-8; Ritter
Konzil von Constantinopei69-7o; Kopecek History 414-18; Simonetti Crisi 326-41.
The theory propounded originally by Mai and entertained by Meslin (Les Ariem
243-4) that Akakius wrote the VIIIth book afthe Apostolic Constitutions has little to
be said for it, if only because MesHn does not distinguish between Homoian and
Eunomian Arianism. Jerome alleges (De Vir. Ill. XCVIII) that Akakius was
responsible for placing Felix in the see of Rome when Liberius was banished. But in
view of the fact that Felix was no follower of the kind of doctrine commended by
Akakius, and the distance between the sees of Caesarea and Rome, this seems
unlikely. We have no evidence that Akakius was among the 'not many' Eastern
bishops who attended the Council of Milan in 355 (Socrates HE 11.36).
117See above, pp. 373-4.
118See above, PP.40o-l.
119See above, pp. 382-4.
120Sozomenus HE IV.29. 1-4.
5 80
Homoian Arianism
reason to assume that he agreed with these views. He is much more
likely to have been among those who prevented the council formally
endorsing them. He certainly was not a patron or supporter of the
views of Aetius or ofEunomius. Philostorgius says that at the council
of Constantinople of 360 Akakius was of the party of the
Heterousians. 12l But as this historian allows the existence of only
two parties there, Homoousians (among whom he includes Basil of
Ancyra and Eustathius of Sebaste) and Heterousians, we need not
press this categorization closely. The same writer tells us that Akakius
at some point, probably late in the reign of Constantius, accused
Eunomius (probably of unorthodoxy) but that when Eunomius was
summoned by Constantius to Antioch to appear at a synod Akakius
simply remained silent and failed to substantiate his accusation. '22
Finally, Socrates gives us an interesting account, which he specifically
says was taken from Sabinus, the historian of fourth-century
councils, of a council held in Antioch in the year 363 during the brief
reign of the Emperor who succeeded Julian. Jovian was known to
support the homoousian doctrine. It was a meeting of the followers of
Meletius, who had returned from exile on Julian's accession, and
those of Akakius (including of course Akakius himself). This council
sent a letter to Jovian roundly endorsing the homoousion:
'To forestall our being numbered among those who misrepresent the
true doctrine, we submit to Your Reverence that we accept and hold
to the creed of the holy Council ofNicaea which was assembled a long
time ago. And when we mention the word in it which is agreed to by
some,123 the homoousion. it has received a sound interpretation among
the Fathers, signifying that the Son was born from the ousia of the
Father and that he is like the Father in ousia; it does not mean that any
process (pathos) occurred in the ineffable generation, nor was the word
ousia accepted by the Fathers in any Greek [i.e. pagan philosophical]
sense, but to refute the "from non-existence" which Arius impiously
dared to apply to Christ, and which those "Anhomoians" who are
around today shamelessly parade in an even more desperate and
daring manner to the injury ·of the church's peace.'
Among the signatories of this document are not only people such as
Meletius of Antioch and Eusebius of Samosata but Athanasius of
121HE IV.I2.
122Ibid. VI:4.
12lValesius wished to emend here to gain better sense 'which appears strange to
some'.
581
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Ancyra (by deputies) and Akakius ofCaesarea. 12 ' It is not surprising
that Socrates in the same passage says that the followers of Akakius
'were always inclined to join the party in power', and that they
perceived that the Emperor at that time was in favour of N. The
closing years of Akakius' career (which must have ended about the
year 366) were spent under the Emperor in the East, Valens, who was
a fanatical opponent of the pro-Nicenes, as also of the Eunomians,
and a supporter of the Homoian creed. Akakius must have felt
himself at home with this Emperor's point of view.
Epiphanius found Akakius difficult to understand. He says that he
confessed 'neither homoousion nor "a creature like one of the
creatures" '; he was really an Arian, Epiphanius believes, but
disguised his opinions because he was afraid of the Emperor. 12 •
Earlier in the same work, however, he has quoted several extracts
from a work which Akakius wrote early in his career against
Marcellus, who in his turn, is quoting and attacking a work by
Asterius. It is difficult in places to determine who precisely is being
quoted. But clearly Akakius at this stage defended·with some spirit
Asterius' statement that the Son was 'the exact image of the ousia and
will and power and glory of the Father' .12' He is ready to go to any
lengths, following Asterius, in extolling the Son, as long as the
traditional subordination of the Son to the Father is preserved. 127 He
can call the Son 'living image of the ousia of the Father', and, though
possessing his own ousia (distinct from that of the Father), he is 'ousia
as image of the ousia' of the Father, in respect of will, life and
power. 12 • And Akakius goes on to define carefully what sort of an
image the Son is:
the image 'bears the characteristics of the original in itself and also
provides a difference, a difference as a likeness . .. Therefore the Son is
an image of the Father, living (image) of the Living One in
movement, in activity, in power and will and glory, not devoid of life
(lhjlux0<;) nor of movement (dK1V1jtO<;), deriving its existence and
124S ocrates HE III.25.
12SPanarion 73.23.6 (296); which Emperor is not at all clear, presumably the
short-livedJovianus. Athanasius (De Syn. 38.1-4) twits Akakius with inconsistency
in admitting ousia in defining the Son's relation to the Father at the composition of
the Creed of the 'Dedication' in Antioch in 341 but refusing it at Se1eucia in 359.
"<Ibid. 72.6.1-2 (260), 7.1-10 (261-2).
1277 .6 (261)-<) (262).
"'9.8 (264).
Homoian Arianism
delineation from another, and itself not being in motion in itself or
through itself. And he is the exact image so that the exact resemblance
does not present a Father,' but precisely a Son' (ulav
(bt1]KP1PCll~VOV).129
The resemblance in these extracts to the theology of Akakius' master,
Eusebius of Caesarea, here is unmistakable. Akakius is not, in fact, a
great mystery. He is an Homoian Arian, deriving from the thought
of Eusebius of Caesarea, as much theology which was not pro-
Nicene did between 330 and 350, who has no great objection to using
the word ousia to define the Son's relation to the Father as long as his
subordination is preserved. The vicissitudes of maintaining his see
and his reputation in later life drove him to make concessions. He was
not a theologian of the undaunted mettle of Palladius. He was bishop
of a leading see, anxious to preserve on the one side the Emperor's
goodwill, arid on the other the unity of the Church as far as possible.
He could stomach the statements ofSirmium II 357, though they can
hardly have represented his true position. At one point, in 363, again
in order to retain the Emperor's goodwill, he was ready to accept N,
when the intention ofits terms was carefnlly explained. He found the
extreme rationalist Arianism ofEunonllus wholly distasteful. He was
not, doctrinally, a pure weathercock. He was a disciple of Eusebius
who tried, according to his lights, to keep the ship of the church afloat
in difficult times. His leadership was political rather than doctrinal,
but he was not indifferent to doctrine.
The next most important name among the Homoian leaders is that
ofEudoxius. But it is open to debate whether he should be called an
Homoian or a follower of Eunomius in theology. He earlier
supported, but later opposed, Aetius and Eunomius. Various gnomic
utterances ascribed to him suggest alternately Eunomian and
Homoian opinions. His creeds, both that printed by Caspari, and that
attributed to Patricius and said to be accepted by Eudoxius, leave us in
a similar uncertainty. And we know of no other written remains of
Eudoxius. Hilary says that at the Council ofSeleucia in 359 he heard
someone whom we can with confidence identify as Eudoxius make
some significant remarks. 130 One was:
129 10 .2, 3 (264).
130CQntraAuxentium 13 (591-2). In fact these may have been remarks made by
Eudoxius when he was at Antioch, but reported to Hilary when he was at Se1eucia.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
'God (always) was what he is. He was not a Father because he did not
have a Son; for ifhe had a Son, there must have been a woman, and
conversation and chat (sermocinatio) and assent to matrimonial
union 131 and kissing. and so to the natural process of generation'.
This could be a peculiarly exasperating way (for Eudoxius had a
penchant for saying things pour <pater les bourgeois) of setting out the
Eunomian view that the title 'Father' is a mere 'aspect' (epinoia) of
God, whereas 'ingenerate' is his essence. Socrates gives another
example of the capacity of Eudoxius to shock people. He says that
Eudoxius once while occupying the episcopal throne (presumably in
Antioch) first uttered this disturbing sentiment: 'The Father is
impious, the Son pious'. When people began to protest at this
. outrageous remark, he said 'Don't worry about what I said, because
the Father is impious since he does not worship anybody, but the Son
is pious because he worships the Father'. This is a thoroughly Arian
idea, but one that could be either Homoian or Eunomian. Both
Epiphanius and Theodoret remark on Eudoxius' luxurious, careless
and unascetic life-style. A certain frivolousness seems to have been
part of his character. 132 Another remark quoted by Hilary in the
same passage says:
'As far as the Son stretches himself to know the Father, so far does the
Father stretch himself further to prevent the Son knowing him'.
This is not at all Eunomian, but directly contradicts Eunomian
doctrine. On the other hand, Epiphanius alleges that Eudoxius and
his party u·sed to maintain
'I know God so clearly and I know and am acquainted with· him so
fully, that I do not know myself better that I know God'.'''
And this clearly is a deliberately shocking way of stating one of
Eunomius' favourite doctrines. Against this we must place the fact
that Eudoxius welcomed and supported Ulfilas' mission among the
Goths.' 34 Ulfilas, as we have seen from his creed and other
profession, was a drastic Homoian, but no Eunomian, nor were his
Gothic converts nor their descendants who later brought Arianism
131 coniunctio coniugalis verbi, a very obscure expression; without the verbi it would
mean 'mating in marriage'.
132Socrates He 11.43; Epiphanius Panarion 76.4.1-4 (344); Theodoret HE 11.27.9.
133Panarion 76+1. 2 (344).
134Theodoret HE IV.37.1-5 (273-4).
Homoian Arianism
into the ruined Western Roman Empire. Theodoret says that at
Constantinople at the end of 3 59 Eustathius of Sebaste vehemently
accused Eudoxius of holding the ·opinions of Aetius, in the presence
of the Emperor, namely:
'things produced in a dissimilar way (avoJloiro~) are dissimilar in their
ousia; there is one God the Father from whom are all things and one
Lord Jesus Christ through whom are all things; "from whom" is
dissimilar to "through whom". Consequently the Son is dissimilar to
the God and Father.'
Eudoxius, says Theodoret, denied that he was the author of these
opinions and attributed them to Aetius, who, when similarly taxed
with the accusation, proudly acknowledged himself as their
author.'35 It is, however, doubtful ifTheodoret is here giving us a
word-for-word account of what ha ppened on this occasion, because
it is unlikely that either Eudoxius or Aetius (or, for that matter,
Eunomius) would have used the explicit word 'dissimilar'
(anhomoios).
Eudoxius was bishop first ofGermanicia, in Armenia. There was at
least one other Germanicia, in Cilicia, but we can assume that it was
the Armenian Germanicia where Eudoxius was bishop because on
the only occasion when he was exiled by the Emperor he went to
Armenia, and Theodoret explicitly places him in Armenian
Germanicia.'36 No doubtit was his native country. As bishop of that
see, he attended the Council of Antioch in 34'; he signed the Eastern
bishops' manifesto after the debacle at Serdica in 343. 137 That he was
one of those sent from the East to carry the Macrostich to the
135 HE 11.27.4-1 I (quotation at 67). In the whole of his account ofEudoxius in the
presence of Constantius on this occasion Theodoret represents him as denying his
of
agreement with the views ofAetius, which the Emperor manifestly disapproved,
but only doing so reluctantly and after much interrogation.
136HE 11.25.3. For Eudoxius see Loofs, art. 'Eudoxius von Germanicia' in
Realenkyklopiidie fur Protestantische theologie und Kirche V.577-80 (an exhaustive
account); he places Germanicia in Commagene, provincia Euphratensis (a
neighbouring province and one nearer to Antioch than Armenia). See also
Schwartz, 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 153-5 (an account which suffers from
Schwartz's obsession with 'Realpolitik'), Simonetti Crisi 341, 403. Kopecek History
418-25. We have already looked at his creed (above p. II2) and that ofrus friend
Patricius. Philostorgius says that his birthplace was Arabissos in Lesser Armenia and
that his father, Caesarius, had atoned for a habit of womanizing by becoming a
martyr for the faith (HE IV.4).
I37Hilary Coli. Antiar. A IV (J) (74-8).
585
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Emperor Constans'38 in either 344 or 345 marked his growing
importance. One of his first acts must have been the convening of a
council at Antioch to give a warm welcome to the highly
controversial creed of the Third Sirmian Council of357.'39 In 353,
on the death ofLeontius, he succeeded in having himself made bishop
of Antioch, apparently without the approval of Constantius. In 356
and 357 he was required to take into custody the truculent Lucifer of
Calaris. Shortly afterwards he incurred the positive disapproval of
. that Emperor for a time while the influence of Basil of Ancyra
prevailed, and he was exiled.140 He returned in time to be present at
the Council ofSeleucia in 359, but, as he was still under a cloud as a
result of his having displeased the Emperor, took no prominent part
in that Council. He must have rehabilitated himself at
Constantinople after the Council of Seleucia in the eyes of
Constantius, though, if we are to trust Theodoret, he did so only with
difficulty. But Theodoret may be exaggerating here, because during
the general reshuffle of sees which took place early in 360,
Macedonius was removed from Constantinople and Eudoxius took
his place.'41
Philostorgius has much to say about Eudoxius, whom he regarded
as a traitor to the cause of true doctrine. He says that he was originally
a disciple of Aetius.'42 He had ordained Eunomius deacon, but,
Philostorgius hastens to add, only when Eunomius was assured of his
bishop's soundness in (Eunomian) doctrine.''' Once he had been
enthroned bishop of Constantinople, and the new church in the city
dedicated with splendid ceremonial, he made Eunomius bishop of
Cyzicus, but he would not agree to the rehabilitation of Aetius.'44
While in Constantinople Eudoxius was prompted by some enemies
of Eunomius to summon Eunomius before him on the charge of
teaching that the Son is unlike (anhomoion) the Father. But
138Socrates HE II.I9: Athanaslus De Syn. 26.
139S ee above, P.348.
140S ee above. p. 357.
141S ocrates HE 11.43. A confused statement in the Historia Akephala 1.4-6 (138.
140) may disguise a previous attempt ofEudoxius on this see, But I do not think this
likely.
142HE IV.4 and V.2 (2nd version).
'43IV·S.
I44VII (Anhang).31; V.3 (notice Neo-Arian disavowal of the title 'Anhomoian').
For Eudoxius' appointment to Constantinople and the dedication of the church, see
Cliron. Pasch. PG 92:736-7.
586
Homoian Arianism
Eunomius defended himself so stoutly, maintaining that the Son was
not like the Father in ousia (but could in other respects be described as
like him), that the charge had to be dropped. But later Eunomius,
finding that Eudoxius was doing none of the things which he had
promised to do (i.e. disseminate Eunomian teaching) and, far from
recalling Aetius, was pressing Eunomius to agree to Aetius'
deposition and to sign the creed of Ariminum (i.e.
Nice/Constantinople), Eunomius in disgust, after vain protests, left
the see of CyzicUS.'45 Philostorgius also has the story of Akakius
laying a charge of unorthodoxy against Eudoxius before
Constantius, but failing to press it home.'46 It is possible that
Theodoret's account of Eustathius accusing Eudoxius before the
Emperor may be a confused version of this incident, which is likely to
have occurred after the Council of Constantinople of 360, for it is not
likely that one who had only just managed to clear himself ofa charge
of favouring a doctrine repudiated by the Emperor should have
almost immediately afterwards been made bishop of Constantinople.
Somewhat inconsistently, Philostorgius says that Eudoxius tried
unsuccessfully to persuade Euzoius, who had succeeded him at
Antioch, to arrange the recall of Aetius.'47 In fact Philostorgius
represents Eudoxius as one who had in the past apparently committed
himself deeply to the cause of Aetius and Eunomius, but who, when
he found himself in a responsible position began to realize how
impractical and unpopular was their outlook, and began
consequently to distance himself from them, while occasionally
making gestures in their favour. At one point, says Philostorgius,
Eudoxius remarked with a humorous candour which we may
recognize as characteristic of his style, about Aetius and Eunomius,
who by this time (the reign of Valens) were both in exile:
'I do not call them impious, which they will be glad to hear because
their banishment then appears to be unjustified, but I do call them
nuisances'. 148
Eudoxius after some hesitation must have joined Euzoius in a policy
of definite hostility to the Neo-Arian school of Aetius and
145VLI-3.
t46VI.4·
147VII .S~ at VIII-4--'7 he represents Eudoxius as giving his support to the enemies
of Aetius in their efforts to discredit and damage his friends.
148IX.3·
 The Rival Answers Emerge
Eunomius."9 One of his last acts was to prevent a meeting between
the Emperor Valens and Eunomius.'so Gregory of Nyssa said that
Eudoxius was hostile to Basil of Cae sa rea once he had become bishop
of that see, and this can cause us no surprise, because Basil's views
must by then have differed widely from those of Eudoxius.'s,
Eudoxius was in fact as long as he lived a principal ecclesiastical
adviser of the Emperor Valens, whose favoured creed, supported by
imperial sanctions whenever he could apply them, was precisely
Homoian Arianism. Eudoxius is credited by Theodoret with
converting Valens to these opinions, aided by the Empress, and it was
he who baptized Valens.,s2 Eudoxius died in the year 370, and was
succeeded in the see of Constantinople by Demophilus from
Beroea. 153
Eudoxius did indeed become, almost by accident, 'the Father of
German Arianism' (Loofs). We must recall in trying to reach a true
estimate of him that our accounts of him come from two different
sources, each strongly prejudiced for different reasons against him.
But when we have made all allowances we cannot fail to recognize in
Eudoxius a man whose theological opinions were strongly influenced
by political events. Deriving from that circle of early Neo-Arianism
where the distinction between this creed and that of Homoian
Arianism had not yet become clear, and never evincing a strong and
clear head for theology, he allowed events to guide him. He had a
great capacity for advancing his own interests, and he realized once
he had reached a position of responsibility that Neo-Arianism as a
creed capable of commending itself to the authorities who directed
the destiny of his part of the Roman Empire was a non-starter.
Accordingly he made the transition from Eunomian to Homoian
Arianism. It cannot have been a traumatic change for him.
If we are to determine who among the Homoian Arians was the
most influential in the long run, we must choose Vlfilas, Apostle of
the Goths.'s, This man must have been born about 3II of Christian
'49IX.7·
150IX.8.
151Gregory of Nyssa Contra Eunomium 1.22 (288).
152HE IV,I2.4 and 13.1; cf.Jerome ehron. sub ann. 366.
lSlPhilostorgius HE IX.S; Socrates He IV.q (giving the date).
,1S4For information about UJfilas, see Gwatkin AC 155--6; Zeiller Origines
431-73; Simonetti Crisi 442-3; Klein Constantius II 251-4; Gryson Scolies Ariennes
143-65; K. Schaferdiek 'Wulfila: von Bischof von Gotien zurn Gothenbischor;
E. A. Thompson: The Visigoths in the time of Uljila xiii-xxiii. Gryson in a learned
588
Homoian Arianism
parents, the descendants of some who had been captured by Goths in
the mid-third-century. He was brought up among the trans-
Danubian Goths (as distinct from the Crimean Goths, among whom
the Arian bishop Theophilus laboured) and knew their language, as
well as Greek. He was consecrated bishop, probably by Eusebius of
Nicomedia, either when the latter was bishop ofNicomedia, or later
when he was bishop of Constantinople, in 340 or 341, possibly at the
Council of Antioch of the latter year.'ss He worked for seven years
to establish a Christian mission among the Goths, but in 348 or 349 a
persecution loosed upon the Christians by a (temporary) King of the
Goths, during which some Christian Goths were martyred, drove
him, with many of his disciples, southward into Roman territory.
Constantius took an interest in him and permitted him to settle, with
many Christian Goths, at the foot of Mount Haemus, near Nicopolis,
in Moesia Inferior. Here he spent the rest of his career. He must have
had considerable success in evangelizing his fellow-Goths. He
translated most of the Bible into Gothic. He visited Constantinople
more than once. He was present at the council held there in 360. It is
wholly likely that we should follow the Letter of Auxentius in the
Scholia on the Council of Aquileia rather than the commentary. of
Maximinus in the same document and place the death of Vlfilas in
383, when he travelled to Constantinople to be present at a last
attempt by Theodosius to bring about agreement between the
warring factions in the church; no doubt he died there. Maximinus
.must be incorrect in saying that Vlfilas accompanied Palladius to
Constantinople in 381 in order to persuade the Emperor to hold a
general council. What impressed Auxentius was not the opportunity
for petitioning Theodosius (who in 381 was not in fact ruling the part
of the Empire where Palladius was) but the wonderful coincidence
note (Scolies Ariennes 143-4) makes it clear that there is nojustification for calling the
Apostle of the Goths either Vulfila (though the name may originally be derived
from *Wulfila = little wolf) nor Hulfila nor Gulfi1a. The proper form is Ulfila
(Greek OUAcpiAa~ (occasionally OUpcplAW;». For Ulfilas see also Socrates HE IV.33;
Sozomenus HE VI.37; Theodoret HE IV.37; lordanes Getica 51. as well as the texts
in Gryson referred to above.
15sPhiiostorgius HE 11.5 says that he was consecrated during the reign of
Constantine (i.e. before the summer of 337). but Auxentius (in Scholia on Cone.
Aquileia) places this in the reign of Constantius. in Constantinople.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
that Vlfilas died at. a time and place where there were many Arian
bishops present to celebrate his obsequies handsomely.'.56 .
We have already examined the Creed and the ProfessIOn of Faith
which Auxentius attributes to Vlfilas. '57 We have no reason to
doubt Auxentius' good faith here. Vlfilas' doctrine eXhib.its a drastic
subordination of the Son to the Father, a fierce emphaSIS upon the
incomparability of the Father, enhanced bya succession ~hdjectives
designed to establish his uniqueness, a demal of the dIvmIty of the
Holy Spirit and a strong and explicit r~pudiati~n of the pr.o-NIcene
doctrine. No doubt what we have here IS Vlfilas final posItIon. TIme
and controversy had sharpened his ideas.158 But we have no reason to
regard Vlfilas as a Eunomian. He is not likely to have met the
teaching of Aetius and Eunomius in his remote Gothic colo?y and
had hardly time to absorb it during his visits to Constantmople.
Zeiller thinks that in Constantinople in 360 he must have agreed to
the condemnation of Aetius.!S9 We can draw no evidence from
Vlfilas' translation of the Bible relevant to his theological viewpoint,
but if (as is quite possible) he was the author of the document known
as Skeireins, an early Gothic MS which is the translation of a Greek
original, commenting upon several chapters in St.John's Gospel, we
can see him directing the reader along an HomOlan path. The
commentary explicitly mentions Sabellius and Marcellus,. as
identifying falsely the Persons of the Father and the Son, declares (m a
characteristically Arian way), that the Father gives the Son 'the
authority of judgment', and at John 5:23 remarks:
'Now, at such a manifest declaration, we must all render honour to the
unborn [better tr. "ingenerate"j God and recognize the only-
begotten One, the Son of God, to be God. Believing, therefore, we
should now render honor to Each according to merit, for the remark
"that all may honor the Son, even 35 they honor the Father" teaches us
to render similar but not equal honor. And the Saviour himself,
praying for the disciples. said to the Father "that you love them, even
156For Theodosius' council of 383, see Socrates HE V. 10. For Ulfilas' presence in
Constantinople, see Chronicon Paschale (PG 92:736£).
157S ee above, pp. 105-6.
158S 0 , rightly. Schaferdiek, 'Wulfila' 112-114·
1590rigines 45 J. Simonetti has insuffic~ent ~vid~nce :when h~ pronounc~s Ulfilas
an Eunomian (Crisi 442-3. 460 n 5). Zedler IS wiser 10 refusmg to see him as an
'Anhomoian', Origines 463.
590
Homoian Arianism
as you love Me". Through this he designates similar but not equal
love.'160
Valens ofMursa and Vrsacius ofSingidunum are a pair ofleading
Homoian Arians who almost always appear together in our sources,
like Damon and Pythias (or Laurel and Hardy!). They were riot
present at the Council of Antioch of 34', but were among the Eastern
bishops (duly denounced by the Westerns) at Serdica in 343. We first
find them at the Council of Tyre of 335, acting on the Mareotic
Commission. Perhaps they were proteges ofEusebius ofNicomedia
and Maris of Chalcedon. It has been conjectured (but the suggestion
is no more than a conjecture) that they had been inspired to take the
theological line which they usually favoured by meeting Arius
during his exile in IIIyria. We must use the word 'usually' in the
above sentence, because this pair tended more obviously than others
to adapt their opinions to the wind ofimperial favour.!6! We have
already seen that the two probably produced theological works
which have not survived.!62 Valens at least was at the Council of
Aries of 353. and both were present at Milan in 355. They were
among the main architects of the Second Sirmian Creed of357, and
we may confidently conclude that. in spite of variations occasioned
by the vagaries of Constantius' religious opinions, Valens and
Vrsacius were in their heart of hearts Homoian Arians, not only
because they seem to have professed this doctrine more regularly
than any other, and because Valens at least made himself a pliant tool
of Constantius in that interest during the negotiations which took
place at Ariminum in 359, but also because anything we know about
their writings points in this direction, and, as we shall see, they
expressed consternation when, none of them being subjected at the
time to imperial pressure, their fellow-Homoian Germinius seemed
to be about to desert this type of doctrine. They were condemned
160W. H. Bennett The Gothic Commentary on the Gospel of John text, IVb-Vc
(66-69), Vc (69) and Vc-Vd (69-70). The mention of Marcellus (of Aneyra) does
not preclude Ulfilas as the original author of this document (which has been to some
extent re-worked by somebody who knew Latin, and which survives in a fragment
of only 8 pages). What pro-Nicene writer apart from Athanasius (most unlikely)
and Eust-athius of Antioch (barely possible) could Ulfilas hav.e met except
Marcellus? Skeireins means 'interpretation' or 'explanation'. Bennett's conclusion
(134-8) that the Skeireins is very like the Gothic Bible in vocabulary and forms
supports the conjecture that the original writer of the work was Ulfilas.
161See above, P.313.
162See above, P.301.
59 1
 The Rival Answers Emerge
together and (on paper) deposed by a council held in Rome in 368 or
369 under Damasus (Athanasius Ad Afros 10), but continued to hold
their sees undeterred until their deaths. Valens died in 371 (Athanasius
Ep. ad Epictetum PG 26:1052), and Ursacius had been succeeded by
Secundianus as bishops ofSingidunum some time before the Council
of Aquileia of 381. The fact that no papal thunder could remove them
from their sees suggests they were not unpopular with their flocks.'·'
Germinius first appears on the stage of history when he is
appointed bishop of Sirmium in 351 at the council in that city which
finally succeeded in deposing Photinus.'·4 He apparently hailed
from Cyzicus.'·5 He was probably present at the Third Council
which produced the controversial Second Creed ofSirmium in 357.
Liberius mentions him, along with Valens and Ursacius, as his friend
in a letter written from exile.'·· He certainly had a hand in framing
the 'Dated' Creed of 359. He was regarded by the pro-Nicenes as one
of the standard-bearers of Arianism in the Balkan provinces. We
have already seen him arguing the Arian case with Heraelianus, but
refusing to allow his flock to lynch the defenders of Nicene
doctrine.'·7 He died in 376 or 377; his successor, Anemius, was
elected after the death of Valentinian in 375 and was in his see by the
year 378 when a council of Sirmium took place (or may have taken
place). See below, p. 595 n 173. But we have information about a shift
of emphasis on the part of Germinius as far as doctrine is concerned.
In Hilary's Collectio Antiariana there is a creed labelled 'the
163For information on this pair, see Meslin Les Ariens 71-84. 266-8; Zeiller
Origines 149-50, 216--17. Philostorgius IX.S says that Eunomius was (in the year
365) banished by the Emperor Valens on suspicion of being implicated in the
rebellion of Procopius. He was, says Philostorgius. sent to Mauretania (el~ tiJv
Muupol)(J{Su Yi'iv, and the Grosser Historische Weltatlas I duly marks the people called
'Maurusier' as living in Mauretania (map 43)). On the way, says Philostorgius,
Eunomius spent the winter with Valens at Mursa in IIlyria and this bishop, along
with Domninus bishop of Marcianopolis, secured the recall of Eunomius from
exile. What Eunomius was doing in Mursa in Pannonia II near the Danube (or
indeed how Domninus from near the shore of the Black Sea came in contact with
him) in a journey which professed to be aiming for Mauretania in the western part
of North Africa Philostorgius does not explain, and it is difficult to imagine any
plausible explanation.
164See above. p. 325. For Germinius. see ZeiBer Origines 304--6, 309-10; Meslin
Les Ariens 67-'71, 294-9; Simonetti Crisi 383-'7. 438-9; Gryson, ScoUes Ariennes
104-5·
165 Athanasius Hist. Ar. 74.
166See above, p. 359.
167Sce above, pp. 528-9.
592
Homoian Arianism
Symbol ofGerminius ofSirmium', taken apparently from a letter of
his, which runs thus:'·.
'I bishop Germinius believe and confess that there is one true God the
Father, eternal, almighty; and Christ his only Son and our Lord God,
the true Son of God from the true God the Father, born before all
things, in deity, love, majesty, power,_ glory, love, wisdom,
knowledge, like in all things to the Father, since he is born perfect
from the Perfect. His taking of manhood from the Virgin Mary, as the
prophets predicted would happen, and as the texts of the gospels and
apostles inform us to have been accomplished; his sufferings too and
death and resurrection and ascension into heaven we accept, ,believe
and profess; and that at the end of the world he will descend from
heaven to judge the living and the dead and to reward each according
to his works. And in the Holy Spirit, that is the Paraelete who was
given to us from God the Father through the Son. That is all' (explicit).
That this profession of faith caused alarm and despondency among
other Homoian Arian bishops is made evident by a Letter of Valens,
Ursacius, and a certain pair Gaius and Paulus, who had held a small
council in the year 366 (the year when this letter of Germinius was
written) at Singidunum. This letter is also given us elsewhere by
Hilary.'·9
They are anxious to ensure that Germinius is not deviating from the
Catholic faith declared at Ariminum, and in particular that he adheres
to the formula 'we say that the Son is like the Father according to the
Scriptures'. and not to the expression he is like 'accordirig to
substance' (substantiam) and 'in all respects'. To adopt such doctrines
would be to return to the false teaching. of Basil (of Ancyra)
condemned at Ariminum. They ask Germinius to deny that he ever
said, or will say, that 'the Son is like the Father in all things,
mgenerateness (innativitate) excepted', or that, as Iovianus the deacon
a~d Martirius the subdeacon report that he said in the presence of
bIShops Valens and Paul, 'the Son is like the Father in all respects'. It is
interesting to note that this letter is sent from Singidunum to
Germinius at Sirmium 'by Secundianus a presbyter', very probably
the man who was later to become bishop of Singidunum and to
appear with Palladius at the Council of Aquileia in 38I.
Germinius did not answer these queries directly. Instead, he wrote
168A III (48) (in 'Migne Fr. viii (10:717).
169Coll. Antillr. B V.I, 2 (159-60).
593
 The Rival Answers Emerge
a letter, addressing it to 'the Lords my most pious brothers Rufianus,
Palladius, Severinus, Nichas, Heliodorus, Romulus, Mucianus and
Stercorius', setting out his views: 170
'We teach', he writes, 'Christ the Son of God our Lord like in all
respects to the Father I ingeneratcness excepted. God from God, Light
from Light. Power from Power, Whole from Whole, Perfect from
Perfect, generated (genitum) before the ages and before absolutely
everything which can be conceived or uttered, whose generation,
nobody knows except the father alone [quotation of Matt 11:27J,
through whom all things were made, without whom nothing was
made' [quotations ofJn 5"7,19,21,22,26; 10:30; '4:1,9, and fmally Gn
1:26 ('Let us make man according to (our) image')]. Now, argues
Germinius, this does not say my image or your image 'to preclude the
suggestion of any unlikeness in the divinity of his Son'. It must imply
that he is like in all respects. Next he quotes In I I: '4; 2 Cor 4:4; Col.
1:13-15 and Phi12:S-? and continues 'Who will not see that just as
our flesh was genuine in Christ according to the form of a servant, so
the divinity of the Father in the Son was genuine in the form of God?
[quotation ofCoI2:8ff].lftherefore all the fulness of Godhead dwells
in Christ, then they are not partly like and partly unlike'. The
statement that Christ is something made or created refers to the Son's
powers and activities only, as to many of his other titles in the
Scriptures, and not to his divine birth, 'because everything was made
from nothing by the Son, but the Son is not from nothing but is
generated from God the Father: Valens, he goes on, seems to have
forgotten that on one occasion in the presence of the Emperor
Constantius, of George of Alexandria, Pancratius of Pelusium, Basil
of Ancyra, of Valens and Ursacius themselves, and of Germinius
himself, after a long discussion which lasted into the night, Mark [of
ArethusaJ, deputed by aU, drew up a formula to which all agreed, and
that formula was 'the Son like the father in all respects as the holy
Scriptures say and teach'. He concludes by saying that he is sending the
letter by the officialis Cyriacus, but is unable to sign it owning to pain
in his hands.
The occasion to which Germinius refers is the production of the
'Dated' Creed in Sirmium on May 22nd 359 (see above pp. 362-'71)
seven years before this letter was written. Clearly Germinius had by
now abandoned Homoian Arianism, to the dismay of his Arian
colleagues, and had fallen back on a position very like that of the
17·lbid. B V.VI.1-4 (160-4).
594
Homoian Arianism
'Dedication' Creed of Antioch in 341. We do not know what
occasioned this change of mind, carefully noted by Hilary. It cannot
have been imperial pressure, because by 366 Valens the supporter of
Homoian Arianism ruled in the East and Valentinian, the Western
Emperor, was keeping as far as possible neutral in religious matters.
The only other really significant Homoian Arian of whose
thought we can form any clear conception is Palladius of Ratiaria.
His doctrine we have already reviewed. '7I According to his own
account he had been in 381 bishop for 35 years, having been priest for
11 years before that. He must therefore have been a contemporary of
Valens and Ursacius. He succeeded a bishop Sylvester in the see of
Ratiaria in 346. We must dismiss, as Meslin does, the wild accusation
made at Aquileia by Valerian its bishop that Palladius had originally
been a Photinian before he turned Arian. The readiness with which
he argues and the coherence of his doctrine preclude our thinking
that he was so ready to change his views as this. It is clear from the
fragments of his refutation of the De Fide of Ambrose which we
possess (or of parts of it) that he regarded himself as championing the
true (Homoian) faith against the false doctrine of the pro-Nicenes.
He can in his argument with Ambrose at Aquileia in 381 hold his own
well and occasionally leave the officious Ambrose groping for an
answer. He can refer contemptuously to 'that kind of "Blasphemy of
Sirmium" which you thought it right to commend which offered to
the church of God a sin of idolatry unheard ofin all past ages', because
it preached three equal gods. l72 He was not present at the Council of
Sirmium of 378, when Ambrose met the Emperor Gratian and
perhaps on this occasion was instrumental in securing the election of
the pro-Nicene Anemius to the see of that city. 173 Palladius wrote his
~71See above, pp.102-3, 109-10,563-4. Gryson, Scolie5 Ariennes 173-200 and
Meslin Les Ariens 85"""'92.
112Gryson ScoUes Arienne5 345V.128-129 (pp. 311-12, quotation from 311).
173The very existence of the Council of Sirmium of 378 has been disputed. The
only evidence for it is in Theodoret HE IV .6-10, where he gives an imperial letter, a
creed and an encyclical letter emanating from the bishops there assembled, but no
signatories of it. The emperor who figures in the superscription to the imperial
lener, Valentinian, with Valens and Gratian, is most unlikely to have written it,.for
it wholeheartedly espouses the pro-Nicene cause. And the creed given by
Theodoret as drawn up by the council is too carefully modelled on that of 381 to be
authentic. But that a pro-Nicene Council met in Sirmium, not in 375, to which date
some have referred it, assuming that Valentinian I called it, but in 378,just before the
battIe of Adrianople. seems very likely. The three emperors would then be Gratian,
Valentinian II (whose views would be taken for granted) and Valens (included out
595
 The Rival Answers Emerge
reply to Ambrose in the autumn of that year; he probably appealed to
Gratian to call a general council in the spring of 381, andG~atIan
agreed. It was because he expected the gathe~ing a~ AqUilela ':" the
summer of381 to be such a council that PalladIus, wIth Secundianus,
attended it. The best comment upon the proceedings of that conclave
was made by Meslin:
'Les debats firent ressortir rimplacable logique et la connaissance
scripturaire de Palladius et de Secundianus, mais aussi la volon,tc
systematique d' Ambroise de les condamner sur un texte dont ils
. .
n'etalent pas les auteurs, en I' occurrence, une 1ett Ie d'A·
flUS.'174
It is unlikely that the two Homoian bishops were deprived of their
sees immediately after the council, though, in view of Theodosius'
recent legislation, they cannot have retained them very long. T~ey
may have continued to function as bishops of. Homman
congregations attached to their former sees for some tIme. How
much later he wrote his defence of his conduct and that of
Secundianus at Aquileia, fragments of which have been preserved
(Gryson Scolies Ariennes 274-323), we do not know. It is quite
probable that he wrote it at the gathering of Arians and others in
Constantinople in 383 which witnessed the death of Ulfilas.
We know something of the career of Auxentius of Milan but little
of his theology. The creed and formulae produced by him and
preserved for us in Hilary's attack on him 175 tell us little, because they
probably represent traditional formulae presented by AuxentlUs as
sufficient to meet the accusations levelled at him by Hilary but can
scarcely have constituted characteristic Homoian doctrine. Hilary
says that Auxentius had at some undefined period subscribed to the
of protocol, little though he would have approved afthe c~uncil's concl~sions~. The
encyclical letter, on these assumption, wou.ld be genum~. Th~ An~n bIshops
condemned in it (who do not include Palladlus or Secundlanus III theIr number)
would be those who had ventured to attend the council. Ambrose probably wrote
De Fide Books I and II in the spring of 378. Palladius replied to them in autumn 378.
Gratian had produced an Edict of general toleration late in 378, under the. pressure ?f
the crisis produced by Valens' defeat and death. Ambrose wrote De FIde III-V m
380. By April 381 Theodosius had produced his edicts against an heresies and
Gratian had revoked his edict of toleration. For the involved question of when the
Council of Sirmium met, if it met at an, and other points arising from the subject.
with many views both for and against, see Zeiller Origines 3 10-27. Meslin Les Ariens
86-91 and Gryson ScoUes Ariennes 107-21.
I 74Les Ariens 90.
175S ee above. PP.466-7.
Homoian Arianism
view that 'he believed that Christ was true God and he confessed that
he was of one substance and divinity with God the Father', and
Hilary had made a note of this in the Emperor's presence. 17 • But it is
difficult to take this claim seriously. Neither Constantius nor Julian
nor Valentinian was in the least likely to insist upon Auxentius
making a statement so much out of keeping with his true sentiments,
and neither Jovian nor Valens can have had any influence over him.
Anyway, Auxentius continued to retain the see of Milan undisturbed
till his death in 374. To the other Arian Auxentius, him of Duros-
torum who, driven out by pagan Goths, came to Milan during
Ambrose's tenure of the see to enjoy the protection of the Empress
Justina, and who may have called himself Auxentius after Auxentius
of Milan, we owe the account of Ulfilas' doctrines and career
preserved in the scholia on the Acts of the Council of Aquileia.' 77
The career of Maximin us, who preserved so much Arian propaganda
and doctrine in the margin of the account of the Council of Aquileia,
and who figured as a prominent Homoian Arian in his debate with
Augustine nearly fifty years after that council, lies outside the strict
limits of this chapter.
We know the names and a little of the careers of several other
Homoean Ariaus: Leontius, Euzoius, Demophilus in the East,17' and
in the West Saturninus, Epictetus, Fortunatianus, Potamius. But we
know next to nothing of the details of their doctrine. We can only say
that they represented a type of Arianism which was less technical, less
involved with Greek philosophy,and less sophisticated than that of
Aetius and Eunomius, to whom we next turn, but one that was more
popular and more enduring than theirs could ever have been.
, ,
176Contra Auxentium 7 (PL 10:614).
177Gryson ScoUes Ariennes 236-263. His original name appears to have been
Mercurius, though Ambrose calls him Mercurinus (Contra Auxentium 22; Epp.
759·22 (96)).
178Philostorgius HE VII.6 gives a useful list of such Arian bishops in the East.
597

19
The Neo-Arians
I. Aetius: his Career
The name which is most serviceable for denoting the followers of
Aetius and Eunomius, who form a distinct group within Arianism, is
that which was given them by Kopecek in his History of Neo-
Arianism. Exception has been taken to this name on the grounds that
their brand of doctrine was not novel enough within the whole nexus
~f Arian ideas to warrant the title. But it will, we hope, be shown in
this chapter that this type of docttine was in certain respects markedly
different from Homoian Arian doctrine such as we have been
considering in the previous chapter. Certainly the Homoian Arians
themselves for the most part disliked bemg associated with the
doctrines of either Aetius or Eunomius, and when they gained power
showed no great tenderness towards trus radical left wing of
Arianism. Other names which have been used to denote the Neo-
Arians are unsatisfactory. 'Anhomoian' (which Simonetti, for
instance, favours) is incorrect because the Neo-Arians on several
occasions repudiated the view that the Son was, without
qualification, 'unlike' (anhomoios) to the Father; this was an insulting
label given them by their opponents. Gwatkin's statement (AC 134)
that Eunomius positively flaunted the word anhomoios as a slogan is
wholly wide of the mark. 'Eunomians' is not satisfactory either,
because Aetius was the real founder of the group; he was the teacher
ofEunomius, even though Eunomius lived longer than he and gained
more notoriety than even Aetius did.
Aetius came from Coele-Syria.' He had a varied career before he
took to theology. Gregory of Nyssa dug up some facts about him
which he thought discreditable, and about whose authenticity we
tphilostorgius HE IILIS. Basil Adv. Eunom. I.I (PC 29:S00). At De Syn. 6
Athanasius caUs him 'the notorious Aetius who is nicknamed "the Atheist''',
The Neo-Arians
must be doubtful. He began his career as a boiler-man (or just
possibly bronzesmith - ICUl'lVtOnj<;). Philostorgius says that because
his parents were reduced to destitution early in his life he had to work
as a goldsmith.> He left that trade (having been detected in dis-
honesty, says Gregory, but this is probably mere slander) to become
a poor man's doctor, and then a fully qualified physician, but finally
turned to philosophy and theology. He attracted the attention of Paul-
inus during the short period when Paulinus had left Tyre to be
bishop of Antioch, and Aetius later was patronized by Athanasius of
Anazarbus in Cilicia and then by Antonius in Tarsus until Antonius
was made bishop there. Athanasius had made him reader. After
leaving Tarsus, when for some reason he had displeased Antonius, he
returned to Antioch and there won the support ofLeontius, who was
then only a presbyter. He left Antioch again, having created a bad
impression by his eristic habits, and returned for a time to Cilicia, but
then sought Alexandria. Here he practised medicine but also studied
theology under the Arian bishop Gregory (ob. 345). He then
returned once more to Antioch, where Leontius was now bishop.
Leontius ordained rum deacon. This can hardly have happened earlier
than 346. But he left Antioch again and went to Alexandria. His
reasons for leaving Antioch at this point are obscure. His teaching
always tended to shock and irritate. He incurred the enmity of two
laymen of the sect of continuing Eustathians or pro-Nicenes in that
city, Flavian and Diodore (and/or Paulinus). He may have been
deposed from the diaconate by Leontius as a result of their protests,
but it is more likely that rus promotion to the presbyterate was
blocked. In Alexandria, where perhaps he hoped to make headway
against the pro-Nicene Athanasius, he met Eunomius and secured
him as his most faithful and effective disciple. 3 But he must have
2Gregory of Nyssa Contra Eunomium 1.37-46 (PG 45:260--1); Philostorgius HE
III.IS· Gregory says that the source of his information is Athanasius of Ancyra
(Basil's successor) who was quoting a letter of George of Laodicea (ibid. 37
(4s:J 60)).
3This reconstruction and much of what follows is based on a critical use of
Philostorgius HE IILIS-I7. 18-21,27; Theodoret HE 11.23-25. 27; Socrates HE
11.35.3 6 .4 1; SozomenusHE 1II.I5.7, 8; IV.I2.I, 2; 24.2; IV.25.7; AthanasiusDe Syn.
6·38. t7-lmost everybody agrees that Leontius ordained Aetius deacon. Only
Gwatkm (SA 138) says presbyter (but this is probably a slip). Epiphanius says that
George of Alexandria deaconed him (Pan. 76.1.1 (340» but Epiphanius is most
unreliable on the subject of Aetius. Athanasius assigns the act to Leontius De Syn. 38.
For accounts and discussions of Aetius, see G. Bardy Lucien 196, 'L'Heritage
litteraire d'Aetius'; Zeitler Origines 288""'9; Simonetti erisi 288""'9.335,357/ 8,392 ;
599
 The Rival Answers Ernerge
returned to Antioch in or not long after 351, for there he won the
favour of Gallus, who was Caesar from 351 to 354. At some point
indeed during that period Gallus sent him to Ephesus in order to try
to wean Gallus' half-brother Julian from his proclivity to paganism.
On Gallus' fall he escaped because of his insignificance. 4 It was as a
result of his contact with Gallus that he made the acquaintance of
George of Tarbasthenus in Cappadocia, later Arian bishop of
Alexandria. His particular doctrine must have become fairly
widespread even before he wrote his main work (the Syntagrnation) at
the end of 359, because the reaction against the Second Creed of
Sirmium of 357 led by Basil of Ancyra was further fuelled by the
alarm and despondency caused by Aetius' teaching. Aetius was
included in the general denunciation of extreme doctrine issued by
Constantius under the influence of Basil in the year 358,' and in
consequence of thus incurring the Emperor's displeasure Aetius was
in 358 banished to Pepuza in Phrygia; quite apart from his radical
opinions, Aetius was suspect to Constantius because of his previous
association with Gallus. 6
On the assembly of the double council of Seleucia and Ariminum
in the autumn of 359, Aetius returned from exile and figured in a
debate held in Constantinople at the very end of the year or early in
360. Four different writers give an account of this affair, all of them
having different interestS to uphold, Epiphanius, Philostorgius,
Theodoret and Sozomenus. 7 Theodoret represents him as openly
espousing the anhornoion, Epiphanius as hinting that others (Eudoxius
and Akakius) secretly believed what he was not ashamed to avow
(though he does not here explicitly mention the anhornoion).
"Loafs 'Arianismus' 38; Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 154 n 31",157-8; Kopecek
HislorY7S. 104. 106-1 14;J. de Ghellinck 'Quelques appreciations de la dialectique et
d' Aristote'; R. Wickham 'Aetius and the Doctrine of divine Ingeneracy' and 'The
Syntagmation of Aetius the Anhomoian'. If Leontius deposed Aetius, and we have
no evidence of his being re-ordained (except Epiphanius' uncertain account). what
was he deposed from in 36o? Philostorgius hints that he did not exercize his
diaconate, but simply taught or lectured. But if with Kopecek (History 72) we place
Antonius' accession to the See of Tarsus in 330, we shall have to abandon Aetius'
connection with Paulinus.
4Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunomium 1.37, 38, 47, 48 (45:262); Sozomenus HE 111.15;
Epiphanius Panarion 73.2; Philostorgius HE 111.6.27.
'See above, pp. 357-8, 586.
6See Historia Akephala 4.5 (154) and n 102 of Martin (197).
7Epiphanius Panarion 76.9. 10 (344); Philostorgius HE IV.I2 and V.I, 2;
Theodoret HE 11.27; Sozomenus HE IV.23·3, 4.
600
The Neo-Arians
Sozomenus describes him vaguely as heretical (KaK6vou, ilJv 1t"pi tT)v
1tio'tlv, 4) but explains that his followers (i.e. the Homoian Akakius
and Eudoxius) made him a scapegoat so as to escape unpleasant
consequences themselves. Philostorgius, who was an admirer of
Aetius and is likely to have better information than the others, said
that Aetius was accused of teaching the anhornoion but he defended
himself with spirit, declaring that so far from this being his doctrine
he taught that the Son was 'unchangeably like' (d1tapa....4Ktm,
OJlOlOV) the Father, and Constantius was so much shocked by this that
he banished him to Mopsuestia in Cilicia, and, when he learnt that he
was rather enjoying himself there in discussions with its bishop
Auxentius, he transferred him to Amblada in the Taurus mountains.
Philostorgius in the 'former passage represents Aetius as having had
much the best of a public debate with Basil, then a deacon, later the
pro-Nicene bishop of Cappadocian Caesarea; it seems likely that this
is authentic, for Aetius' eristic talents were widely admired and
feared. Philostorgius also maintains that Aetius' watchword was nOt
anhomoios but heterousios, and this is certainly true. It is not
improbable that he maintained that the Son was unchangeably like
the Father in certain respects, though emphatically not in ousia, for
though Aetius does not refer to this in his Syntagrnation his disciple
EunomlUS was ready to defend this point of view. What shocked
Constantius was probably not 'like', but 'unchangeably', because the
Homoian viewpoint was that the Son must be changeable or he could
not have become incarnate. But if we are not willing to credit
Constantius with so much theological knowledge, it was no doubt
sufficient for him that Aetius was flourishing the word heterousios,
whereas the Arianism which he favoured had just made a point of
doing a;-vay w.ith all reference to ousia or compounds of it in defming
the Son s relatIOn to the Father, and even more that Aetius was tarred
with the brush of having supported in an inferior capacity the
treasonous behaviour of the late. Caesar Gallus. We have already seen
reason to reject Theodoret's account of the strict interrogation to
which Eudoxius was subjected, as a suspected ally of Aetius, and of
postponing this incident to a later period. 8 The letter of a Council
held early in 360 in Constantinople given us in Theodoret's account,
however, seems authentic (HE II.28). It is addressed to George of
Alexandria and announces that Aetius has been unfrocked for heresy
8S ee above, pp.S86--7.
601
 The Rival Answers Emerge
(details not specified), and that four bishops, Stephen (ofPtolemais),
Heliodorus (ofSozous), Serra (ofParaetonium) and Theophilus (the
'Indian') have been warned that; if they continue holding Aetius'
views in spite of having heard long dissuasion from their fellow-
bishops, after six months they will suffer the same fate as Aetius and
their sees will be filled by others. Most of these bishops could be
regarded in one way or another as coming under the jurisdiction of
the archbishop of Alexandria. Here Homoian Arianism had for the
first time declared war on Aetius.
With Julian's accession to sole power in 361, Aetius returned from
exile; he received a polite letter from the Emperor, who had a
friendly feeling towards him as a former friend of his half-brother
Gallus, welcoming him back. 9 It is probably best to place at this point
the appointment of Aetius as a bishop, an incident which is usually
accepted as a fact. We do not know to what see he was allotted, but
we may guess that it was a Libyan one. Libya was the heartland of
Arianism, most of the bishops mentioned in the Letter from the
Council of Constantinople to George of Alexandria in 360 as
unrepentant supporters of Aetius are from Libyan sees. Philostorgius
says that at an earlier period Aetius was offered a see by Libyan
bishops but refused because the bishops still communicated with the
champions of homoousios.' o He relates that the people who made him
bishop were Leontius from Tripoli and Theodulus from Chairatopae
(the first a Libyan), along with the party of Serra and Theophilus and
Heliodorus from both Libyas and anyone who had not consented to
Aetius being unfrocked or to the Creed of Ariminum ('iii TOl'CJl ,"IV
'EUl,"p(OlV), with the approval ofEudoxius. And he adds that Euzoius
of Antioch saw to it that the ultimatum given to the Libyan bishops at
Constantinople was not put into effect." He also has a muddled
account of a council planned by Eudoxius to take place at Antioch
with the intention of rehabilitating Aetius, but frustrated by Euzoius'
delaying tactics. This may be an allusion to the council of 361 where
extreme views were canvassed but no decision taken. 12 It seems
'Julian Epp. 46 [JI] 52 cf. Philostorgius HE V1.7; Sozomenus HE V.5.9. The
reference to an eminent Christian leader whom Julian refuted in argument is
probably not to Aetius (Against the Galilaeans 418 [234] 47B). In Epp. 79 Julian
praised Aetius by name for saying that God could not have taken flesh in the womb
ofa woman.
IOHE 1lI,'9.
"Ibid. VII.6.
12Ibid. VII.S; see above p. .s80.
602
The Neo-Arians
unlikely that Aetius ever resided in his see, or that he was ever
formally re-installed in the clerical order by the church at
Constantinople or at Antioch. When Eunomius broke formally with
the great church (which was for him of course the church of
Eudoxius and Euzoius in Constantinople and in Antioch, the church
supported by the eastern Emperor, the church under Homoian Arian
influence), Aetius joined him in setting up a separate Neo-Arian
church with separate bishops, consecrated by these two. At its first
fine careless rapture it had bishops in Constantinople (Eudoxius
and/or Aetius), Lydia and Ionia (Candidus), Palestine (Chairatopae
presumably presided over by Theodulus), Lesbos (Thallus), Pontus,
Galatia and Cappadocia (Euphronius), Cilicia (Iulianus), Antioch
(Theophilus the 'Indian') and Libya (Serra, Stephen and
Heliodorus}.'3 Aetius had been given an estate in Lesbos by Gallus,
and Julian had confirmed or restored this gift. To this estate Aetius
retired in later Iife.' 4 Philostorgius says that Aetius was made
governor of Lesbos by Procopius, the usurper who threatened the
throne of the Emperor Valens early in his reign, but managed to
escape evil consequences on Procopius' defeat, and died in
Constantinople, where he was associating with Eunomius and
another prominent Neo-Arian called Florentius. not long after the
failure of Pro copius' attempt at power.' s Most authorities agree that
this death took place in the year 367'6
2. Aetius: Doctrine
The only work of Aetius which survives, preserved by Epiphanius, is
his Syntagmation. Otherwise we have nothing but a few extracts and a
few conjectures. Ps-Didymus tells us of an argument of Aetius to the
effect that if God who is ingenerate is wholly generative (OAOC;
ytW'lTlKOC;), then he has not generation substantively (oocruil50lC;)
[presumably because an ingenerate cannot generate that which is
generatel, and that if God's substance (ousia) was changed into an
issue (ytvv'll'a). then the ousia of God is not beyond transformation
'JPhilostorgius, HE VIl.s. 6; VIII.2-?; IX.4; Socrates HE IV.13.
14Philostorgius, HE IX.4.
I5lbid. IX.6.
16But Simonetti (Crisi 391 n 35) places his death in 365. before the defeat of
Procopius.
60 3
 The Rival Answers Emerge
(U!I&tUP1.l]tOC;).'7 This sounds very like the material which we find in
the Syntagmation, and may be a paraphrase of it. Julian commended
Aetius because he said that God could not have taken flesh in the
womb of a woman.'· We have no utterances at all by Aetius apart
from this one bearing on the Incarnation, and it is difficult to know
why Aetius should have said this, ifhe said it. If we lay the emphasis
on the word God, perhaps we can conjecture that Aetius was here
uttering in a provocative form the universal Arian assumption that
only an inferior God could have become incarnate. M. Richard
thought that in Or. con. Arianos 111.26 Athanasius, reproducing a
series of seventeen texts from the New Testament adduced by an
Arian author to support Arian doctrine, was giving us material from
the pen of Aetius, perhaps from the Syntagmation.' 9 But the
Syntagmation as we know it does not discuss the Incarnation, and all
these texts are employed to demonstrate the weakness, ignorance and
subjection to passions of the incarnate Logos, based on the universal
Arian supposition that the Logos took the place of the psyche in Jesus
Christ. The fact that these texts emphasize, inter alia, the ignorance of
the Logos does not make for their coming from a Neo-Arian source.
We have no reason to believe that Athanasius was acquainted with
Neo-Arian ideas at the period at which he wrote this work. A more
likely source of Aetius' doctrine is the unknown writer or writers
whom George of Lao dice a quoted in order to attack in his Letter of
359, written at a time when the teaching ofAetius first began to alarm
the followers of Basil of Ancyra. 20 The extracts from his work attack
the doctrine that 'like in respect of ousia' is a proper way of defining
the relation of the Son to the Father. 21 This author maintains that
'By reason of his birth the Son is less and is confessed (to be so). He
does not consequently preserve likeness to the unbeginning (to
uytV'ltov) in respect of ousia, but preserves the pure will of God,
bearing it in his own existence (U7tOataOSt); so he preserves likeness,
not according to ousia but according to the principle of truth. '22
This is, no doubt, the point which Aetius was attempting to make
before Constantius in Constantinople in 359. He goes on;
17PS.~Didymu5 De Trinitate 10 (40).
"EpP·79.
19'5 aint Athanase et la Psychologie du Christ seIan Ies Ariens' 3-10.
20See above, PP.370.
21Epiphanius Panarion 73.21.2 (293).
"Ibid. 3 (293, 294).
i
I
. c,
The Neo-Arians
'Seeing that the Son is admitted to be infinite (uteAs6t1]to<;), not
because he possesses life by his own nature, but from the authority of
the Unbeginning, and the unbeginning (uytv1]to<;) nature is infmitely
greater than any authority: how can they avoid manifest impiety who
exchange the Heterousian gospel (to &t&p06cnov 1CljpUY!lU) of
orthodoxy for "likeness of ousia"?,23
It was the heterousion which Aetius championed before Constantius.
Another extract runs:
'So the name "Father" does not denote ousia, but authority which
produced (unoo-t1]o-cio-'l<;) the Son the God-Logos before the ages, and
he possesses infinitely the ousia and authority which was given to him,
and he possesses it continuously'. 24 Aetius of course would have
maintained that the ousia given to the Son by the Father was different
from the Father's own ousia. A fmal fragment runs:
'If they want "Father" to indicate ousia but not authority, they should
address the existence (un6o-tumv) of the Only-begotten by the name
"Father" .'25
There can be little doubt that these are the words of Aetius himself,
written some time before he produced his Syntagmation. It is
interesting to observe that the distinction between
agennetos = ingenerate and agenetos = unbeginning (i.e. existing from
eternity) is not recognised here. It is possible that the extreme Arian
views which Hilary says that he heard canvassed at Seleucia in 359 2 •
were those of the school of Aetius. And ifSozomenus is correct in his
account of a council held in Antioch in 361 (apparently) which met to
proclaim that the Son was unlike the Father but without achieving
this,27 then it is likely that these were the doctrines of Aetius, who
"Ibid. 4 (294).
"Ibid. 5 (295).
25[bid. 6 (294).
26See above, P.464. Bardy in his article 'L'Heritage Iitteraire d' Aetius' did not
consider these highly probable passages, and the text of the Synlagmation which he
gives in this article may be said to have been superseded by Holl's version of it in his
edition of Epiphanius· for the GCS series (the I1Ird volume of which had not
appeared when Bardy wrote). Bardy prints not only the passage given us in Basil's
De Spiritu Sancto (see next page) but also a few other short passages from the Doctrina
Patrum. Their attribution, because of their use in later controversies, is not however
clear enough, in my opinion, to make them worth printing here. More recently the
Syntagmation has been edited with Introduction, English translation and notes by
L. R. Wickham in 'The Syntagmation of Aetius'. He conjectures that what we have
is not the whole original work.
27HE IV.29.1-4, see above p. 580. This is the passage where Sozomenus relates
60 5
 The Rival Answers Emerge
was at the time in exile. Epiphanius remarks that what mattered
supremely to Aetius was knowing God;John 17:3 'this is eternal life,
that they should know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom
you have sent' was his watchword; to this knowledge he sacrificed
everything else in his system, morals, discipline and so on, and he
imagined that this knowledge was readily available; Epiphanius
quotes an isolated saying of Aetius:
'With such entire clarity do I know God and so fully do I know him
and am acquainted with him, that I do not know myself better than I
know God'.2'
This is one of the chief points on which Aetius and Eunomius differed
from Homoian Arianism. Epiphanius gives us one further isolated
saying of Aetius:
'The ingenerate (agenneton) cannot be like the generate (t0Y6VV1\tcp);
notice that the name is different: for one is ingenerate, the other
generate',29
One more saying of Aetius has been preserved, by Basil of
Caesarea,30 from one of Aetius' letters:
'Things which are dissimilar in nature are stated (1tPOlptP6crSUl)
dissimilarly. and conversely things which are stated dissimilarly are
dissimilar in nature', and he took 1 Cor 8:6 as a proof of this ('One
God and Father from whom are all things and one LordJesus Christ,
through whom are all things). 'So just as the names are related to each
other, so will the natures indicated by the words be related. Now the
"through whom" is dissimilar to the "from whom". Therefore the
Son is dissimilar to the Father'.
One is struck by the resemblance to the saying attributed to Eudoxius
above (P.585) and by the characteristically Neo-Arian argument
frol1l names to realities. The only point which makes one hesitate
about ascribing this passage to Aetius is the open use of anhomoios
(dissimilar). But on the subject of the divine natures he might well
have permitted himself to use the term.
The Syntagmation (Little Treatise) of Aetius consists of 37
that Aetius himself was known as 'the Atheist' and his followers branded by their
opponents as 'Anhomoians' and 'Exucontians',
28Panarion 76.4.1, .2 (344).
"Ibid. 76.6.1 (J46).
30De Spiritu .Sando 11.4 (PG 32:73).
606
The Neo- Arians
propositions drawn up as an answer to the De Deeretis of Athanasius,
and as an attempt to prOve by the methods of logical analysis
available at the time that the Son could not possibly be like in ousia to
the Father nor be identical in ousia with the Father. 31 It mentions
neither the term anhomoios nor heterousios but rather prefers the.
expression tv Ollcri~ dcr"YICPltOV (incomparable in ousia). It is on the
whole likely that Epiphanius, who gives us the text, reproduced the
whole work.3 2 ln his preface to the work Aetius stigmatizes the pro-
Nicenes as 'time-servers' (Chronitai people who subject God to time)
because to describe the Father as begetting the Son is in effect to
subject him to time. This version of the work is a republication of an
earlier edition, which had been misunderstood and even published in
an interpolated form. 33 Then follow the 37 propositions, all couched
in the form of an aporia, i.e. a problem to which in his comment he
tries to show there is no solution if the ousia of the Son is like to or
identical with that of the Father. All the aporiae are concerned with
the relation of the Son to the Father, none with the Incarnation. The
first aporia begins in characteristic fashion:
'Is it possible for the ingenerate God to make something generate
ingenerate?'.34
We cannot within the scope of this book give the whole text of this
very technical work, but only quote some typical examples of its
argument. 35
If God. he says. is ingenerate in his ousia, then that which he begets is
not begotten by a difference of ousia. but out of the ousia which gives it
existence (61tocrrl'Jcra<Tll~). But it is impious to say that the same ousia
can he both ingenerate and generate. [Therefore the ingenerate cannot
be generate.]36
If the ingenerate is generated. why should not the generate become
ingenerate? But every nature tends towards what is proper (ob:eiov)
to it and away from what is not proper (dvob:m.ov) [therefore neither
ingenerate could become generate nor vice versa].J7
31S 0 Kopecek History 225-']; he gives a useful analysis of the work 227-97
including a history of the use of the terms agennetos and agenetos.
32To be found in Panarion ?6.II.I (351)-12.37 (360).
"Ibid. 76.II.I-J (J51-2).
34 12: 1 (35 2).
3sWords in square brackets in this account of the aporiae are my explanation or
comment.
"5 (J 5J).
376 (J5]).
607
 The Rival Answers Efflt'fge
If God can really turn himself into a generating agency. what he
generates cannot possibly possess his whole ousia because it is
generated and no~ generator, and anyway this implies that ~s ousia is
not beyond transformation (UJl£t"~"T]tO')' But if God IS beyond
transformation and greater than cause, then 'talk of a Son' (to teUta. tOY
ul6v) must be confessed to go no further than the name. 38 [Here Neo-
Arianism appears in all its nakedness: God could not have a Son].
If ingenerateness does not constitute God's existence. but the name
'incomparable' is only the result of a human perception (t1tlvo(a,),
then it is owing to our human perception that God knows that he is
ingenerate [which of course is absurd].>·
Later Aetius moves on to a theme which is a stock one in Neo-
Arianism - that names express realities and are not mere conventional
symbols. The pro-Nicenes had, of course, claimed that 'ingenerate'
was just one name or title among many applicable to God. The Neo-
Arians believed that it expressed his essence.
'If being ingenerate in contrast to the generate contributes nothing
towards superiority of ousia, then the Son will be superior [to us] only
by appellation (1tpoaCjlop~) and he will know that those who pray are
superior to him, and not Gust) the God and Father who is addressed in
prayer,' [i.e. his divine status will virtually disappear].4o The
ingenerate is his own ousia (autoouo{a), and is superior to the generate
by nature and not just by choice [of name]. Consequently it cannot
admit of any idea of birth41 (rEvsal,).
He next sets out a series of paradoxes which result from assuming that
'ingenerate' is a mere adjective of privation meaning 'privation of a
condition' or 'a condition ofprivation'.42 It will mean, for instance,
that the ingenerate, which is beyond passions (1tUO'l), and the
generate, which must, as changeable, be subject to them, are equally
immutable. 43
'If the ingenerate nature is the cause of the generate (nature), yet the
ingenerate is nothing [but a merely human perception (epinoia)], then
how can that which is nothing be the cause of something which
exists?,44
38
8 (353, 354).
39 12 (354)·
4°17 (355).
41 1 8 (356).
42 20 (356).
4321 , 22 (356, 357).
4423 (357).
608
The Nea-Adans
If'ingenerate' is a mere name, and we exalt God's existence above all
generate things absolutely, then man's appellation will be more
important than God's existence. 45
If everything which has come into existence has done so because of
another and the ingenerate existent (hypostasis) has come into
existence by its own or any other agency, then it necessarily follows
that the ingenerate indicates ousia [and not mere epinoia].46
Aetius ends his treatise by considering the disastrous consequences of
teaching (as he believes the pro-Nicenes to teach) that there are two
ingenerates (agenneta) or ultimate principles (archai).
How can the ingenerate God, since he is free from all finiteness in
contrast to everything else which is fmite, and since he cannot
transcend his own source, observe at one time his second ousia in the
issue (gennema) and at another time his first ousia in the ingenerate,
preserving the order of first and second?47
If the ingenerate is independent of all cause and there are many
ingenerate things, they will all have an immutable nature. It is
impossible to imagine them having two natures, one creative, the
other having experienced becoming. 48
If there are two ingenerate ousiai, one cann'ot dominate the other, one
cannot be the agent and the other the subject of change, for the
argument of the pro-Nicenes will not permit God to produce one
ousia from non-existent ausia (eK JlIl 01tOKSlJlEVT], oua(a,) [as the Neo-
Arians taught that God had done].4.
There is danger in assuming that 'God' and 'the ingenerate' mean two
different things. If they do it is logical to say that God begets God. But
if nothing existed before God (as is the case), then 'God' and
'ingenerate' mean the same thing, and the generate cannot admit of
ingenerateness. 50 [In short, to say that God is begotten is equivalent to
saying that God is not God.]
The last aporia is not really a philosophical non possumus but a
concluding benediction couched in Neo-Arian phraseology:
'May the existent self-generated God, and so the only true God who
was (thus) addressed by Jesus Christ the Apostle (u1toataUvto,) who
45 26 (357).
4'28 (358).
4731 (35 8).
48 33 (358).
40 34 (35 8).
5°36 (35 8).
609
 The Rival Answers Emerge
has existed truly before the ages and is a truly begotten existent
(hypostasis), preserve you, both men and women, in soundness from
impiety.'Sl
It is obvious at once that Aetius here is not in the least concerned to
appeal to the Bible, nor even to mention the name ofJesus Christ. His
sole concern· is philosophical, to point out how illogical and
impossible it is, in the light of the logic and philosophy of his day, to
hold that the ousia of the Father and the Son can be either like each
other or identical with each other. His opponents, the pro-Nicenes
and the party of Basil of Ancyra, ·had appealed to philosophy when
they insisted upon introducing the word ousia into their doctrine
about the relation of the Son to the Father. They had not done so with
any specially philosophical intention; they were trying in their own
way to do justice to the Bible and the witness of tradition and of
Christian experience. But they had made ousia a kind of touchstone,
and Aetius meets them to this extent upon their own ground with
acuteness, learning and a great display of basically Aristotelian logic.
He was a famous debater, a famous analyser and exponent of the
rationaL To people like Basil and Athanasius he must have seemed as
Abailard seemed to St. Bernard, as a logical analyst would seem to an
idealist theologian. We are not surprised when we learn that Basil of
Caesarea as a deacon retreated before the formidable machine of
Aetius' logic. Aetius presented the defenders of N with a severe
challenge. We can sense also why people like Constantius, Akakius
and Eudoxius disliked Aetius. A man who is ready to argue forcibly
from first premises on every occasion may be an effective debater but
will never be a popular success.
But behind the metaphysics, the definitions, the aporiae, we can
discern one basic assumption of Neo-Arianism: God cannot beget.
And behind that assumption lies another: God cannot communicate
himself. He may make it possible for us to know him in a formal
51 37 (359. 360). It is impossible 'to be sure about the exact date afthe production
of the Synt4gmation. Kopecek wishes to place it in 359, Wickham in 360. In the
preface Aetius complains of persecution, and this may refer either to his first exile
(358) or to his second (360). Kopecek is sure that it is a reply to the De Decretis of
Atha,nasius. but there is ~o reason why Aetius should have made an immediate reply
to th1s work. It looks as If George of Lao dicea had an early version ofit in his hands
in 359, and Aetius tells us in the preface that there was another version current. We
cannot place its composition much after 360, because time must be allowed for Basil
of Caesarea to have replied to it in his Adv. Eunomium, some time after its
appearance, by about 363.
610
The Neo-Arians
sense, to become acquainted with his being in an intellectual way;
indeed according to Neo-Arianism he has made the knowledge very
easily obtainable. But to know him in the Hebraic sense, in the sense
of the Old Testament and the Fourth Gospel, to commit ourselves to
him in faith, to share in his life (though not his nature) - this Nep-
Arianism virtually excludes. This is one of the reasons why it is so
difficult to envisage Neo-Arianism having arisen out of surviving
Jewish Christianity, in spite of some apparent evidence to this effect
in the Apostolic Constitutions. It is also worth noting that though
Aetius never says that the Son was created from non-existing things
(e<; 00" 5VTOOV) he does hold that he was created 'from ousia which did
not subsist' (e" lliJ 01tO"elll&Vll, oocria,). This seems to be a distinction
without a difference.
Rationalism is in fact Aetius' outstanding characteristic. He
probably had ideas about the Incarnation and was willing to expound
them but with one small exception they have not survived. This is a
loss, but not a very great one, for clear! y Aetius' main interest was in
the metaphysical relationship of the Son to the Father. His main
purpose is to preserve the correct metaphysics. This is probably the
reason why Neo-Arianism, unlike Homoian Arianism, never
became a popular movement.
3. Eunomius: his Career
We do not know the date of the birth of Eunomius, but we may
conjecture that he was born about 330. The place of his birth was an
obscure village called Corniaspa in Cappadocia. 52 He was the son of a
poor, struggling farmer, and was educated by his father. He started
life as a teacher of short-hand (1tpouvl"ou crorpia<;, called after
Prunicus, its inventor, just like Pitman!), then supported himself as a
tutor of the children of the man who had employed him as a writer,
and next became a rhetor. Thence he graduated to becoming a
theologian. 53 He may have been accepted in the church of
52Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom. 1.105 (281); but Philostorgius and Sozomenuscall
it.Dakorioenoi. see below PP.613. 616-17. Eunomius objected to Basil referring to
him as a Galatlan and preferred to be called a Cappadocian. Much the fullest and
most recent source on Eunomius is Kopecek, History of Neo-Arianism. But Harnack
History IV.74 (very scanty), Loofs 'Arianismus' 31-2, 34. 38 (not altogether
accurate), Zeiller Origines 306, 308 and Simonetti Crisi 254-9 can also be consulted.
53Gregory of Nyssa ibid. 1.49-54 (264-5).
6II

The Rival Answers Emerge
Cappadocian Caesarea when the Homoian Arian Dianius was
bishop, and George of Alexandria (himselfa Cappadocian) may have
found him a civilian post in Constantinople. 54 Philostorgius
however says that he came to Antioch from Cappadocia,55 and he
certainly studied rhetoric and logic in Antioch. Thence he went to
Alexandria, perhaps in the train of George its Arian bishop. In
Alexandria (we may conjecture about 355 or 356) he met Aetius,
whose secretary he virtually became and by whose t~ought he was
deeply influenced. In 358 he came to Antioch again; accompanying
George of Alexandria 56 and there met the recently-appointed bishop
of Antioch, Eudoxius. Philostorgius says that Eudoxius made
Eunomius deacon, 57 and this is the only point at which we can
envisage his ordination by Eudoxius. Very shortly afterwards,
however, both bishop and deacon were banished by the irate
Constantius, exasperated partly because Eudoxius had ordained as
extreme a theologian as Eunomius. 58 Eunomius was sent to
Midiaeon in Phrygia. 5 •
Eunomius returned with almost all other banished bishops for the
General Council ofSeleucia-Ariminum. Philostorgius tells us that he
was present at Constantinople and that he supported Aetius in the
role that he played there in frightelling off the deacon Basil of
Cappadocian Caesar;;a and refuting the charge of Anhomoianism. 60
But he does not say that Eunomius actually took part in any debate,
though it is possible that he had just published his First Apology. We
may conclude that it is most unlikely that Eunomius in fact engaged
in any public discussion, for ifhe had it is wholly improbable that the
Emperor would have allowed him to be made a bishop very shortly
54S0 Kopecek History 145-150.
ss HE III.lo. 21.
s6Theodoret HE 11.27.9. It is highly likely that he attended the council in Antioch
held by the newly-elected Eudoxius which approved of the 2nd Sirmian Creed. See
Sozomenus HE IV,I2.3-? and above pp.348, 586.
57HE IV.j.S. Philostorgius says that E. only allowed himself to be ordained after
satisfying himself ofEudoxius' orthodoxy (according to Eunomius' standa·rds). But
it is most unlikely that this deacon's examination in reverse took place; the story can
be attributed to the historian's characteristically Neo-Arian concern for doctrinal
accuracy and soundness. See Simonetti Crisi 237.
58See above. P.357.
59PhiJostorgius: HE IV.B.
6°lbid. IV.I2. Incidentally Philostorgius says quite clearly here that Basil was a
deacon at this point (not just a reader). Simonetti, with others (Crisi 2S4). wishes to
place the discussion about Anhomoianism early in 360.
612
•
The Neo-Arians
afterwards. In the general reshuffle of sees which followed the
Council of Constantinople early in 360, Eunomius by the influence of
Eudoxius was made bishop of Cyzicus. 61 What happened next is
surrounded by a mist ofuncertainty.62 Philostorgius says that while
Eunomius was bishop ofCyzicus he was accused to Eudoxius (now in
Constantinople) of teaching the anhornoion; he went to the capital,
declared that he did not teach that the Son was anhornoion, but on the
contrary that he was 'like according to the Scriptures', but not 'like in
ousia', because to allow this would mean to subject the impassible
High God to the experiencing of passions (pathe). Eunomius had a
resounding success in Constantinople. 63 But later (how much later
we do not know), failing to persuade Eudoxius to recall Aetius,
Eunomius left Cyzicus and went to his home in Cappadocia. 64 On
another occasion (we cannot tell when).Akakius accused Eunomius
to Euzoius of Antioch of heresy but when Eunomius appeared to
answer the charge Akakius remained silent and the case collapsed. 65
Constantius, he says, was intencling to call a general council to Nicaea
to establish the heterousion as official orthodoxy when he was
prevented by the rebellion of Julian and his own death. 66 We must
take this last statement with a pinch of salt. Sozomenus says that while
bishop of Cyzicus Eunomius was accused by his own clergy of
heresy, and that he went to Constantinople and defended himself
with apparent success. Eudoxius did not condemn him, but neither
did he encourage him to return to Cyzicus; so Eunomius decided not
to return because he was not trusted by some of his own clergy. 67
Later Sozomenus refers to Eunomius being exiled by the Emperor,
but we do not know which, nor whither he was sent, and it is most
improbable that he is referring to the year 360. All he knows of
Eunomius thereafter is that not long after this he went to his own
village ofDakora in Cappadocia and there died. 68 Theodoret relates
61 Philostorgius_ HE V.3. As usual Philostorgius says that he only submitted to this
elevation on the understanding that Eudoxius would have Aetius recalled. But this is
most unlikely. Eunomius must at trus point have signed the creed of
Nice/Constantinople.
62As Simonetti admits Crisi 341, n 72.
63HE VI.J.
64V1.3·
65V1.4·
66VI.S·
67HE IV.26.S. 6.
68VII.17. I.
61 3
 The Rival Answers Emerge
that when Eunomius was bishop ofCyzicus his local enemies induced
him (against the advice of Eudoxius) to show his hand doctrinally;
they then delated him as a heretic to Constantius, who angrily
ordered Eudoxius to look into Eunomius' case ifhe wished to retain
his see. Eudoxius duly gathered a court of bishops who tried
Eunomius and deposed him for heresy. But he took no notice of this
action and began ordaining men to constitute his own sect. 69 We can
conclude without difficulty that at this point Eunomius left the see of
Cyzicus for doctrinal reasons, either after condemnation by a synod
or of his own accord, and that the evidence that he was nOw banished
is almost non-existent. 7o
Philostorgius also tells US of two councils held at Antioch at the
time at which Aetius was made bishop, and before the persecution of
the Christians (which can only allude to the reign of Julian),
organized the first by Eudoxius and Euzoius and the second by
Euzoius alone, the first of which was intended to vindicate Aetius,
though its intentions were frustrated by Euzoius' delaying tactics, but
at the second Neo-Arian doctrines were approved and Aetius'
condemnation reversed; and Philostorgius remarks that Euzoius did
not implement the penalties with which the Libyan bishops were
menaced six months after Aetius' banishment early in 360.71 That a
Council met in Antioch in the second half of 361 attended by
Constantius himself, Euzoius, newly made bishop of that city,
George of Alexandria, George of Laodicea (who had now
presumably deserted the party of Basil of Ancyra to join the
Homoeans; thereby avoiding deposition in the great re-shuffle of
early 360) and Eunomiusis clear from Athanasius De Synodis 30 and
31 and Socrates HE 11.45. But that it cleared Aetius and restored him
to the clerical rank is inconceivable. Aetius was still in exile in 362, as
Julian's Ep 79 recalling him reveals, and Eunomius left Cyzicus
because nobody would make an effort to recall and reinstall Aetius in
his rank; and we cannot possibly place Aetius being made bishop as
69HE 11.29.
7°Everybody seems to assume that Eunomius was banished at this point, but
though it is wholly fikely that he was unfrocked, there is simply no evidence of his
banishment in 360. Simonetti (Crisi 391 03S) makes this assumption, and so does
Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 158, saying that he was sent to Mitylene and
citing as sources Philostorgius HE VII.I.?; VII.6; VlIl.z arid IX.4 and Sozomenus
HE VI.26 and Theodoret HE 11,29. None of these sources says anything about
Eunomius being banished at this point, though Philostorgius says that Aetius went
to Mitylene.
"HE VU.l, 6.
614
The Neo-Arians
early as this. It is highly likely that this Council of 361 did in fact fail
to pass extreme Neo-Arian measures owing to Euzoius' reluctance,
and that we must here place the unsuccessful and half-hearted attempt
of Akakius to charge Eunomius with heresy. 72 Perhaps Eunomius
left Cyzicus not in 360, but in 361, disgusted at the failure of this
council to vindicate Aetius. If there was a council of Antioch which
rehabilitated Aetius, we must place it in 362, after the death of
Constantius, and perhaps later. But it is doubtful if any such council
took place.
At the death of Constantius and accession ofJulian to sole power
(361) all exiled clergy and bishops returned (though not necessarily to
their original posts). This recall we know to have included Aetius, for
we have Julian's letter welcoming him. Eunomius did not return
because, as we have just seen, he was never exiled. But from this
period onwards we must envisage the establishment and spread of a
separate Neo-Arian church or sect. Aetius was apparently made a
bishop by enthusiastic Neo-Arian Libyan bishops. Eunomius was a
bishop already, though he had left his see of Cyzicus. 73 The next
point at which we can with confidence declare that Eunomius waS
exiled is about the year 365, and he was exiled, not for doctrinal but
for political reasons. He had fallen under suspicion of supporting the
revolt of Procopius. He had undertaken a mission to free from
detention some supporters of Valens imprisoned in Cyzicus when
Procopius was in control of Constantinople, and had of course for
this purpose entered into relations of some sort with Procopius'
government. Later he was wrongfully accused of having consciously
72Seeabove, p. 61). Martin Hist. Akeph. 198 n 106 seems to me to be going too far
when she concludes that this council of 361 adopted an Anhomoian (or even an
heterousian) formula. Probably Euzoius did refrain from pressing the penalties on the
Neo-Arian bishops after six months.
73Philostorgius HE VIII.2; IX.4; Socrates HE IV.I 3. It is possible that this move
occurred a little later, in the short reign ofJovian (36)-4), as Gwatkin suggested (SA
230) and Wickham ('The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomaeon' sso) places it in
36). Philostorgius HE IX.4 says that on leaving Cyzicus E performed
thenceforward no liturgical functions but retired to his estate at Chalcedon and
confined himself to acting as guide and encourager (with Aetius) to other Neo-
Arians. But he could not also have organized a Neo-Arian church from
Constantinople at the same time, so that we must place this retirement to Chalcedon
to a later period. I think it desirable, because entia non sunt praeter necessitatem
multiplicanda, to be sparing in accepting evidence of Eunomius' exiles. Theodoret
HE 1l.29. I I implies that E began creating a Neo-Arian church immediately after
leaving Cyzicus. But it is unlikely that he initiated this policy till he had the support
of Aetius. returned from exile.
615
 The Rival Answers Emerge
sheltered Procopius in his private estate. 74 This was quite enough for
the intensely suspicious Emperor Valens; his association with Aetius,
who was certainly tarred with the Procopian brush, must have
rendered him an object of suspicion anyway. He was banished, as we
have seen (above, p. 592 n. 163) 'to the Mauretanian land' but on the
way met at Mursa Valens, 'bishop' of that town. Valens the bishop
interceded successfully with Valens the Emperor, and Eunomms was
recalled. He spent some time in Constantinople ordering the Neo-
Arian church and was able to close the eyes of Aetius on his death-
bed.?' However, neither Eudoxius of Constantinople nor Euzoius of
Antioch nor the successor ofEudoxius, Demophilus (whose accession
to the capital see we must place in 367 or 368) liked Eunomius nor
Neo-Arianism. Philostorgius tells us that at some point Demophilus
secured from the Emperor Valens the banishment of Eunomius to
Nao~(av <iJv vijaov, which presumably means the island ofNaxos, on
a charge of disturbing the churches. 76 We must place this exile at
some point in or after 368. Philostorgius stigmatizes both
Demophilus and the successor of Euzoius at Antioch, Dorotheus, as
enemies of Eunomius. They described the Neo-Arians as
'Anhomoians' as readily as did the pro-Nicenes. 77 By 380 Eunomius
was living in Chalcedon; he must have returned from exile at latest
on the death of Valens in 378. 78
The Emperor Theodosius, however, was not one to leave so
notorious an heretic as Eunomius in peace. He banished him to
Halmyris near Tomi on the shore of the Black Sea. We do not know
the date. It may have been as late as 383, on the failure ofTheodosius'
last attempt to reconcile all parties. From this spot Eunomius was
captured and temporarily held by trans-Danubian barbarians who
had crossed the frozen river. Later Eunomius, rescued from the
barbarians, was transferred to Caesarean Cappadocia, where he was
unpopular because he had been a known opponent of Basil, the
recently deceased bishop of that see. Finally Eunomius was allowed
74Philostorgius HE IX.6, 7, 8; cf. Sozomenus HE V1.9; Socrates HE IV.I9.
7sPhiiostorgius HE IX.6.
76Ibid.IX.II.
77Ibid. IX.I), 14.
78Ibid.IX.4; Philostorgius' chronological order (or that of his editor, Photius) is
confused. In his Apologia Apologiae Eunomius complains of being condemned and
meeting i1Iegaljudges and of being dragged across sea and land and suffering injury
from the heat of the sun and from dust, Gregory Nyssa (Con. Eunom. 1.72 (45':27.2.)).
616
The Neo-Arians
to retire to his native village of Dakoroenoi. He must have been
permitted considerable liberty of movement, because Philostorgius
said that when he, Philostorgius, was twenty years old he saw
Eunomius in Constantinople. 79 We do not know when Eunomius
died. Jerome in his De Viris Illustribus (CXX) says that Eunomius was
still alive when he Gerome) was writing (?397 or 398). But this is not a
very reliable statement. It only means that Jerome did not positively
know that Eunomius was dead.
There is no doubt that the doctrines ofNeo-Arianism were at one
time quite influential. This is testified to not only by the fact that Basil
of Caesarea, Gregory of N azianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-
Didymlls, Epiphanius and several others chose to write against
Eunomius, but we know that when Amphilochius was made bishop
of !conium in 373, having had no theological training, he found
himself beset by Neo-Arian propaganda in his see, and called in the
aid of Basil of Caesarea, his friend, to assist him in the task of
countering it. What that doctrine was, we must next enquire.
4. The Doctrine of Ellnomiu.
Eunomius is known to have written at least three works which
survive in whole or part. They are the Apology, or First Apology,
which survives and on which we can gain more light from Basil's
attack on it in his Adversus Eunomium; the Apology for an Apology (or
Second Apology, portions of which survive because they are quoted by
Gregory of Nyssa in his Contra Eunomium) , in answer to the Adversus
Eunomium of Basil of Caesarea; and his Confession of Faith, which
Gregory of Nyssa has preserved. so We can glean some further
quotations or paraphrases of Eunomius from contemporary
79Ibid. X.6. ·Philostorgius was born in Borissus in Cappadocia Secunda about
368, son ofKarterios who was himself an Heterousian and Eulampius, a woman of
Homoian views who was converted to her husband's point of view; she converted
her brothers and her father (a presbyter called Anysius). See ibid. HE IX.9.
Philostorgius was writing some time between 42-5 and 433 as a conscious
continuator of Eusebius.
8°Henceforward the Apology will be called Apol., the Apology for the Apology will
be shortened to Apol. Apol., and the Confession of Faith will be referred to as Conf
The reader is reminded that 'apology' here is reproducing the origina] Greek
apologia and means simply 'defence' with no thought of apologizing in our sense of
the word.
61 7
 The Rival Answers Emerge
literature. Basil's Epistles and Gregory of Nazianzus' Theological
Orations. and the De Trinitate ofPseudo-Didymus. It is not difficult to
calculate approximately the date of Apol. Apol. Eunomius wrote it in
two periods. The first two books were written in 378 or 379. on his
return from exile at the death of Valens. The third was written a little
later. in 382 or 383. He did not begin this work till eighteen years after
Basil's attack on the first Apology. the Adversus Eunomium. had
appeared. He later wrote two more books. but our fragments cover
only the first three books. 81 His Conf was written expressly for the
gathering of various parties in the church called by Theodosius in 383
as a last effort at achieving unity. But it is more difficult to date
Eunomius' first work. the Apol. Till fairly recently it had been usual
to place it after the Council of Constantinople of359/360. some time
later in 360. But recent opinion has tended to conclude that it must
have been produced late in 359. at Constantinople. 82 The subject is a
complicated one; evidence is strong for neither conclusion; and the
scope of this work does not permit us to enter into it here. 83
We have several summaries of his beliefs from the pen of
Eunomius. In his Apol. he gave a short. wholly colourless and
uninformative creed which he admitted to be in need of filling out
815ee Philostorgius HEVIIl. 12; Socrates HEIV.26;Jaeger Preface [0 Vol. II of his
edition of Gregory of Nyssa, Opera, and Kopecek History 362-371 and 441-450.
82Wickham 'The Date of Eunomius' Apology'; Kopecek History 299-306.
83The chief argument in favour of the earlier date is that Eunomius says that he
was awarded the see of Cyzicus as a reward for producing the Apar. (Gregory of
Nyssa Con. Eunom.I.III (45:281); 114 (28S); 117 (28S. 288». But Eunomius was
probably writing twenty years after his production of the work, and he could have
been mistaken. Both Basil and Gregory strenuously deny that E delivered the Apol.
at Constantinople in 359. The chief argument against the year 359 for the
production of this work is that it would entail assuming that E had delivered himself
of just the kind of views for which Aetius was at that very council deprived and
exiled on a charge of heresy, but yet E was rewarded by being made bishop of
Cyzicus. Philostorgius HE IV.12 does not suggest that Eunomius delivered a
discourse on that occasion. The Apol. could have been the reply made to his accusers
by E later in 360 when he was arraigned at the capital for teaching the anhomoion and
successfully defended himself (see Apol. II (PG 30:848). [8 (853), 2[ (886-7) and 24
(860) all of which treat of likeness and unlikeness. Ancient speakers from the dock
allowed themselves much more latitude in answering charges than we are used to).
The passages in Con. Eunom. quoted from Eunomius' own references to his past life
in Apol, Apol. can be interpreted in different ways, though his references to
condemnation by unjust judges and being dragged to his injury through dust and
heat (1.7 (27.2)) would be more impressive if they applied to an experience
undergone more recently than his banishment in 358.
618
The Neo- Arians
with further details. 84 But a much more useful kind of confession of
faith was at some point tacked on to the end of the Apol .• in all
likelihood by Eunomius himself. Though it is fluid and almost chatty
its form is that of a Rule of Faith; it speaks of:
'our Lord Jesus Christ. through whom all things have come into
existence, the image and seal of (the Father's) own power and activity,
comparable in respect of ousia neither to him who generated him nor
to the Holy Spirit who came into existence through him' [Biblical
texts now adduced. Acts 2:36 and Prov 8:22 and for the created nature
of the Spirit I Cor 8:6 and John 1:3]. The Son is "neither homoou$ios
nor homoiousios, because the former implies an origin and a division of
(the Father's) ousia. and the latter an equality" (of ousia). The Son is
entirely subordinated to the Father. and "uses the Paraclete as a
minister for sanctification, for teaching, for the support of the
faithful". And Eunomius ends this profession in a conventional way
"in these last days born of the holy Virgin. living holily
(llo1.ltSU"Ul1svo<; 6"lro<;) according to human laws. crucified. dead.
risen again the third of the days, ascended into heaven, coming to
judge the living and the dead according to a just payment of faith and
of deeds, reigning for ever', Finally he quotes I Cor IS :28 as a text to
justify his subordination of the Son',8s
Next. we can examine Eunomius' Conf in which he expressed
concisely and uncompromisingly his doctrinal convictions for the
benefit of the Emperor Theodosius in the year 383. It has been pieced
together from the quotations of it in the Refutalio Confessionis
Eunomii of Gregory of Nyssa: 8 •
'We believe in the one and only true God according to the teaching of
the Lord himself, honouring him with no false voice (for he is without
deceit) but he truly exists as one God in nature and in glory alone
without beginning eternally, endlessly, not divided in the ousia in
which he exists nor distributed into more, nor becoming something
84To be found in Apol. 5 (840), also in Basil's Ad". Eunomium 1.4 (PG 29:509, 512,
5 I 3)· The creed is reproduced in Hahn Symbole §190 pp. 260-1. Eunomius'
comment on the creed is found in ApoI. 6 (841) and Adv. Eunom. 1.5 (517).
85Apol. 26, 27 (864. 865). For comment see Kopecek History 346 n I and 402.
'6Ref. Conf Eunom. (ed. Jaeger) (PG 45:476t1) 20 (476). 33 (480), 39 (484). 50
(48 8""9),5 2 ,54 (489), 68 (496). 73 (500). [[4, [[5 (5[7). [[6 (520), [[9 (520), [3[
(5 25).132, [33 (528). 136 (529). [42 (532). [45 (533), [51 (536), 159 (540). [64 (541),
[67 (54[), [69 (54[.544), [70 (544), [72 (545). [82 (549), [89. [90 (553). [98 (556),
202 (557), 208 (56[). 2[2 (~64). 2[8, 2[9 (565).22[ (565),223,224 (568). 227 (569),
230, 23 I (569). 232 (57z), The piecing together has been done by me. Kopecek
discusses this ConI. History 517-27.
619
 The Rival Answers Emerge
else at another time, nor altering what he is from its existence, nor split
from one ousia into a triple hypostasis, for in every way and wholly he
is one, remaining sole in the same conditions and as always. He has no
sharer of his Godhead. nor participator of his glory nor joint possessor
ofhis authority nor consort of the throne of his kingdom, for he is one
and sole God almighty, God of gods, King of kings, Lord of lords,
highest over all the earth, highest in the heavens, highest among the
highest, above the· heavens. true in acts, true in words, loftier than all
rule, subordination, authority and kingdom. In generating he has not
divided his own ousia nor is the generator the same as the generated
nor has he become both Father and Son; for he is beyond process
(li<p9aptoc;), and he does not need in creation matter or parts or
physical organs, for he is altogether independent (t'11tpOcr5Et\C;). And
we believe in the Son of God, the only-begotten God, the first-born of
all creation, true Son, not ingenerate. truly generated before the ages,
named Son not without coming into existence (YEVVllO'Emr;) before
existing, coming into existence before the creation, not uncreated,
existing in the beginning, not unbeginning, living Wisdom and active
truth and existent Power and generated Life, as Son of God imparting
life to those who are alive and imparting life to the dead, true Light,
Light which lightens every man coming into the world, good and
dispenser of good things, not to be measured in rank along with him
who generated him nor in any point with respect to his Father's ousia
but coming into existence by generation; glorious and the Lord of
glory, and receiving glory from the Father, not sharing his glory (for
the glory of the Almighty cannot be communicated, as he said "My
glory I will not give to another" [lsa 42:8). He it is who spoke in the
prophets), glorified by the Father before all ages, glorified by the
Spirit for ever and by every reasonable and generated being. He is
obedient in creating and giving being to things that exist, obedient in
all his administration, not having received his being Son or God
because of his obedience, but from his being Son and being generated
as only-begotten God, being obedient in words, obedient in acts ...
«the Father) is faithful in words and faithfnl in acts) .. ." Mediator in
doctrines, Mediator in the Law, Son, only-begotten and like to him
who generated him uniquely ("at't~a{pEtOv) alone according to his
peculiar aspect (fVVOlav). 88 He is not Father to the Father, for there are
not two Fathers, nor is he as an Ingenerate to the Ingenerate, nor as a
Son to the Son, for as Son he is image and seal of all the activity and
power of the Almighty, seal of his counsels. (To him must be
87The connection of this sentence is not clear.
88 An equivocal expression, it can in Eunomius' use mean 'aspect' of an objective
character, or, in a pejorative sense, 'purely human apprehension'.
620
The Neo-Arians
attributed) the liquidation of the human race by flood, and the rain of
fire on the people of Sadam and the just punishment of the Egyptians.
He gives law according to the command of the eternal God. He
became man at the end of the days, but he did not assume a man
composed of soul and body.89 After him we believe in the Paraclete,
the Spirit of truth, the teacher of orthodoxy, who came into existence·
by means of the sole God through the Only-begotten, wholly
subordinated. He is not to be reckoned beside or along with the
Father, for he is one and sole Father, God over all, nor is he (the Spirit)
to be put on an equality with the Son, for the Only-begotten is the
Son who has nobody begotten along with him (6~oy.vfj). And yet
(the Spirit) is not to be ranked along with anybody else, for he is
superior to all the creatures produced by the Son in origin and nature
and glory and knowledge as the first and most important and greatest
and finest work of the Only-begotten. For he is one and first and sole
and excels all the productions of the Son in ousia and in rank in the
natural order, and he accomplishes all activity and doctrine, according
to the Son's good pleasure. He is sent by him and he receives from him
and passes on to those who are instructed, and he leads into truth. He
sanctifies the saints; hierophant to those who approach the mystery,
distributing every gift, working along with the faithful so that they
perceive and behold what is commanded, assisting those who pray,
guiding them for their good, holding them in orthodoxy,
enlightening souls with the light of knowledge. (It is the function of
the Spirit also) to ward off the daemons, to tend the sick, to heal the
enfeebled, to exhort those who are distressed, to raise up those who are
sinking down, to revive those who are drooping, to exhort those who
are engaged in conflict, to give courage to the fearful, to care for all
and to exercise foresight and providence in everything, so that the
well disposed shall be welcomed and the faithful be protected.'90
This Con! is, of course, a carefully drawn up general survey of
Eunomius' doctrine. But the basic belief of it, from which all else
flows, is the ingenerateness (agennesia) , and with that the
incomparability, of God, the Father. For him there is only one God,
strictly speaking, who exists neither from himself nor from another.
God must be before everything, for this follows from his
ingenerateness. He is 'ingenerate substance' (oolcria ciylivv1JtoC;).91 He
89E means that he took human flesh, but not a human soul, an almost invariable
feature of any Arian doctrine of the Incarnation.
9°It is likely that the ConJ. is broken off at this point, and the rest lost.
"Apel.7 (841); cf. 28 (268) and Basil Adv. Eunom. 1.5 (51)-17); 1.16 (548).
621
 The Rival-Answers Emerge
is ingenerate not merely in name nor 'in human apprehension' ("at'
&1tiV01av) nor by deprivation ("ata O"tepllow) but really and
essentially.92 To adapt a term ofCharIes Wesley, his nature and his
name is ingenerateness. The consequence of this ingenerateness is
that:
'He could never come into contact with generation. so as to
communicate his own nature to something generated. and he must
escape all comparison or association with tp.at which is generated:
Any such experience could only be brought about by division or
comparison. neither of which we can conceive of God. 93
Much ofEunomius' argument in the Apol. Apol. is directed towards
establishing the proposition that if it is conceded that God is
ingenerate, then he cannot beget that which is generate: agennetos
cannot produce gennetos. He can create something which he calls a
Son, but he cannot strictly speaking beget him. If God is to be called
'ingenerate' and if he is simple and not composite, then his nature
simply is ingenerateness. 94 To say that God is ingenerate is not
merely to refer to one aspect or attribute or human interpretation
(epinoia) of his being, but to describe its essence. 95 And, as Gregory
observes, for Eunomius 'coming into existence' or 'birth' (gennesis) is
equivalent to dissolution and death 9• (because it entails both), and for
him not to be ingenerate is the same as not existing before being born
(or coming into existence)·7
The Scriptures, Eunomius maintains, declare the Son to be a
progeny (gennema). By this they mean no more nor less than they say;
he is 'that reality (hypostasis) which the name indicates'. Therefore the
Son did not exist before he was produced before everything else and
he was produced 'by the decision of God and the Father'. 98
Eunomius rarely or never indicates precisely where the Scriptures say
that the Son is a gennema, but it is likely that ifhe had been taxed on
the point he would have referred to Isa 53:8 ('his generation (genea)
who shall declare?') and John 1:14, 18 (,only-begotten'):
'2Apol. 8 (841, 845).
"Ibid. 9 (845).
94Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom. 11.23 (917).
"Ibid. II.95, 96 (1012).
'·Ibid. II.S99 (Il12).
"Ibid. III (ix).4S. 46 (873).
98Apol. I2 (848).
622
The Neo-Arians
'We say that it was not by separation or division, because (God is)
indissoluble, nor by the ous;a of God admitting generation (gennesis),
because (God is) ingenerate. nor by any other substance contributing
to the production of the Son, but the Son was brought into existence,
having not existed'. 99
But Eunomius in the same passage will not allow that the Son was
born from non-existence (t" trov Ill] OVtcov), for 'that which does not
exist is not ousia' - a typically rationalist conclusion: non-existence
cannot produce existence. By the decision of the Father, he goes on to
say. the Son was granted a superiority over all creatures such as the
creator has over things which are made. for all things were made by
him: 'He alone, generated and created by the· power of the
Unbeginning (agenetos), became the most perfect agent for all the
creative activity and decisions of the Father."oo He continues the
argument by concluding that it is impossible to base the
consubstantiality of the Father and the Son on the bare meaning of
these two names, because if we take them literally it means that the
Father has generated the Son out of some pre-existing substance
(which is the error of the Greeks), and if we say that the Father
generated the Son by his mere authority, then we must allow an
alteration in God, so that he became a Father, not having been one
previously. We must therefore rarefy the Father/Son image into the
most remote and nominal of metaphors,just as we speak of God's eye
when we mean his activity of succouring and protecting the
righteous.' o, .
Eunomius objects strongly, of course, to the view that the Son can
be begotten from the Father's ousia. Of things which are begotten
from the ousia of the begetter, among everything within human
experience it is universally true that they are begotten 'by process'
("ata 1taOo,), and that their nature is involved in all sorts of processes.·
This is a fatal objection to the view., o2 Gregory asks pertinently
"Apol. IS (849. 8S2).
100Eunomius makes no distinction at all between agennetos and agenetos.
101 1 6 (852). But Eunomius can use the old Arian expression of the Son 'product
(gennema) but not "like one of the products', and apply the same language to
'creature' (ktisma) and to 'thing made' or 'artefact' (poiema), only on each occasion
he insists that God is the Ingenerate, the Uncreate, the Unmade (ibid. 28 (868)).
102Gregory Nyssa Con. Ermom. (III (ii) 1 (617). Gregory notes a little later that E
cannot conceive that God could be both genuinely a Father and without passions
(pathi') (ibid. III (ii) 'S (623)).
62 3
 The Rival Answers Emerge
how, if you argue that the Son's generation from the Father
disastrously compromises God with pathos, can you explain the
Incarnation, where God certainly was deeply involved with
pathos?I03 Unfortunately nothing from Eunomius' pen survives in
which he may have answered this objection. But we have a careful
statement of his about how exactly the Son was begotten:
'Not by an extension being prolonged. not by a flux nor by a section
of his continuity with the begetter being cut off, nor by the
accomplishment of an increase, not by the transformation of an
alteration, but (the ousia) obtained existence by the sheer will of him
who generated him',104
Eunomius is quite ready to say that the Father is complete without the
Son (which of course Gregory denies).'o, To say that the Son is a
product (gennema) is to describe his ousia as well as his hypostasis.,o 6
'The ousia of the Son was produced, having not existed before his
establishment (crucrtucr&COC;), but exists because produced before all
things by the decision (yvOOI111) of the Father.',o7
Eunomius, it is scarcely necessary to say, rejects the doctrine that
the Father and the Son share the same ousia, whether they are thought
to be equal or not (though of course he repudiates their equality).
Likeness in ousia must, anyway, imply equality, and this in its turn
implies the unacceptable conclusion that there are two Ingenerates;
surely anybody can see the plain sense of the (conllated) text 'the
Father who sent me, he is greater than I'?'08 It is entirely consistent to
call the Son a creature; in fact, if words correspond to any realities, we
must do this. To speak of the likeness in respect of ousia of Father and
Son is to attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. lo , Eunomius realizes
that the accusation is levelled at him when he advances these
arguments that 'he is distorting the truth by his own concoctions and
verbosity', so he adduces plenty of Scriptural texts to support his
'"'III (ii) 26, 27 (628).
104 111 (ii) 28 (628).
I05III (vi) 61 (824). We may find an echo of chis doctrine ofche Father's total
independence ofche Son in an argument (certainly of extreme Arians) recorded by
Hilary De Tr;n;t'te 111.8 (79).
'06Basii Adv. Eunomium 2.6 (584). quoting Eunomius. As Wickham observes
(,The Syntagmation of Aetius' 552) for Eunomius (as for Aetius) there is virtually no
difference between ousia. hypostasis and physis.
I07Ibid. 2.11 (592), Basil quoting Eunomius.
10·Apol. 10, II (845, 848).
10'lbid. 18 (8n).
The Neo-Arians
doctrine: one God is proclaimed by the Law and the prophets. This
one God is the God of the Only-begotten (Tn 20:I7). He alone is true
God (Tn I7:3), alone is wise (Matt I9:r7 (so Migne ed., but Rom.
I6:27 would be better)), he alone is good (Matt I9:r7), alone is
powerful (I Tim 6:IS), alone has immortality (I Tim 6:IS). The
Son's ousia is generated, 110 created and different from the ousia of the
Father." 1
'the generated ousia leaves no scope for sharing with any other, for it is
only-begotten; nor can the activity of its Maker be conceived as
common'.112
Eunomius certainly is what he prides himself. on being, an
Heterousian. It is doubtful if he even would have approved of the
strictures of the Second Sirmian Creed on those who introduce the
word ousia into the Trinitarian debate. He wished to bring the word
forward, in order to emphasize the difference of ousia in the Father
and the Son.
The most exalted language which Eunomius can use about the Son
is to say 'he is generated Sole from the Sole by the power of the
Ingenerate and has become, once created, the most perfect agent'
(01toupy6C;),'13 and that though he is dissimilar in ousia from the
Father, he is also dissimilar in ousia from all created things. He is 'the
only essence that exists as an hypostasiS by means of the activity of the
Father'.'!' He is, unlike everything else, direct, so to speak, from the
Father's hand. But otherwise Eunomius is mainly concerned to play
down the significance of the Son, by way of contrast to what he saw
as the pro-Nicenes' outrageous exaggeration of it. Aetius had said in
his Syntagmation that 'the generated [Le. in this case the SonI is
negligible' (&lllcuta<pp6vlItOV).'15 The word 'Son' as applied to
Christ, is a homonym, i.e. a single word applied in two different
senses to two different things; he cannot be a real Son, because
Eunomius admits that a son receives a part of his father's essence
(ousia) and sonship involves passion in the process of generating,
neither of which conditions can apply to Christ.!!6 The Godhead in a
110Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom. I1I.67 (589). quoting E.
I " Ibid. III (ii) 43. 44 (6JJ), again quoting E.
112Ibid. III (li) U5 (664). quotation again.
113Basil Adv. Eunom. 2.20 (613).
114Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom. 11.76 (644); see Kopecek History 474-5.
1tSEpiphanius Panarion 76.12.32 (388); see Kopecek History 291--7.
116S 0 Kopecek History 475--6.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
sense suffered in Christ, but only in its reduced form, in the created
Son. God could have decided not to generate (i.e. create) the Son:
'Not only does the Son not share his essence, he does not even have a
necessary claim on him' .'17 As God the Father is the source of all
goodness, so the Son is necessarily less good than the Father, and by
parity of reasoning as the Father is alone truly and fully real, so the
Son is less real than he."· The Son is in constitution midway
between the Father and angels, and can be called the angel of the High
God, as he is the god of all lesser beings.'" The Son is subservient
((",>11<00<;) by nature.'20 He is a lower being possessing a purely
functional character, can be called 'product' (gennema) 'artefact'
(poiema) and 'creature' (ktisma) , sustained solely by the Father's power
without sharing his nature.'21 The createdness of the Son is
evidenced by St. Paul's words in Rom 1:20 'the invisible things from
the creation of the world are perceived, being known by the things
that are made' - i.e. the uncreated Father is known by the created
Son.'aa 'Father' is the name either of God's essence (ousia) or of his
power (energeia); ifof ousia, then we shall have to admit that the Son is
of a different ousia (heterousion); if of energy, then the Fatherly
activity obviously made the Son, and the maker and the thing made
cannot be the same.'23 On the subject of the Son as image of the
Father, one which was bound to crop up in theological debate,
Eunomius and his followers held that, since the Father is
incomparable and greater than the Son, the image of God is one thing
and God is another, and to say that the Son is God's image is not an
impressive claim because man himself is said to be the image and
glory ofGod.'24 In short, for Eunomius generatedness and ousia are
inseparable; because the Son is generated his ousia cannot but be
different from the Father's.'2S
Eunomius regards the attempt to unite God's power or activity
(energeia) and his essence (ousia) as wrong; it is the practice of the
117See Kopecek History 477, 484 (quotation).
1I8Gregory Nyssa Con. Bunam. III (ix) I (1856).
119Ibid. III (ix) 27 (868), 32 (869). Ps.-Didymus has to encounter the same
argument De Trinitate I.IS (99) (PG 39:328).
t20Gregory Nyssa Refutatio Confessionis Eunomii 133 (528).
121Con. Eunom. III (ii) 73 (644). a quotation from E.
. 122Ps._Didymus De Trinitate 1.26.41 (166).
123Gregory of Nazianzus. Theological Orations 1l1.I6.
124Ps._Didymus De Trin. I. No. I (332).
125Gregory Nyssa Con. Bunom. III (ii) 137 (668), a quotation.
The Neo-Arians
pagan philosophers, and it led them to the false conclusion that the
world is eternal. On ,the contrary, God's activity is derived from his
will; it is not eternal and does not derive from his essence. Hence
Christians can hold that the world is not eternal and that the
production of the Son relates to the will of God as Father, not to his
essence which means in effect his ingenerateness. 126 Because the
energeia of God is his will (JlO1JI.1]CJI<;) the only-begotten Son is
constituted as the will of the Father and not by his ousia. This is how
we can still speak of a 'likeness' between the Son and the Father, and
keep within the scope of such biblical texts as COl1:15,16;]n 1:3. And
this is how the Son is image of the Father and is Logos (though
Eunomius does not much like using the word Logos of the Son).12'
The Son is in fact like the Father in will and is the image of his will. It
is ironic to observe this extreme Arian heretic welcoming the
distinction between the ousia and the energeia of God, a distinction
which the Cappadocian fathers warmly embraced and which was to
become an integral part of Eastern orthodox theology. Eunomius
welcomed it because he thought he could show that the ousia and the
energeia were different and that we do not know God just by his
energies but can directly observe his essence. The Cappadocians
welcomed it because they were anxious to maintain that whereas the
ousia, of God is unknowable, we can know him through his energies.
The vulnerability of the distinction is merely shown up by the
contrast. In Eunomius' scheme, of course, the energeia of the Father's
ousia created the energeia of the Son's ousia, and the Son in his tum
created the energeia of the Spirit's ousia.'2.
We find almost no references to the Incarnation in such of
Eunomius' works as have come down to us. This is not an accident.
The Incarnation must have played a comparatively minor role in
Eunomius' thought. In the creed called that of Patricius there is
virtually no mention ofit. The usual reasons assigned for the necessity
of God becoming incarnate are that he wished to reveal himself to
men and that he came to overcome sin. In Eunomius' scheme, as in
the schemes of most rationalists, the problem of evil is virtually
ignored, as Kopecek observes.'2' And (as we shall see) there is for
him no problem of revelation either, because anybody can know
126S0 Kopecek History 338, 339.
m Apol. 24 (860).
128Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom. I.2oSff (313ft).
129History 489-91.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
God quite easily. The Incarnation of the supreme God is for Eunomius
impossible; he explicitly denies this possibility;'30 only a reduced
divinity such as the Son could accomplish this. And by the same
argument there was no necessity for any further self-emptying at the
taking of a human (or not quite human) body by the Son. The Son
was in a sense all kenosis. Eunomius trenchantly criticizes Basil's
doctrine that all the self-emptying was done by the human nature of
Jesus. What room is there for sdf-emptying in that case?, he asks:
'How could anyone empty himselfinto that whieh he is?'13 I We can
know almost nothing about the details ofEunomius' doctrine of the
incarnation. The creed ofEudoxius, however, whieh may be taken as
in this case representing Neo-Arian thought, throws some light on
the subject:
(the Son) became Besh but did not become a man, because he did not
assume a human soul but he became flesh in order that through the
flesh as through a veil God might associate with us; not two natures,
since he was not a complete man, but God in flesh instead of a soul; the
whole was one composite nature; he became subject to suffering for
the strategy (6,' obcovollIav), for he could not have saved the world by
(simply) soul and body suffering. Let them explain how this passible
and mortal being could be consubstantial (611006a,0<;) with God who
is greater than these experiences, beyond suffering and death. '132
Similarly we have observed Eunomius' Confession of 383 declaring
that 'he became man at the end of these days but did not assume a man
composed of soul and body' .'33 It is in accordance with this doctrine
that Philostorgius repudiates the idea that God at the Incarnation
'dwelt in a man' (tvollciiaal tv uv9poo",p), an idea which he attributes
to Basil of Caesarea and Apollinaris of Laodieea. l34
While Eunomius does not directly endorse Arius' 'there was when
he was not' he insists upon a doctrine which is equivalent to it, that
there was a time, before all times, when the Son did not exist. Most of
the sixth part of the third book of Gregory of Nyssa's Contra
Eunomium is devoted to arguing about this point. In the nature of
things, Eunomius said, it is necessary that the Son existed after the
130Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom. 11.301, 303 (897.900); see Kopecek History 493·
'''Con. Eunom. III (iii) [8 (688). Cf. Ibid. (iv) 36-38 (725.729).
132Hahn Symbole §19I, pp. 261-2; see above p. II2.
133See above. p.621.
134 HE VIII. 12; it is worth noting that Eunomius, according to Philostorgius (HE
V1.2) denied the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Neo-Arians
Father and did not exist before he was generated. 135 He did not think
it profitable to enquire further into the matter:
'it was right and proper to generate the Son at the very time at which
(God) willed, and wise people will make no further enquiry about
why it was not earlier'.136
'God', he says elsewhere, 'existed without generating and has existed
before anything being generated '" and he who has achieved
existence by being generated did not exist before being
generated.'[37 He can even make a rather paradoxical attempt to
reconcile this with John 1:1, 2 and 18. '38
Socrates gives us a very radical statement about our capacity to
know God which was attributed to Eunomius, though it does not
occur in any of his works known to us:
'God does not know more about his own ousia than we do, and it is
not known more to him and less to us. But whatever we may know
about it, that he also certainly knows; and conversely whatever he
knows, that (knowledge) you will find exactly in US.'13.
We might think this reported saying to be due to the venomous
exaggeration of the enemies ofEunomius, but for the fact that we can
find statements in his surviving works which do not fall far short, if at
all, of this one in boldness. He confidently claims that we can know
God's ousia; it is ingenerateness. '40 Our Lord, he claimed, would not
have called himself Door and Way (John 10:9) ifit had not been easy
to go through the Door and walk in the Way. The ousia of God is
comprehensible (KataA.1]1ttlKljV).'41 He made even bolder claims
than this; not only can we know Christ, we can achieve knowledge of
God beyond Christ:
'The understanding of those who believe in the Lord leaps over all
sensible and intelligible ousia and is capable of not even stopping at the
Son's generation, it moves on beyond this, in its desire for etemallife it
135Con. Eunom. III (vi) 23 (777).
"·Ibid. (vii) [5 (805).
"'Ibid. (viii) 27 (837).
"'Ibid. (viii) 34 (84[).
t39HE IV.7.
140Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom. 11.61 (929); cf. Gregory's much more technical
statement tOlama ylipeO"'n Ka9oA.l1c&;ta SO'YJ.lCln~6JiEVa, tbr;t1ti 1tO:V'ta qip&a9al '[a.ir;
61tovoial<; Kai IlTJ6tv imel;alpeicr8a.l '[fir; 1ttptA.ll7ttlKfjC; circocpaoemc; (ibid 1.461 (393»).
l4'lbid. III (viii) 5 (528,529).
 The Rival Answers Emerge
strives after the First One' (i.e. the Father}.142 For Eunomius,
knowledge is direct perception of the ousia of the thing known,
whereas for Basil and the other Cappadocians we know things only
by their qualities or activities impinging upon us, and this applies to
God whose energeia we know. but not his ousia.
Eunomius' epistemology was bound up with his theory of names.
For him, every name conveyed direct knowledge of the essence of
o
the thing named, and names had originally been given to things not
at random nor by convention but by the direct action of God who
named them.'43 From this he argued that as each ousia is clearly
denominated by its name (ltp0<J1lYopla), so the ousia of Father and Son
must be different, because they have different names.'44 No doubt
this theory is ultimately derived from Plato's Cratylus. In this
dialogue Socrates (Le. Plato) concludes that names are imitations of
the essence (ousia) of things named, °and names must originally have
been given to each thing by some daemon Qr god and not allotted by
chance or randomly. But it is likely that Eunomius did not simply lift
the theory directly from Plato, but that it reached him through
several intermediate sources. Certainly he relied for his idea of the
divine origin of names on the story in Gen 2:19, 20.
But Plato's Cratylus was certainly not the only philosophical
influence which we can detect in the thought of Eunomius. He had
indeed an unbounded faith in the power of Greek philosophy to
explain all questions about God. Both Basil and Gregory complain
about his tendency to immerse the argument in philosophical terms,
what they sometimes call his 'technology' (t.xvoAoyia).'45 At one
I42lbid. (viii) 14 (832). See Kopecek History 431-440.453. 54. Amphilochius
enountered this theory in full spate when he took possession of his see of Iconium,
and Basil wrote his Ep 233 in order to help him to cope with it. Eunomius had even
said in his doctrinaire way that our knowledge of the Son's activity as creator of
angels tells w more about the Son's ousia than our knowledge of him as our Saviour,
because the higher the activity the more it tells us about the agent, and angels are
higher than men. See Kopecek op. cit. 453.
143For Eunomius' theory of names, see DanieIou 'Eunome rArien et l'Exegese
platonicienne du Cratyle'; Wickham 'The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean'
560; Simonetti Crisi 462-8; Kopecek History 266-77.
144Con. Ii.nom. IJI (v) 18 (745), 34 (752).
145S 0 :ijasil Adv. Eunom. 1.156-160 (297, 300) objecting to a fine-drawn
distinction between ousiai by E (1.151-4 (297». Cf.. Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom.
1.205-222 (313-317) protesting against a distinction between ousia and energeia and
the various roles allotted to them; this does not make sense, says Gregory, either
philosophically or logically but only serves to make the obscure obscurer. But it is
The Neo-Arians
point Gregory accuses him of plagiarizing Philo.146 'What does this
arid learning have in common with the Christian message?' Gregory
elsewhere exclaims.'47 One influence, though not the sole one, on
Eunomius can be recoguized at once, and is admitted by everybody-
Aristotelian logic. Aetius' Syntagmation is redolent of it, and when
Eunomius is accused of 'technology', this is in the forefront of the
accusers' minds. 148 But Aristotle cannot account for all Eunomius'
thought. We cannot exclude some influence from the Neo-
Platonism which was contemporary with Eunomius. Danielou in his
article 'Eunome I' Arien et I'exegese platonicienne du Cratyle' made a
strong case for concluding that Eunomius' theory of names, though
of course ultimately stemming from the Cratylus, directly came from
a tradition of Neo-Platonist thought represented in the Athens of
Eunomius' time and indebted to lamblichus. Danielou thought that
the greater part of Eunomius' system derived from Neo-Platonism,
and Vandenbussche had earlier made the same suggestion.' 49 In
particular, Eunomius' hierarchic view of ultimate reality, whereby
the supreme God creates the lesser god and this god in his tum creates
the Spirit, suggested to them a basically Neo-Platonic scheme of
emanations in a descending scale. But Wickham justly protests
against this. He points out '50 that Eunomius explicitly rejects
emanationism, and indeed we have already seen one example of this
rejection, which, as Wickham observes, is consistent with Eunomius'
~oll?w~d by a cOlI~plic~ted demonstration by E (quoted by Gregory) that the
hmltatIon and modIficatIon produced by the effects of the 'energies' on each other
must result in some 'energies' being greater and some lesser than others.
14~Con. Eunom. III (vii) 8 (8?4); the words complained of are: 'This Supreme God
of hIS controls whatever thmgs are generated peculiarly by his own power'.
Gregory declares that all except the last few words are taken from Philo, and
concludes that Eunomius' system is fundamentally Jewish. In fact it is difficult to
identify this citation from Philo, and in any case a resemblance to Philo's thought
would not necessarily imply recognizably Jewish influence.
l4'Ibid. III (viii) 43 (848).
148See E. Vandenbussche 'La part de la dialectique dans la theologie d'Eunomius
"Ie technologue'" (a most illuminating article); also Barnard 'The Philosophy of
Anus' I.16 (~ list ?f ~ccusations of Aristotelian logic-chopping made against the
Neo-A~lans In antIqUIty);]. de Ghellinck 'Quelques appreciations de la dialectique
et d'Arlstote durant les conflits trinitaires du IVe siecle' (much useful material);
Hadot Mar;us Victorinus 193-5; Kopecek History 497-8.
1490p. cit. 68....,0; So also Martin, Historia Akephala62; Kopecek, History 266-77,
had opted for Middle Platonism as the main influence, and Boularand (improbably)
the Phaedrus of Plato (L' Heresie d' Arius II4-18).
lso'The Syntagmation of Aetius' 558 n I.
 The Rival Answers Emerge
pluralism.'51 Further, Eunomius' fierce rationalism is hardly
compatible with the spirit ofNeo-Platonism. Mysticism of any sort is
anathema to him. As Wickham says, Eunomius believes that there is
no knowledge of God by way of mystical communion of essence.'S2
Eunomius could have adopted with ease the title of Toland's book,
Christianity not Mysterious.
It is the all-prevailing rationalism of Eunomius, indeed, which
makes the strongest and last impression on those who read the
remains of his work. He has a deep, and sometimes almost literalist
respect for Scripture.'53 He can refer at times favourably to
tradition,'s, which he believes to be on his side, but reason is his final
court of appeal. And, as Vandenbussche pointed out, by reason he
means the correct method of proceeding. in argument: either you
look at the ousiai and argue with a clear judgment from them, or you
examine the 'energies' of the ousiai and begin the argument from the
products (OTJl'lOoPYTJl'ato>v) of these ousiai (Apol. 20 (856)). This is the
"correct order for business' (t1\v OOl'Ijloij toit; "paYl'aol ta~lv (Apol.
Apol. m Gregory of Nyssa Con. Eunom. 1.154 (297)). Neither
Scripture nor tradition is mentioned.'ss This rationalism is enhanced
by the Neo-Arian insistence on the importance, indeed the' primacy,
of doctrinal purity:
'Persuaded by the holy and blessed men [i.e. Scripture and tradition]
we declare that the mystery of orthodoxy is not established by fme-
sounding names nor by the detail of customs and mysterious signs
(I'O(Jt'KIDV "UI'~6AOlV), but by the accuracy of doctrine."'.
One cannot read Philostorgius without noticing the intense
151S ee above. P.624 (the quotation beginning 'not by an extension').
152'The Syntagmation of Aetius' S66.
15JSee , e.g. Gregory Nyssa Con. Eunom. II.20S (977) where E has occasion to
quote Gen 1:3ft'('Let there be light .. . let there be a firmament .. . let the waters be
gathered'): he insists strictly that God actually said at that very time these very
:w ord.s which wer~ recorded b'y Moses. Gregory laughs at this literalism and calls it
makmg a degradmg assumptIOn and dragging the Divinity into low conjectures'
(212 (98I)). For the texts favoured by the Neo-Arians see Simonetti Crisi 259 and
Kopecek History 502-3.
154Cf. Basil Adv. Eunom. 2.18 (608, 609), a quotation from E which claims that he
is ~aithful tOr~ 6xo troy ay{rov Kal yi}y E(jl' litJii>v, i.e. to tradition and the Modern
MInd.
155Vandenbussche op. cit. 66-8.
156G~egory Ny~sa. Con. Eun?m. III (ix) 54 (877), quoting E. Kopecek remarks
upon thIS char!lctenstlc ofE, sayIng that even baptism is for him only valuable for its
doctrinal content, History 484--6.
632
The Neo-Arians
concern evinced by the Neo-Arians for correctness of doctrine; on
several occasions (as we have seen) Eunomius insisted (or is
represented by Philostorgius as insisting) on establishing the doctrinal
soundness (by his standards) of those with whom he was expected to
co-operate before he would deal with them; and the split in the ranks
of the Neo-Arians in the capital which resulted in the Party of the
Pastrycook was over a relatively small point of doctrine. IS'
We can therefore describe the doctrinal position of Eunomius
most accurately by saying that he was an Heterousian. He directed a
continual polemic against the pro-Nicene viewpoint, which was of
course gathering increasing support in his day. He accuses the pro-
Nicenes of regarding the generation of the Son as a corporeal
affair. ISS The expression 'Light from Light' and its analogy for the
production of the Son, which Basil regarded as the 'strongholq' of
the pro-Nicenes (Adv. Eunom. 2.25 (629)), Eunomius attacks on the
ground that if it means a comparison of two diverse things then it
means that God is compound, and what is compound cannot be
ingenerate; but if it means that the same thing is derived from the
same, then the difference between light and light is the same as the
difference between the ingenerate and the generate- and this does not
advance the argument an inch.'s, He particularly dislikes the
doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son: it must mean that if God
never ceases to beget the Son his action is incomplete and must one
day cease; it must therefore have one day begun. And the Neo-Arians
contend that difference in nature does not preclude the Father and the
Son both being called God, just as a dog and a fish can both be called
animals, though they have quite different natures.'"O And we have
seen already how shrewdly Eunomius criticized the pro-Nicene
157 At HE VIII.12 Philostorgius says that the truth of E's Apol. Apol. was so
tremendous that it gave Basil a heart-attack of which he died!
'58Basil Adv. Eunom. 2.1 (573).
'59Ibid. 2.25 (629).
~60Gregory ofNazianz~s Theological Or~tion III. 13, 14. Kopecek (History, 482-3)
pomts Ojlt that E also rejected the doctrine of necessary relations (the xp6; tl
argu~ent rejected by Arius (see above p. 8» because if it is valid it must apply to
creation as well as to the Son, and this is unacceptable; further the eternal generation
limits God, making his will subservient to his nature; goodness is what he wills
rather than what he is. And anyway in E's view generation to infinity is an absurd
and irrational notion. It is to be noted that behind all this debate lies the Neo-Arian
conviction that God cannot communicate himself.
633
 The Rival Answers Emerge
practice of attributing all compromising experiences of the incarnate
Son to his human nature.'·' But it would be wrong to describe
Eunomius by the insulting epithet which so many of his
contemporaries, and not a few modern scholars, have applied to him,
Anhomoian. ' • 2 The more responsible opponents of the Neo-Arians
knew perfectly well that they did not teach that the Son was unlike in
all respects, but only unlike in respect of ousia. ' • 3 But Philostorgius
represents both Aetius and Eunomius as strictly denying that they
teach that the Son is anhomoios,'·4 and we have no reason to doubt his
accuracy. What they taught was that the Son is like in will to the
Father but different in ousia. Had they taught that the Son is unlike in
all respects to the Father they would of course have obliterated all his
activity in revelation and mediation, and this they never intended to
do.'·5
It must not be forgotten in the search for philosophical influences
in Eunomius' thought that he took over a large part of the existing
stock of Arian theology. He reproduced the drastic Arian
161S eeabove, p.628. See also Kopecek History 478.
162What Gregory of Nyssa calls 'the contrivance of unlike' (T) lOU avo~otou
xa,a(JKSU~) Con. Eunom.1.616 (414); 11.664 (1065); Ref Conf Eunom. 152 (536)) isso
constantly referred to in the pro-Nicene writers that references are unnecessary; one
may list immediately Basil, both the Gregories. Epiphanius. Ps.-Didymus, Socrates.
Sozomenus and Theodoret. Athanasius had of course accused the earlier Arians of
teaching the tlnhomoion, and when he became aware (at a fairly late stage) of the
Neo-Arianshe transferred the obloquy to them, e.g. De Synodis 3I.I, 2. (259.260).
He had accused the Arians (not the Neo-Adans) of teaching eu:po6cnov already in
De Sent. Dio. 24.4.64.
163E.g. George of Laodicea (who, whatever his doctrinal vagaries was never a
Neo-Arian) in Epiphanius Panarion 73.15.4 (288), 22. I, 2 (294), where heterousion is
transformed simply into anhomoios kat ousian. At 14.7 (287) he seems to attribute the
origin of the anhomoion to the Second Creed of Sirmium of 357.
164HE IV.I2 and VI.r; Eunomius in his Apol. taught neither eu:po60'1o~ nor
QV6J.10l0~.
165 Ambrose of course accuses Palladius of teaching that the Son is dissimilar
without qualification. Palladius denies this, replying 'Or perhaps you think that he is
said to be unlike by us because we do not say that he is co-eternal with the Ingenerate
and equaJly everlasting with this Father?' (Gryson Scolies Ariennes 264-266 (81, 82».
But Ambrose was not a responsible writer and Palladius was not a Neo-Arian. More
extreme is the Sermo Arianorum (682.3 r) where the Father is said to be different from
the Son in natura, ordo,gradus, affictus, dignitas. virtus and operalio (voluntas however is
not mentioned). Simonetti Crisi 59 n 47. 258 n 15, and Ritter, 'Arianismus' 713,
note the injustice of calling the Neo-Arians Anhomoians. Loofs 'Arianismus' 32
says, quite incorrectly. that the differences between the Homoians and the Neo-
Ariam were minimal, and, just as incorrectly, that the N eo-Arians taught the
anllOmoion.
634
The Neo-Arians
subordination of the Son, the conviction that the incarnate Son had
no human psyche, the ascription of creatureliness to both Son and
Spirit and the witholding of divinity from the latter. But Eunomius'
doctrine represented a considerable difference which both Homoians
and Heterousians recognized, but which has not been given sufficient
prominence by modern students of the period.'·· PhiIostorgius is
prepared to criticize both Arius and his Homoian successors as not
wholly sound in doctrine, though he recognizes their kinship with his
views in their rejection of the homoousion.'·7 In the accounts of the
Council of AquiIeia of the year 381 Ambrose is represented (no doubt
accurately) as saying that the Arians with whom he is dealing
repudiate Aetius and Eunomius, though of course he regards the two
groups as teaching a virtually identical doctrine.'·· The points in
which the Eunomians differ from the Homoians are:
(i) the comprehensibility of God (see Basil Epp 234); in spite of their
beliefin the incomparability of the Father they believed that not only
could the Son know him fully, but that any believer could, because
'knowing God' meant understanding true doctrine about God; the
Homoian Arians believed in the incomprehensibility of God and most
of them held that the Son could not fully know him;
(ii) the immutability of the Son, which the Neo-Arians maintained
and the Homoian Arians mostly denied; the Neo-Arians taught that
the Father had given the Son an immutability by his will, by grace not
by nature;
(iii) the formula for the Son's likeness to the Father among the
Homoian Arians was 'like according tv the Scriptures', among the
Neo-Arians, 'like according to will.. different according to ousia';169
166We have seen how far waS Loofs from realizing this; Meslin appears to class
PaJladius and his school among the Eunomians; see Les Ariens 30, 31, 300-05.
Gryson is quite mistaken in similarly equating Palladius' doctrine with that of
Eunomius. Scolies Ariennes 173-5.
167 HE X.2-4.
168Gryson Scolies Ariennes 83 (266,268); cf. the Tomus Damas;: anathematjzamus
Arrium adque Eunomium qui pari impietate licet sermone dissimili Filium et Spiritum
Sanctum adserunt creaturas (Turner EOMIA I p. 285 col I).
169Thus when Palladius (Gryson Scolies Ariennes 47 (238, 240) says that the Son is
'like his Father not according to the deceptive wickedness and stubbornness of the
Ma~edonians [i.e. like in substance] against the Scriptures, but like according to the
SCriptures and tradition', he is declaring himself an Homoian and not an Eunomian
(though Gryson does not realize this). And when Maximinus in Contra Iudaeos
invokes Isa 53:8 to justify his refusal to explain how the Father begets the Son (see
Meslin Les Ariens 372) he is taking the same stance (though Meslin does not realise
this). Ritter. on the other hand ('Arianismus' 712) recognizes the distinction
 The Rival Answers Emerge

(iv) the Neo-Arians constantly employCd the vocabulary of Greek

philosophy, whereas this is far from prominent in the writings of the
Homoians, and least of all in the Latin-speaking Homoians. 170
Finally we must classify Eunomius as an individualist,
philosophically eclectic theologian, as many theologians of his day PART IV
were philosophically eclectic. He was indeed enough·of a child of his
day to be soaked in Neo-Platonic thought. But his spirit and many of
his doctrines were far from Neo-Platonic. He used Aristotelian logic The Controversy Resoh'ed
to deploy his peculiar brand of rationalist Unitarianism. He took
some of the ideas of what might be called mainstream Arianism and
developed them in. an eccentric and untypical direction. He is
interesting for his own sake, but not because he was representative of
the thought of the church of his day. It was no doubt the apparently
strict logic of his arguments and the high-minded consistency of his
conduct which attracted those who accepted his doctrine.

between. the two sets of doctrine. Kopecek History 183-97 has some useful
observations on the Neo-Arian conceptions of 'like' and 'unlike', This is not to say
that Eunomius could not on occasion use the expression 'like according to the
Scriptures'. but it was not in any sense his watch-word; for him it was too vague.
170
1 have not here had scope to discuss Neo-Arian baptismal ceremonies or
formulae. The main sources for our knowledge of these are Epiphanius Panarion
76.54.32-34 (413. 414); Sozomenus HE VI.26.I. 7-10; Philostorgius HE X.4; Ps.-
Didymus De Trinitate II. IS (PG 39:729). Further references can be found in Meslin
Les Ariens 386-90; Simonetti Crisi S03 n I2I. Kopecek discusses the subject in his
History 160, 171 and in his more recent essay in Arianism (ed. Gregg), 'Neo-Arian
Religion; che Evidence of the Apostolic Constitutions' where he makes a strong case
for concluding that the author ofche Ap. Constitutions was a Neo-Arian. The use of
early Jewish vocabulary and ideas in this author, however, should not lead us to
conclude that Neo-Arianism had any serious kinship with early Jewish Christianity.
Some Eunomians found such v'ocabulary and ideas convenient for their own
purposes but the spirit and aim of their doctrine, and above all their concept of
knowing God, were quite alien to Judaism, Jewish or Christian.
 20

Athanasius and His Heirs

I. The Council of Alexandria of 362 and its Resnlts

We last left Athanasius hiding in the hinterland of his diocese while

the stirring events were taking place in Alexandria which resulted in
the lynching of George of Alexandria by a mob. It will be useful to
make a list of the events which took place in that city between
December 361 and October 362:'
361 Dec. I I Julian makes a triumphal entry into Constantinople
Dec. 24 George and his fellow-prisoner lynched
Feb. 9 Julian's edict recalling all bishops
Feb. 21 Athanasius returns to Alexandria
May Julian leaves the capital and travels to Antioch
July 2 Julian reaches Antioch
Oct. 23 Athanasius compelled to leave Alexandria again by
imperial order
The most important event concerned with Athanasius' return to his
see was his calling of a Council there. This Council must have taken
place at some point between March and October 362. The letter
which it circulated, and which we must regard as having been writ-
ten under the influence (if not by the actual pen) of Athanasius,
survives, and is most informative concerning the important doctrinal
decisions which were taken there. We must examine it. 2
IThe best sources here 3rc the Historia Akephala 3.1-4.4 and the Festal Letters of
Athanasius, summarized conveniently in the useful article ofC. B. Armstrong 'The
Synod of Alexandria and the Schism at Antioch of 362',
2PG 26:795-810. For the Council and its immediate consequences see Gwatkin
AC Ill. SA 224-5; C.B. Armstrong op. cit.; Schwartz, 'Zur Kirchengeschichte',
163-6; Harnack History IV.II4; Richard'S. Athanase et l'ime du Christ' SO-53;
Kelly Early Christian Creeds 241 (who gives the erroneous impression that the
Council of Alexandria cleared up the whole semantic confusion); Simonetti Crisi
3Sg-Ql; Martin Histoire Akephale 64-67. The original sources, besides the Tomus ad
Ant. are Historia Akephala 2.7 (muddled and prejudiced); Rufinus HE 1.27-29;
 The Controversy Resolved
The heading is addressed to five people, Eusebius, Lucifer, Asterius,
Kumatius and Anatolius, and the Letter is sent from Athanasius and a
list of bishops then in Alexandria·who come, it is claimed, from Ital~1
Arabia, Egypt and Libya. Eusebius is certainly Eusebius of Vercelli,
who in fact was present at the Council of Alexandria, Lucifer is of
COUrse Lucifer of Calaris. Asterius is the bishop of Petrae in Arabia
returning from exile. But the writers associate Eusebius and Asterius
with them. They were the people delegated to bring the letter to the
Church of Antioch, to whom it is addressed. The letter is addressed to
'those who gather in the Old' (Church), and this certainly means the
followers in Antioch of Meletius, who had returned by now from
exile.
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
(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 Sa belli us and Paul of Sarnosata and
Valentinus and Basilides and that of the Manichaeans. 3
The Letter mentions 'the followers of Paulin us' as ready to agree to
these conditions. 4 He was the current head of the continuing
Eustathians in Antioch: we shall discuss his status presently. Next, the
Letter makes an important statement about the utterance of the West-
ern bishops at Serdica, nineteen years before. It says that the 'pamph-
let' (mtt'''''ov) about the faith alleged to have been drawn up by
the Council at Serdica has no authority, because the Council did not
make any such doctrinal statement. No one is to circulate it because it
only causes dissension. s The statement about the Council ofSerdica is
a direct untruth, and Athanasius must have known that it was untrue. 6
But it was, in view of what comes next in this Letter, an embarrassing
utterance because it had roup.dly declared that there is only one
hypostasis in the Godhead. For the Letter next plunges into a careful
definition of terms. The council, it said, had asked some people
present whom others had accused of using allegedly un Scriptural and
suspect terms, 'three hypostases, whether they meant by hypostases
Socrates HE 1l1.6--9; Sozomenus HE IV.I2.I-I3.6; Theodoret HE 111.4.2-5.4 (only
the vaguest reference to the Council at IV.4.2, 3); the account in the Oratio XXI.3S
(PG 35:1124-5) of Gregory of Nazianzus is highly inaccurate.
'3 (797, 800).
44 (800).
55 (800-1). '
6See above, PP,244-5.
Athanasius and His Heirs
three separate independent Beings of different ousia ~o each, other
(ti1.1.0tPIOU"(OU<;), each being an isolated hypostasis, ord,d they mtend
Beings who were different ousiai, or three ultl,mate pnncIple~ or three
gods by using the term hypostases?' They rephed that they rejected all
these interpretations: they believed in Father, Son and Spint ~a,ch
subsisting (im'(Jtiiita) distinctly, but they recognized 'a holy Tnmty
indeed, but a single Godhead and a single ultimate principle and a Son
consubstantial (61100""'OV) with the Father ... and the Holy Spirit,
neither a creature nor an alien, but belonging to (tOlOV) and
inseparable from the ousia of the Son and of the Father'.' .
Next the Council asked those who were accused of saymg one
hypostasis' whether by this they intended in a Sabellian sense to destroy
the distinct real (otn(: avu1totrto:toUC;) eXIstences of the Persons [though
the document does not use any term here to express this concept,
neither prosopon nor hypostasis]. They replied that they did not, but
that they meant hypostasis to be equivalent to ousia; those who were
accused of saying 'three hypostases' agreed with these views, and
together they anathematized Arius and a list of other heretics and
undertook in future only to use the terms sanctioned by N.8
[Fortunately they did not follow this disastrous course]. The Council
now turned to the doctrines held by some people about the
Incarnation, Those present duly admitted that: 'the Saviour did not
have a body which lacked either a soul (apsychon) or a capacity for
feeling (tiva("aT]tOv) or a mind (tiv6T]tov). For it was not possible that
when the Lord became man for our sakes his body could have lacked a
mind (tiv6T]tov), nor did salvation of the body only take place in him
who is the Logos but also of the soul' (1jIUXii<;)·9 And they rejected the
view that the Son who had existed before Abraham, and had appeared
from the time of Abraham onward and had fmally become incarnate
was not the same in each phase: but 'it was the same who asked as a
man (tivapOlltivOl<;) where Lazarus was lying dead, and as God (a."cro<;)
raised him up; it was the same who as a man spat but as God, as the Son
of God, opened the eyes of him who was blind from birth."o
The signatories of this Letter describe themselves as 'those who are ~eft
in Alexandria, along with our fellow-ministers Asterius and EuseblUs.
For the greater part of us have gone back to their sees' ,11 Atha~asius
signs first, then 'those who have been sent [presumably from Ant1o~h]
from Lucifer the bishop of Sardinia, two deacons representmg
75 (801).
'6 (801, 804).
97 (804).
"7 (80S).
"9 (80S)·
 The Controversy Resolved
Paulinus, and there were also present some monks (J.LOVa.~OVtEC;)
purposely sent by Apollinarius 12 the bishop'. A list of those to whom
the Letter is sent is next subjoined: Eusebius of Vercelli. Lucifer of
Calaris, Asterius of Petrae, Kumatius of Paltus in Coele Syria.
Anatolius of Euboea. This is followed by a Jist of the senders. headed
by Athanasius, including Eusebius and Asterius and fourteen Egyptian
bishops. Eusebius adds a note to say that he had translated the Letter
into Latin and that he condemned the 'pamphlet ofSerdica'.13
There is finally added to this document a declaration by Paulinus
obscurely expressed but apparently signifying that in 363. on meeting
Athanasius in Antioch. he had been persuaded by him of the truth of
the Letter. He believes in the distinct existence of Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, as well as their consubstantiality and he accepts the
doctrine of the Incarnation set out in the Letter and that the Son did
not in becoming incarnate 'suffer change' ()lBtapoJ.:r)v nEnov6tvat).
with other acceptances of the doctrine of the Letter ,14
This Letter. usually referred to as the Tomus ad Antiochenos. tells us
much. but also raises some questions. Who. for instance. were the
fIrSt group interrogated. who held by the doctrine of three
hypostases? They could not have been representatives of Meletius, or
the document would certainly have said so. It is possible that they
were represented by Asterius of Petrae. and were either a group
whose views derived originally from the moderate Eusebiaos,
perhaps even from Akakius at that period. who had seen the dangers
inherent in Arianism as declared in the Second Creed ofSirmium and
in the Neo-Arian doctrines, had observed the fate of the followers of
Basil of Ancyra. and were now ready to accept the homoousios and N
on the grounds that only thus could the erroneous doctrines which
threatened be avoided. Or. alternatively and perhaps more probably.
they were the Meletians. appealed to over the head of Meletius.
whose name is purposely omitted. It is interesting to note that by
now apparently a school of thought has emerged which accepts the
doctrine of N as far as the Son is concerned. but which refuses to
believe in the divinity of the Holy Spirit (see iii p. 640 above). The
second question raised by the Tomus ad Antiochenos is the identity of
the group whose views are here rejected when it is declared that the
incarnate Logos was not without a human soul (psyche). organ of
perception or feeling (aesthesis) and mind (nous). It has been hitherto
"9 (808).
"10 (808).
" I I (809).
Athanasius and His Heirs
universally assumed that these were Apollinarians. followers of
Apollinaris of Laodicea who was a firm adherent of N but who
taught that the incarnate Logos did not possess a human nous (mind).
But we have seen that representatives of Apollinaris were present at
Alexandria and that they apparently raised no objection to words
which can only be thought to be a rejection of the teaching of their
master. This is a grave difficulty which has not hitherto been seriously
faced. It is much more likely that these words in the Tomus were
designed to condemn Arianism. As has been abundantly shown in
this work, the stock Arian doctrine of the Incarnation was that the
Logos in becoming incarnate had possessed no human psyche or mind.
so that the Logos. a second-rate, reduced divinity. created for this very
purpose. should be exposed directly to the compromising experi-
ences of human existence. The words of the Tomus fit this doctrine
quite as well as Apollinarianism in any form does. and the statement
of Paulinus appended to the Tomus. which includes a denial of the pro-
position that the Logos on becoming incarnate suffered any change.
refers to the doctrines of Arianism rather than those of Apollinaris.
Another question raised by the Tomus is why Paulinus. who was
only a presbyter, and who manifestly was not present at Alexandria.
could have been represented. One would normally expect only' a
bishop to send representatives to a council. C. B. Armstrong. in the
article already cited. suggested that Paulinus had in fact already been
consecrated a bishop. and that is why he was able to send
representatives to Alexandria. but it is difficult to believe that the
Tomus would not have described him as a bishop ifhe was one. He
was. however. the acknowledged leader of the group in Antioch
whom we have called the continuing Eustathians. those who had held
to the Council of Nicaea through thick and thin. recognizing no
bishop since Eustathius as orthodox. and rejecting alike Eusebians.
Homoians, Homoiousians. Neo-Arians and Meletians. Their slogan
hitherto had been 'one hypostasis in the Godhead'. but the Council of
Alexandria had begun the process of persuading them that the
formula of three hypostases might be patient of an orthodox
interpretation.
Lucifer of Calaris was certainly not present at the Council of
Alexandria. Everyone of the three Greek church historians says that
he went direct from the Thebaid where the pro-Nicene exiles about
to be freed had held a consultation before some of them went on to
Alexandria. The historians (at least Socrates and Sozomenus) give the
 The Controversy Resolved
impression that it had been agreed between Eusebius ofVercelli and
Lucifer that the latter should go first to Antioch and prepare the
ground for a rapprochement between the followers of Paulinus, the
Meletians and the party of Athanasius, between whom the doctrinal
differences appeared now to be very small, and that nobody should
be consecrated bishop of Antioch until some agreement had been
reached between all these parties; indeed if all went well Meletius
might have been recognised as bishop of Antioch without further
consecration. Lucifer, however, we are told, exceeded these
instructions and proceeded without further delay or consultation, on
reaching Antioch, to consecrate Paulinus bishop of that city, thereby
wrecking the chances of harmonious agreement with Meletius and
his party. Such an action would be characteristic of Lucifer's
hotheaded temperament, but we cannot be sure that this is an account
of the true state of affairs. The Tomus ad Antiochenos gives no explicit
indication that it is aiming at agreement with Meletius, whose name
seems to be deliberately avoided; the views ofMeletius would fit well
with the doctrine professed by the first group interrogated at the
Council of Alexandria, the upholders of three hypostases. But, as we
have seen, Meletius was not directly represented at Alexandria. On
the other hand, the Tomus does not speak of Paulinus dthe.r as a
bishop or as a prospective bishop. We are faced with alternative
theories: the church historians put all the blame on Lucifer for what
was in fact an intransigence manifested by Athanasius towards
Meletius, or Lucifer byhis headstrong action in consecrating Paulinus
ruined an attempt by Athanasius to bring about reconciliation with
I examination and analysis of the Contra Apollinarem. His constant aim
Meletius. We cannot discern with any certainty what exactly
happened. It is possible that Athanasius hoped to persuade the
followers of Meletius to desert him and accept the leadership of
Paulinus. Eusebius of Vercelli, as the Tomus indicates, went from
Alexandria to Antioch. If he made efforts there to bring about
reconciliation between the estranged Homoousians. he was
unsuccessful. He returned to his Italian see.
Athanasius, however, had in this Tomus ad Antiochenos made
important concessions. He had signalized to his followers that ousia
and hypostasis could be used in different senses, that it was possible to
speak of three hypostases in an orthodox sense, that a proper distinction
made between ousia and hypostasis was a step towards agreement on
orthodoxy. This did not mean, as some modern writers assume, that
henceforward all semantic confusion was at an end and that all pro-
Athanasius and His Heirs
Nicene writers now will carefully use ousia to mean substance
common to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and all hypostasis for that
which God is as Three in distinction from what he is as One. As we
shall see, variety ofusage still continues in some places, and indeed the
Tomus expects that it shall. But at least the confusion had been
identified, and the way was open for a younger generation of
theologians to establish a clear distinction in the use of these terms.
A much more difficult problem arises when we ask how serious
was Athanasius in declaring in the Tomus ad Antiochenos that the Logos
in becoming incarnate had taken to himself a human soul or mind as
well as a human body. And bound up with this subject is the question
of whether or not Athanasius is the author of the two treatises
attributed to him, usually under the title of Athanasius contra
Apollinarem (Athanasius against Apollinaris).15 The subject has already
been discussed in an earlier chapter,'6 but it must be re-opened here
because of the recent appearance of a compendious study by G. D.
Dragas. 17 In by far the most exhaustive investigation of the
authorship of the Contra Apollinarem ever undertaken, this scholar
not only explores the testimony to the work in the ancient church,
and provides a Word-Index to it by way of comparison with
Athanasius' vocabulary, but also gives a history of scholarly opinion
on the subject, a history of the treatment in modern scholarship of
Athanasius' doctrine both of the death of Christ and of his
Christology, and his own account of both, as well as a minute
in this work of 600 pages is to show that there are no solid reasons for
denying the authorship of the Contra Apollinarem to Athanasius. By
this gigantic exercise Dragas has, in my opinion, established certain
facts. The two books of the Contra Apollinarem are by the same
author. The work can be shown to have been recognized as
Athanasian towards the end of the fifth century (but not with any
certainty earlier). Athanasius in all probability did not formally
renounce the view that the incarnate Logos had a human psyche. He
did not represent an 'Alexandrian' tradition of a Logos-sarx model for
the Incarnation in distinction from an Antiochene model of a Logos-
ISDe Incarnatione Domini Nostri Iesu Christi contra Apollinarem PG 26:1093-1 r66.
16See above. PP.4.51-5.
17 Athanasius contra Apollinarem (1985). The work is prefaced by an exaggerated
eulogy upon it by T. F. Torrance making claims for it so enonnous that it would
have been in the author's best interest to omit the preface.
 The Controversy Resolved
anthropos model. In fact, my own book has, as the reader must have
realized, consistently resisted the tendency evident in several scholars
since the xixth century to read a schema of Alexandrian or
Antiochene 'schools' into the first half of the ivth century. Bur
Dragas has not, in my opinion, overcome some of the most serious
obstacles to accepting the Contra Apollinarem as Athanasian. His
efforts to explain away the extraordinary silence of Athanasius in his
works written before 362 about the existence of a human psyche in
Jesus Christ are far from convincing. In his early Contra Gentes
Athanasius may have acknowledged that man is composed of body
and soul, but this does not mean that every time thereafter till 362
when he speaks of the 'body' (soma) or 'flesh' (sarx) of the incarnate
Logos he implies that the psyche was there as well. The case is not that
Athanasius joined the Arians in directly denying a human soul to
Jesus Christ. In spite of Richard's efforts to prove the contrary, it is
evident that Athanasius had before 362 never encountered this Arian
doctrine. The facts suggest that Athanasius before the year 362 never
saw the point of acknowledging a human psyche in Jesus. He never
grasped the significance of such an idea. Consequently, he expounded
his doctrine of the Incarnation virtually without acknowledging such
a feature inJesus Christ, and when he was compelled, in dealing with
the Agony in the Garden and the Passion, to cope with the subject of
Christ's human soul, he found himself in an embarrassing situation
from which he could only extricate himself by a series of implausible
contradictions (not 'paradoxes' as Dragas calls them):Jesus Christ was
ignorant and omniscient; he suffered and did not suffer: he showed
cowardice and did not show cowardice. The human soul only
appears in order to be immediately cancelled (not 'balanced' in
Dragas' term, the word usually employed by Athanasius is (ul'avi~CIl)
by the divine Logos. He made no human moral decisions; he could
not exercize faith nor experience temptation, the example which he
gave was one of divine. not human, behaviour, or, to be quite exact,
not of a man but of a divine Being acting in the 'space-suit' of human
flesh.!· It is perhaps remarkable that until 362 Athanasius had never'
encountered the Arian doctrine that the incarnate Logos was directly
exposed to human experiences without the interposition of a human
psyche, but not very surprising. Athanasius' knowledge of Arianism
during the period when he was constantly liable to pressure or attack
from the imperial government (c339-361) was manifestly defective.
18S ee ,above, pp.447-8.
Athanasius and Hjs Heirs
But we cannot doubt that this Arian doctrine was current and
widespread during that period. The works of Asterius which we have
seen, the mention of this doctrine in the Macrostich and the accusation
made against Valens and Ursacius at Serdica make this clear.!.
But what happened to cause Athanasius in the Tomus ad
Antiochenos, written in 362, to change his doctrine and admit that the
incarnate Logos was not lacking in a human psyche, aesthesis and nous?
It is clear that by now Athanasius had encountered, not the doctrines
of Apollinaris, whose work by that time cannot have made a great
stir nor become prominent, but the Arian doctrine that at the
Incarnation the Logos took flesh directly so as to encounter directly
human experiences without the filter of a human soul or mind
between. Once he had realised that such a doctrine was designed to
display the inferiority of the Logos to the Father in the Arian view,
Athanasius took fright and realised that there was some point in
recognizing a human psyche inJesus. Hence the Tomus ad Antiochenos.
Hence too the remarks in the Letter to Epictetus, which we have
already noticed,20 reiterating his conviction that Jesus Christ had a
human soul, though here he was combating a different error to that
of the Arians. 2! And yet, when all is said and done, Athanasius never
seriously integrated this realization of the necessity of recognizing a
human soul inJesus Christ, far less a human mind, into his doctrine of
the Incarnation. Had he done so, he would have had to change that
doctrine drastically, and this he certainly never did.
When we look at the Contra Apollinarem in some detail, we find
several facts in it very difficult to reconcile with Athanasian
authorship. The document has indeed considerable affinity with the
authentic works of Athanasius in both vocabulary and doctrine. But
in the first place, it is clear that the people against whom it is written
are not only Apollinarian in their doctrine, but also that they have
been attacking the doctrine of the author.22 It is not easy to envisage
either Apollinaris or his followers, who were all devoutly pro-
190ne of the defects of Dragas' book is that he refuses to believe the large body of
evidence that Arianism had a significant soteriology (dismissing the idea in a curt
footnote on p.260 of his book), and believes that the Con. Apollinarem is the first
evidence ofche Arian doctrine ofChrist's soma apsychon. S. G. Hall, in a contribution
to Arianism (ed. Gregg, 37-58) has suggested that Athanasius' knowledge of the
actual doctrines of Arianism when he wrote the Orations was much restricted.
20See above, P.452.
21Probably, but by no means certainly, ApoUinarian.
22COII. Apoll.1.22 'You [i.e. the people attacked in the Con. Apoll.] deceitfully say
that we speak of two Sons, and you call us worshippers of a human being'.
 The Controversy Resolved
Nicene, openly attacking Athanasius, even as late as 373, rhe year of
his death. Epiphanius said that Apollinaris was 'always dear to us and
to the blessed Pope Athanasius'. 2' And Apollinaris himself writing in
373 or 374 wrote to the persecuted pro-Nicenes in Diocaesarea that
he had received 'complimentary letters' (ypu~~ata tl~iis) from
Athanasius, and clearly regarded himself as having always been in
good standing with the archbishop. But it is perfectly possible that
somebody writing in the Athanasian tradition at some point, perhaps
in the middle of the fifth century, should have been the object of
attack from the defenders of Apollinaris. Again the Contra
Apollinarem uses some expressions which are difficult to reconcile
with Athanasian authorship. For instance, we find in it the statement
6~00u(nos yap 1\ tpias ('For the Trinity is consubstantial')}4 If we are
to judge by Muller's Lexicon Athanasianum nowhere does Athanasius
apply homoousios to the Trinity, though he does of course apply the
epiphet to the Son and the Spirit. In fact, as we have seen,25 for
Athanasius there is a derivative sense in the word homoousios which
would make it most unsuitable for application to the whole Trinity.
A little later we encounter the expression:
'For that which is consubstantial and beyond passion «blaeeS) and
incapable of death cannot in relation to the consubstantial experience
an hypostatic union (evC1lcnv KaO' u1l6c:n:acnv) but only a union of
nature' (Kata q>ucnV)}6
This is not at all the language of Athanasius, who up to 362 disliked
and avoided using the word hypostasis in Trinitarian or Christological
contexts and even in the Tomus ad Antiochenos only allowed that
others could use it, not that he must or should do so. The term evC1lcns
KaO' u1l6utacnv ('hypostatic union') suggests someone writing in the
tradition of Athanasius but at a later period than his, perhaps after the
Council of Chalcedon of 45 I. The author also uses the expressions to
denote Christ's human body til> 1l&PltXOVtl ux1\~atl til> 6pyavlKil> and
tii 6pyavIKU KataUtUU&1 ('the instrumental form which enveloped
him' and 'the instrumenal condition'),27 terms which express
Athanasius' doctrine of the Incarnation well enough but which are·
never found in his authentic works, though he uses the word
23Panarion 77.2 (416). written in 376 or a little later.
4
2 Con. Apoll. 1.9.
25See above, pp. 441, 443.
26Con. Apoll. 1.12.
27lbid. I.IS; 11.1.
Athanasius and His Heirs
'instrument' (opyavov) frequently. Or again the expression 'the form
of a servant which is not lacking a reality visibly manifest' is a
combination of words not found in Athanasius to express Christ's
humanity}8 The author also uses the expression 'the inner man' (6
.UC1l0&V livOpC1l1lOS) for Christ's soul, which Athanasius never uses,2'
and he speaks of the Incarnation as accomplished 'not by division of
the roles (or persons), but in the reality (U1lUPS&I) of Godhead and
humanity'.3 o Now the word translated 'roles' here is 1lPOUOJ1lC1lV
(prosopon), a word which Athanasius never used in a theological sense
before writing his comparatively late De Synodis (4 times) and
absohitely never in a Christological context like this one; but the
word would have become quite familiar in theological circles after
the Council of Chalcedon held nearly eighty years after Athanasius'
death. Again, though Athanasius used the adjective homoousios many
times, he never used the abstract noun corresponding to it
(6~00ucn6tTJS) but that noun occurs in the Contra ApoUinarem. 31
The strongest argument against the Athanasian authorship of this
work, however, is the full and developed state ofits Christology. The
author is in no doubt about the necessity of positing a human mind in
Christ and expresses himself confidently on the subject. The soul of
Jesus being grieved and troubled and terrified, he says, is the sign of
his humanity, not of his divinity," and no mention is made of the
divine cancelling the behaviour of the human soul. The spiritual man
is dominated by the Spirit, the 'psychic' man by the psyche, but the
body of either is the same. 33 These are not the terms familiar to
Athanasius' anthropology; and neither is the expression 'the whole
man, reasonable ().,oYIKiis) soul and body'.34 Later he says:
Just as he redeemed us by the blood of his flesh so by the iutellectual
activity (voitcr£1.) of his soul he manifests his victory on our behalf. 35
This passage lays an emphasis upon the mind ofJesus (noesis, which I
have translated as 'intellectual activity') which is wholly absent from
28tllV 'tOU SOUAOU Ilopqniv, oli A.611t0Jl&VllV u1Iap~£ror;: tile; tv tmSd~£t cpavspovJ,LtVllt;.
11·3; cf. 1.2 tv t1tlaei~tl 61tclP~&~ which is equally unAthanasian.
29
11.3.
30
11.9.
31 11.12.
321.5·
331.8.
341.15.
351. 16.
 The Controversy Resolved
the Christology of Athanasius. In fact the word noesis Occurs only
once in his authentic works, and that'not in a Christological context.
And again the author of Contra Apollinarem can say:
'He does not manifest distress and grief without his soul being grieved
and bewildered; nor is he terrified and prays without his mind (noesis)
being terrified and praying'.36
And on the textJn 6:40 ('I lay down my life ('!'uxi]v) for my sheep'),
where Athanasius had emphasised the meaning 'life', this author
insists that it includes the spirit (pneuma) and that on the cross the
separation of spirit from body took place. 37 In fact in the Christology
of Athanasius, whatever formal concessions he may have made in
face of Arianism in Tomus ad Antiochenos and of Apollinarianism in
the Letter to Epictetus, there is virtually no place for the human mind of
Jesus to play any significant part. It is an embarrassing phenomenon,
to be reduced to an unimportant role, ifit plays any role at all. In his
careful exposition of the Christology of Athanasius, Dragas brings
out again and again that Athanasius would not allow that the Logos
on becoming incarnate took a human individual or person who
could be the subject of the experiences of the incarnate Lord; the
Logos himself was the subject,38 It is extremely difficult to see how a
human mind can fit into this scheme, and I do not think that
Athanasius ever seriously faced this difficulty. But the author of the
Contra Apollinarem has no hesitation in referring to a human minq in
Jesus. It seems to me therefore to accord better with the evidence to
assume that this work was written by somebody writing later than
Athanasius, though one who knew his works well, and could
reproduce his vocabulary and at times even his very words. Perhaps
36Il. I ): noesis, meaning 'perception', 'conscious experience', occurs again II.3.
37
11.17.
38E.g. op. cit. 270. 305. 316. 319. The last reference contains the statement 'What
is absolutely cruciaJ is that the pe~son of Christ is the person of the divine Logos, and
the soul, the human soul which was assumed with the flesh at the Incarnation'; if
'soul' here includes 'mind' one is baffled by the thought either of a mind without a
person or a Person with two minds, one divine and one human. But Athanasius
never considered this problem. Cf. Grillmeier CCT 311: 'where the original [the
Logos] appears with all its power, the copy [the human psyche], with its secondary
and derived power, must at least surrender its function. even ifit does not give place
altogether.' Very recently H. Chadwick, in his 'Les deux Traites contre Apollinaire
attribues aAthanasc' (Alexandrina. Melanges offerts aClaude Montdesert, 247--60)
has come to the same conclusion as this work about the improbability of Athanasian
authorship and has placed the two treatises more accurately about the year 400.
Athanasius and His Heirs
he lived after 451. We need not brand him as a forger. It is perfectly
possible that some later scribe attributed his two treatises to
Athanasius.
On returning to his see in February 362 Athanasius had seen to it
that the Arians in Alexandria were turned out of the churches, which
were repossessed by his party. On George's death, however, the
Arians in Alexandria had been able to consecrate a bishop, called
Lucius, to succeed him. 39 Julian as Emperor had allowed Athanasius
to return to Alexandria, but was not satisfied to leave him there. He
was a prominent leader of the Christians, whom Julian hated, and
anyway no Emperor found it congenial to tolerate so over-mighty a
subject in Egypt as Athanasius had become. After several hints and
shots across his bows, Julian finally chased Athanasius out of
Alexandria into the hinterland, where he could easily escape pursuit
and detection (October 362).40 This was Athanasius' fourth exile. It
did not last long. Julian died in the middle of his abortive Persian
campaign on June 26th 363. His successor, Jovian, hastily elected
Emperor by the army, extricated the Roman army from its impasse
by a humiliating peace-treaty, and came to Edessa. Here he was met
by a delegation of churchmen of various parties asking for his
support, but he refused to make any immediate decision.41
Athanasius had returned to his see on hearing of Julian's death. He
unostentatiously left his see and joined the entourage ofJovian. The
Emperor willingly accepted from him a document affirming the
validity ofN and rebuffed approaches from Arians. Athanasius then
set out for Antioch. 42 Meanwhile a council of between 20 and 30
bishops had been assembled in Antioch by Meletius. This council had
decided to accept N. They sent a letter to Jovian informing him of
39Historia Akephala 4.7; Socrates HE II1.14; Sozomenus HE V.7.
4°Julian Letters IIO[24] 163, 164; 1 II [46] 169-173; 112[46] 173, 174. The last ends
with the peremptory words applied to Athanasius tOV J.uap6v, or; tt6A.JlTlO'EV
'EUitvlSar; tx' eJlou yuvaiKar; trov emcriu.l.O)v j}axt1O'at . .duod:crElro. Pagans in
Alexandria had complained to Julian about Athanasius. See Socrates HE III. 13, 14;
Sozomenus HE V.IS: Theodoret HE 111.9; Rufinus HE 1.33,34.
41Socrates HE 1II.2S; Sozomenus HE V1.4; Philostorgius HE VIII.6. 7.
42Hist. Akeph. 4.7: and p. 265 (Index to Festal Letters XXV); Socrates HE 111.24:
Theodoret HE IV.2. The Letter toJovian is found in Theodoret HEIV.3. A letter to
Athanasius from Jovian permitting his return from exile can be found in PG
26:8 I 3ff. Theodoret's account of a council taking place in Egypt is contradicted by
Hist. Akeph. and the Index to the Festal Letters (This point lowe to a paper given to
the Tenth International Conference on Patristic Studic;s (August 1987) by L. W.
Barnard).
 The Controversy Resolved
their decision and sending him yet another copy of the creed. Among
those who signed this letter were Akakius of Caesarea and Eusebius of
Samosata, as well, of course, as Meletius himself. The reasons which
they give for adopting N are that it ensured that the Son should be
acknowledged as begotten from the ousia of the Father and 'like in
respect of ousia' (6~oto<; KaT' oucriav) to the Father; and they observed
that ousia had not been originally adopted in some Greek
philosophical ('EA.A.1]VtcrTtKTtV) sense, nor to signify that any process
(pathos) was involved in the divine generation, but to overthrow the
'out of non,existence' doctrine, which Arius impiously had taught
and which was being taught by contemporary Neo-Arians
{'Anhomoians').43 It is clear from this letter that former followers of
Basil of Ancyra were among those who reached this agreement, for
the letter equates homoousios with homoios kat' ousian (like in respect of
ousia), which last was the slogan of Basil's followers.
For what happened when Athanasius reached Antioch we have
only indirect evidence. Later historians could not understand why a
reconciliation between Athanasius and Meletius did not take place.
Certainly Meletius did not meet Athanasius; perhaps he refused to
meet him. It is generally thought that Meletius was indignant because
Paulinus had been consecrated bishop of Antioch instead of the
continuing Eustathians, led by Paulinus, recognizing Meletius as
bishop of Antioch. The Meletians suspected Paulinus (whose party
had hitherto embraced the slogan of'one hypostasis') as Marcellan or
Sabellian in doctrine and the Paulinians (as we may now call them)
disliked the Homoian Arian past of Meletius." But another
interpretation can be put on the facts.' s On this view the Tomus ad
Antiochenos is not a peace feeler put out towards Meletius but is
intended to support the followers of Paulinus, and Athanasius never
intended to achieve agreement with Meletius, but only to detach the
Meletians from Meletius. However, it is clear that Athanasius left
Antioch having recognized Paulinus as bishop of that city and
43Socrates HE IV.25 and Sozomenus HE IV .4. 7-11, where the text of the letter is
given.
44The letters of Basil of Caesarea, who as long as Athanasius was alive made
several discreet ~tforts to reconcile him to Meletius (whom Basil would never desert
or disparage), are the best evidence for this obscure situation, Epp. 63; 89.2; 214.2;
25'8.'3. See Schwartz 'Zue Kirchengeschichte' 166-8; Simonetti Crisi 374.
45 And has been byJ.-M. Leroux in Kannengiesser PTAA 151-6. A letter in PG
28:8stffalsely attributed to Athanasius is in fact a contemporary Paulinian pamphlet
misrepresenting and attacking the party of Meletians. See above, p. 802.
Athanasius and His Heirs
without having achieved any understanding with Meletius. Petitions
for reinstatement by the Arians from Egypt made to Jovian during
his short reign were all rejected.'.
Jovian died as a result of an accident on February 20th 364. An
army general, Valentinian, was elected to succeed him, and he at the
end of March appointed his brother Valens to rule as Emperor in the
East while he governed the Western Roman Empire. Valens was, as
we have already seen, a convinced believer in the creed of Homoian
Arianism and, wherever hehad the power, tried to advance and
support it. Early in 365 Valens produced an edict declaring that all
bIShops who had returned on Jovian's accession to sole power were to
be banished again. This sent Meletius, among others, into exile again,
but for some time Athanasius resisted, arguing that he did not fall into
this category. However, Valens insisted and in 365 Athanasius had to
leave Alexandria, in retreat in the hinterland, to endure his fifth and
last exile .. It only lasted four or five months. Valens deliberately
allowed hIm to return. Where there was a non-Arian bishop whom
he personally admired (as in the case of Basil of Caesarea), or where a
banishment would create more disturbance than letting sleeping dogs
he, Valens was ready to sacrifice his principles. The Arian Lucius
could only return under the protection of imperial spears. Athanasius
hved out the rest of his days in peace. The focus of interest as far as the
development of doctrine is concerned had shifted from Alexandria
several years before his death.' 7 Athanasius died on May 2nd 373 .• 8
2. Didymus and Pseudo-Didymus
Both Rufinus and Jerome give us some information about an
Alexandrian monk called Didymus who was an author of theological
works. In hIS De Viris Illustribus Jerome tells us that he himself had
known and indeed was a friend of this monk. He was blind but in
spite of this infirmity was of immense erudition and had written
several books. Jerome himself had persuaded him to write a book On
the Holy Spirit and it only survives in Jerome's own Latin translation
of it. Jerome mentions a Commentary on Zechariah and two books
46For these petitions see the documents appended to Athanasius' Letter to Jovian
PG 26:820-4.
47See Leroux in PTAA I45-56.
48Hist. Akeph. 5.1-14; Sozomenus HE VI.7. IO .
653
 The Controversy Resolved
Against the Arians. 'He is still alive today' ,Jerome says 'and has passed
the eighty-third year of his age.'49 Rufinus also tells us ofDidymus,
confirming that he was blind; Rufinus himself had heard. him
discoursing in Egypt. People had taken down at his dictation and
published 'some remarks or public discussions or anSwers to questions
proposed to him by this man'.50 Palladius (Lausiac History 4) also
gives us some information about him. which enables L. Doutreleau
to date his life 313-398. Socrates informs us that he lost his sight when
he was very young, having only just leanit to read, that he wrote
three books On the Trinity and translated [into what he does not say,
but the word could just mean 'commented on'] the Peri Archon of
Origen, incurring some obloquy thereby, and that on one occasion
the holy monk Anthony visited him and consoled him for the loss of
his sight. 51 There was recently discovered in the fmd of papyri at
Toura in Egypt three works of this man, his Commentary on
Zechariah, his Commentary on Job (or parts of it), his Commentary on
Ecclesiastes and his Commentary on Genesis. The first has been edited by
Doutreleau, the second by A. Heinricks, Ursula Hagedorn, D.
Hagedorn and L. Koenen, the third by G. Bindler and L.
Liesenborghs. The Commentary on Genesis has not yet been published.
A short work On the Holy Spirit and another Against the Manichaeans
attributed to Didymus are also extant. 52 Another work known as De
Trinitate, in three books on the controverted Trinitarian themes, in
Greek, was discovered in 1759 by Mingarelli in an ixth-century
manuscript. He attributed his work to Didymus the Blind, and this
attribution has till recently been generally accepted. The author of
this work tells us that he has written a book about the Holy Spirit. 53
Mingarelli's reasons for assigning the work to Didymus were its
author's statement that he had written a book On the. Holy Spirit,
Socrates' information that Didymus wrote a book De Trinitate, and
resemblances of style and vocabulary which Mingarelli thought he
could detect in the works of both authors. Some scholars have also
attributed to the author of the De Trinitate the last two books (IV and
490p. cit. CIX.
SOHE XI.7.
"HE lV.2S.
52PG 39:1033-1085 and 108S-IIIO; both only in Latin versions and the latter
incomplete.
53lJl:3 I (PC 39) 949, 9S I. All these books are to be found in PC 39. but Book I has
recently heen edited by J. Honscheid and Book II, caps 1-'] by Ingrid Seiler.
Athanasius and His Heirs
V) included in Basil's Adversus Eunomium, which are certainly not by
Basil.
In recent years. however, it has been seriously questioned whether
the De Trinitate can have been written by the blind monk
Didymus. 54 Doutreleau has in a useful article listed several reasons for
entertaining doubt on this subject. One of the references in the De
Trinitate to a previous work On the Holy Spirit occurs in an exposition
of 1 Tim 5:6, but no exposition of this passage is to be found in the
work ofDidymus on the Holy Spirit translated by Jerome. 55 The De
Trinitate speaks of the Macedonians, but Didymus On the Holy Spirit
refers to them only as Pneumatomachians (a derogatory epithet
meaning 'fighters against the Holy Spirit'). Jerome in his account of
Didymus does not mention a work on the Trinity by him, though
the De Trinitate must have been written fairly soon after 381 and
Jerome visited Didymus in 386. De Trinitate enumerates Zechariah as
the last of the Minor Prophets, whereas Didymus Comm. on Zechariah
counts him as the eleventh (before Malachi). The explanation of the
candelabra in Zech 3:8-4:10 is utterly different in every detail in De
Trinitate and Comm. on Zechariah, and the latter does not refer to the
treatment of the passage in the De Trinitate. As far as style and
vocabulary are concerned, there are some striking resemblances
between the De Trinitate and the works of Didymus, but there are
also some striking differences. The resemblances can be accounted for
by the use of a common source by both authors, but the differences
are difficult to explain away. In his Trinitarian doctrine, as far as it can
be deduced from works, none of which are directly on the subject of
the Trinity, Didymus uses almost no technical terms at all, neither
hypostasis, nor prosopon nor ousia in a Trinitarian context, nor does he
use !cronllia (of equal honour) for the Holy Spirit, nor tK7t6pEUcrl<;
(procession). He applies homoousios twice to the Son but never to the
Spirit, whom he nevertheless regards as uncreated and fully divine. In
his view the incarnate Logos had a soul ('!'ux1\). body and mind (vou<;).
He never uses the word 'nature' (physis) in the context of the
Incarnation, and never applies theotokos to the Blessed Virgin Mary,
54For a-discussion of this subject see Grillmeier CeT 361 n 2; Doutre1eau 'Le De
Trinitate est-ill'oeuvre de Didyme J'Aveugle?'; the same author's introduction to
his edition ofDidymus Comm. on Zechariah, and the Introduction byJ. Honscheid to
his edition of Book I of the De Trinitate.
55This reference in the De T,initate occurs in III. 16 (872): the other is too vague to
allow any argument to be drawn from it.
655

The Controversy Resolved
and never quotes Prov 8:22, and never alIudes to or quotes a pagan
poet; he is fond of arithmology, i.e. playing around wIth the
significance of numbers. Though no wholesale Ongemst, such as
Evagrius Ponticus, his debt to Origen is, to one who knows t~e
works of Origen, everywhere evident. In his theology ~e m~y be said
to belong to the school of Athanasius as far as an Ongemst coul~,
without being a devoted folIower of him. His .book On the Holy .SPlnt
(which is not controversial) will be dealt wIth later. Other":,,e he
does not offer enough material for our purposes m his works to Justlfy
our paying further attention to him. . means that this work falls outside the period covered by this book,
On the other hand, the De Trinitate deploys a fuII techmcal
vocabulary in dealing with Trinitarian themes, using hypostasis,
isotimos, idiotes and several other terms which suggest that the work
comes late in the Arian controversy, is ready to apply theotokos to the
Virgin, frequently quotes Homer and the classic Greek poets, and has
only two brief excursions into arithmology. Its theology shows no
influence from Origen. The author appears to Identlfy Mar~lOmtes
and Manichaeans,56 whereas Didymus in his Against the Mamchaeans
does not. There are one or two significant pieces of further internal
evidence which teII against identifying the author of the De Trinitate
with Didymus the Blind. At one point the writer of the De Trinitate
expresses the hope that what he is about to write will earn him grace:
'I go forward to the next task, trusting that even before 1 speak 1 shall
receive grace along with the children whom (God) has gIven to me
and the children of those children, through whom as long as we bve
we labour,57 and indeed' also all whom (God) knows'.58
These 'children' could refer to the writer's disciples, but to call
disciples of a later generation or disciples of one's discip~es
'grandchildren' would be odd. And if Didyrr,'us ~et A,:,th~ny wh~le
he (Didymus) was already a monk, and yet dIed m 398 m his elghtles
it is not easy to imagine him marrying and begetting children before
he took to the ascetic life. 59 Again at one point the author of the De
Trinitate says «AAU Kai 'IOJuvv'1<; llijM<; tml, KaSu <pam, Kai "tu<pMjl ...
"E.g. 111.19 (89 2). . b i d 'f<
573i'u Kai ~c7Nte<; n:OVOU).l£v. an odd expression; perhap~ It coul~ ,e trans ate. or
whose sake ... we labour'. In either case it could be apphed to disClples who elCher
took down or circulated his words (MU..1\O'w). or children of his body.
"lll.l (7 84). hi' 'd
59S
ocrates whose chronology is by no means impeccable, places t s lOCI ent 10
the reign of Valens. but this is completely impossible.
65 6
Athanasius and His Heirs
(,ButJohn too is obvious, as they say, even to a blind man'),60 which,
though not completely improbable .. is not a likely expression for a
blind man to employ. The same author urges his readers or disciples
to 'live among books' (~ijv tv BI/3Aiol<;),61 which again is not a likely
piece of advice for a blind man to give. And at one point, quoting
Aquila's version, the author transliterates the Hebrew word into
Greek letters· 2 We have to ask ourselves whether a blind man is
likely to have learnt even the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The
strong weight of evidence, then, is against the identification of the
author of Mingarelli's De Trinitate with Didymus the Blind. This
and will only be referred to incidentally.
The authorship of the last two books of the work Adv. Eunomium
attributed to Basil of Caesarea (IV and V) is a difficult matter to
decide positively. Negatively we can say with confidence that they
are not by Basil. They are not a considered reply to Eunomius'
Apology, as are the first three books, but a series of largely
disconnected passages arguing generalIy against Eunomius' doctrine.
The author's doctrine of the Holy Spirit appears to go further than
Basil ventured to go (he uses cruvllo~u~OJ of the Spirit, the term used by
C, more than once, and calls him 8E6<;).63 His style (except in the very
last passage (V.768-'73) which is not found in all MSS and may be by
a diJferent hand) is dry and dense and his points closely argued. In this
he is reminiscent neither of Basil nor of the De Trinitate nor of
Didymus. He is well aquainted with formal theological vocabulary;
he has no difficulty in referring to the 'divine nature' ("tij<; SEia<;
<pUcrEOJ<;) of the Holy Spirit,64 though he never calls him homoousios.
He seems to me to be too well-informed a controversialist for us to
identify him with Didymus. There are, however, quite strong
reasons for seeing the author of these two books as the same as the
author of the De Trinitate. They have been well presented by Elena
Cavalcante. 65 This writer is well informed about the Trinitarian
'°11. I I (660).
61
11.27 (768). In the same passage he prays for 'a full rising of the Nile' (fJEO'tov'tofi
NeiAau 'to pei9pov) which makes it clear that he is Egyptian. probably Alexandrian.
"111.3 (82).
"V (PG 29) 729. 732. 734 and 740.1.
64V.729.
6SS ee her article' "Excerpta" e Temi sullo Spirito Santo in Ps.-Basilio "Adv.
Eunomium" IV-V' in Forma Futuri. But I cannot agree with her early dating of this
. collection of material (which. as she rightly discerns. it is) to near 358.
 The Controversy Resolved
debate, knows something of the Cappadocian theologians, and stands
in the tradition of Athanasius, though he is writing several years after
the archbishop's death. He has, however, neither the fire and
brilliance of Athanasius nor the ability of the CappadoCJans. He IS
essentially a second-rate theologian.
3. Epiphanius
In Epiphanius we meet another second-rate theologian standing in
the tradition of Athanasius. He was born in Palestine in the second
decade of the fourth century and there served as deacon and presbyter
until in the year 367 he was elected by the bishops of Cyprus to their
primatial see of Salamis. He is well-informed about Palestme, and
from Salamis continued to take a hvely mterest m the Anan
controversy, from the point of view of a firm disciple of Athanasius,
whom he knew personally,66 intervening (or perhaps one should say
interfering) whenever he could. He wrote two major works, both of
which survive in the original Greek, the Ancoratus, a survey of
Christian doctrine, and the Panarion (medicine-chest) or a Cure for all
the Heresies. This last is of immeasurable value because it preserves
for us so much material which would otherwise have been lost, even
though it is presented by a writer who is narrow-minded at best and
very silly at worst. The Panarion must have been fimshed by about
67
377, but was being written during the two previous yea r s. He
wrote two other minor works on non-theological subjects which
need not concern us here. Epiphanius was a steadfast supporter of
Paulinus in the dispute about who should be regarded as the pro-
Nicene bishop of Antioch, and also interested himself particularly in
the Apollinarian Controversy. He gives an interesting account m hiS
Panarion of a visit which he paid to Antioch in connection with both
these concerns, towards the end of 376. 68 Apollinaris had by now
consecrated Vitalis, his own bishop of Antioch representing his own
views, thereby adding a fourth candidate (with Paulinus, Euzoius and
Meletius) for the position of orthodox bishop of that city. Vltahs had
already journeyed to Rome and gained recognition from Pope
Damasus. But, warned by Peter of Alexandria, Damasus had charged
66S ee above, p. 220.
67S0 Dossetti Simbolo 38, following Quasten.
68From Panarion 77.20-33 (434-6).
Athanasius and His Heirs
Paulinus (whom he recognised as the sole orthodox bishop of
Antioch) to enquire into the orthodoxy of Vitalis by submitting to
Vltalis the creed N and a dogmatic addition which Damasus made to
his letter to Paulinus (the letter known as Per jilium meum). This was
the point at which Epiphanius arrived. Paulinus accused Vitalis of
Apollinarianism and Vitalis accused Paulinus of Sabellianism.
Epiphanius began by refusing to communicate with either Paulinus
or Vitalis. Then he interrogated Paulinus about his orthodoxy, and
was satisfied when he produced the subscription which he had made
to the Tomus ad Antiochenos,6' a profession which Epiphanius
reproduces. Next Epiphanius turned to Vitalis and submitted him to
a similar interrogation. Vitalis answered all the questions
satisfactorily until thelast, which was 'Did he allow that Christ took a
real human body (soma)? Yes, said Vitalis. Did Christ also assume a
human soul (psyche) ? Yes, Vitalis replied. Did he assume a human
mind (nous)? No, was Vitalis' reply. Thereupon Epiphanius
pronounced Paulinus and not Vitalis the orthodox bishop of
Antioch. 70 This is a peculiarly interesting incident because it shows
how far people of Apollinarian views could go in agreement with the
pro-Nicenes, but it makes it all the easier to believe that an
Apollinarian representative at Alexandria in 362 could have thought
that the Tomus of that council was not aimed against him, but against
the Arian doctrine of the Incarnation. By psyche the Apollinarians
meant a kind of combination of what we would call the subconscious
mind with what. we would call the nervous system; by nous they
meant the conscIOus mmd. The Apollinarian at Alexandria could
have thought that he was asked to admit the former inJesus but not
the latter. Arians, who did not make this distinction between psyche
and nous, denied both.
Epiphanius' later life was not without incident. Regarding himself
as an Important. guardian of orthodoxy, he joined Jerome in
campalgnmg agamst Origenism, fell out with John, bishop of
Jerusalem, was temporarily inveigled by the wily Theophilus of
Alexandria to ally himself with the movement to dethrone John
Chrysostom from Constantinople, andjust had time to realize that he
had made a fool of himself before he died on his way back to his see
from the capital city in 403. But his later career does not concern us
here.
69S ee above, p.642.
70S ee Dossetti Simbolo 62-4.

The Controversy Resolved
It is characteristic of Epiphanius that he coined the name 'Semi-
Arians' for the followers of Basil of Ancyra and the subscribers to the
statement issued by the Council of Ancyra of358. The opprobrious
epithet has been taken up by many authors, ancient and modern,
since.71
In his earlier work, the Ancoratus, Epiphanius gives us two creeds.
As regards the first 72 at this point the text depends only on one not
very accurate manuscript. What it gives us is a creed almost exactly
like that later produced at the Council of Constantinople in 381. 73 It
is wholly likely that this creed is a later interpolation, a substitute for
what Epiphanius originally transcribed, namely N. The creed ends
with a statement that this formula was produced or confirmed (the
text is uncertain) 'in church in the holy city by all the holy bishops
together who were there, more than three hundred and ten in
number'.74 'The holy city' cannot refer to Nicaea and by Epiphanius'
time the number of those who attended the Council ofNicaea of 325
had become stereotyped by legend to 318. The reference must be to
Constantinople. We cannot 'believe that Epiphanius' Ancoratus was
written after 381, the date of the Council which drew up C. The
creed here must be a later interpolation. 75
A little later, however, in the same book Epipha';;us gives us
another creed, which is more or less his personal affirmation of
faith. 76 It is in effect N with later additions necessitated by the course
of the controversy. It exhibits the following points of interest:
It has a very elaborate gloss on 'was made flesh' (aupKroeeVtu): 'that is,
begotten perfectly from the holy Mary, ever virgin, through the Holy
Spirit, and was made man, that is taking a whole man, soul ('I'UXt\v)
and body and mind (vou,) and all that there is of man without sin;
(begotten) not from the seed of man nor in man, but fashioning for
himself a body into a single holy unity; nor, as in the case of the
prophets, did he inspire nor spoke nor operated (in it), but he became
wholly a man, "for the Word became flesh", without experiencing
71 Perhaps by Ambrose at De Fide V.S. 101 (253); but the reading is not clear here;
see Faller's apparatus criticus in lac. Loafs, 'Arianismus' 32, rightly protests against
this derogatory labeI..
72Ancoratus II8.9-14 (146--7).
73Now that we are, so to speak. in sight of that Council we shall in future
regularly refer to this creed as C.
"Ibid. II8.14 (147).
75See Kelly Early Christian Creeds 305-12.
76Ancoratus 119.3-12 (148,149).
660
Athanasius and His Heirs
change or transforming his own Godhead into humanity, but uniting
his own ... [text corrupt] into one holy perfection and Godhead, for
there is one Lord Jesus Christ and not two, the same God, the same
Lord, the same King'.
The article on the Holy Spirit mentions his function in giving the
Law, inspiring the prophets, being present at Christ's baptism, and
his activity in the apostles and in the sanctified. But a long gloss on the
Spirit is added, describing him as not only perfect and uncreated
(homoousion is not included) but 'proceeding from the Father and
receiving from the Son' . In the anathemas he adds condemnation of
propositions about the Holy Spirit to the condemned propositions
concerning the Son, and appends a special anathema against those
who deny the resurrection of the dead (veKpiiiv).it is interesting to see
in this creed concern to exclude specifically Arian doctrines fading
and the necessity appearing of dealing in detail with doctrine about
the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit. We should date this creed to the
year 374. 77
Epiphanius, who is almost fanatically pro-Nicene, does not neglect
to distinguish his position from that of the Arians in the course of
describing various types of Arianism in his PanaTion. We orthodox,
he says, believe that the Son is the image (eIKIDv) of the Father, not
simply as a picture is an image of the original, but the Son is an image
'because of his inbred consubstantiality (ttl<; YEVVltUCtl<;
6J..l0oUO'L6tlltOC;). as the Son reproduces in his character the breed
(xupuKtl]pi~ovtoc; t6 yevoc;) in relation to the Father, seeing that the
likeness (cbleIKoviaflUtoc;) is brought out (through the) identity and
consubstantiality and corresponding likeness' (&KtUllIDflUtO,).78
Earlier he has described the Son in a carefully constructed statement
thus:
'And the Son is always perfect, always subsistent (tvu1t6c:rtato<;),
begotten in reality from the Father unoriginatedly, timelessly,
indescribably; he is not a brother to the Father; he never began to exist
77Epiphanius' doctrine of the Holy Spirit is discussed more fully below,
pp. 753-5· The reference to people who disbelieve in the resurrection of the dead is
probably a dig at the Origenists, see Anc. 87.1, 2 (107-8). Epiphanius could hardly
have followed Origen's carefully nuanced and sophisticated doctrine on this subject.
78Panarion 76.3.1, 2 (343). Elena Cavalc;anti has interesting information upon this
tendency to emphasize eikon as implying a common ousia in her article' "Excerpta"
e Temi' 1019-21.
661
 The Controversy Resolved
nor will ever cease, but is eternally the genuine Son co-existing with
the Father, begotten timelessly from' the Father, equal ... .'79
In a kind of doctrinal manifesto :it the beginning of the Pan arion he
describes the Son as
'begotten timelessly and without beginning from the Father's inner
being (tl< I<61,.lt",v ltu<pmcov) ... consubstantial with the Father and in
no way differing from the Father, but unchanging and unalterable,
beyond passion and simply not suffering (6"-"'<; I'i] micrxoVTu), but
sympathising (aul'ltcl";(OV<U) with our human race ... having
assumed mind (vouv) and everything that belongs to man apart from
sin,'so
Earlier he had described Jesus Christ as 'suffering impassibly (ltuOmV
cbtuOi]<;) while remaining the Logos',81 an expression taken from
Athanasius but by no means contributing to theological lucidity. The
suffering, he says elsewhere, was attributed (s1,.oy;,,01]) to the
.Godhead, even though the Godhead was beyond suffering. 82 In a
carefully framed statement in the same book he describes the
incarnate Logos as a sinless, impassible genuinely human being,
incapable of altering his mind from that which is good, one Christ (he
does not say one hypostasis nor prosopon) uniting two natures, and he
says explicitly that the (spiritualized) human nature survived the
Ascension. 83
His attempts to do justice to the human mind and soul of the
incarnate Word certainly derive from Athanasius. In his Ancoratus he
reflects the disinclination of Athanasius to give this feature a serious
role. The Incarnation, he says, was like a king who wishes to bring to
a decisive and open battle an adversary who will flee away ifhe sees
the king· himself advancing, and so disguises himself and pretends to
flee from his enemy, but when the enemy pursues him turns and
fights. So Christ pretended fear at the Agony in the Garden in order
to induce the devil, deceived by the request that this cup should pass
from him, to show his hand openly so that he might be completely
defeated. Christ of course could not have desired that the cup should
pass from him, for he foreknew that he would be crucified and would
"Ibid. 62.).7 (392).
··Ibid. 1.2, 3 (227, 228).
8tAncortUuS 67.7 (80).
82Ibid. 93.4 (I 14): shortly afterwards (5 •.6 (I 14» he takes the example ofa stain on
a garment being attributed to the wearer of the garment.
8'lbid. 8.1-8 (99.101).
662
Athanasius and His Heirs
rise again. God cannot suffer; the flesh suffered without the divinity
being altered or changed. 84 Later in ·the same work he discusses the
human mind of Christ. In taking flesh, he firmly asserts, Christ
assumed a human psyche and nous, but this human mind was wholly
dominated by the divine mind:
'He did not then permit it (the mind), like a human being, to vary, but
he himself became the commander. director and improver of the
mind. Just as when he took flesh he was not defeated by the flesh, so
when he took a mind he was not defeated by the mind'. 85
And he adds a vigorous argument for allowing that Christ took a
human mind: our own minds needed healing by his assuming a
human mind; and the actions of understanding and growing in
wisdom attributed to him in the Bible could only be done by a
human, not a divine, mind. 8 • He had a perfectly genuine human
mind which never gave way to evil desires nor inclinations but did
give way to 'the proper and suitable bodily needs'. 87 Epiphanius
however is more ingenious than Athanasius in attempting to explain
the apparent ignorance of Jesus Christ. He says that there are two
sorts of knowledge, one achieved by knowing and the other by
experience (svepYBlu or ltpa~l<;), and for the second he instances those
places in the Bible where 'to know' means 'to have sexual intercourse
with', and also the expression 'the Lord knows his own' (Num 16:5
and 2 Tim 2:19), and 'you only have I known of all the nations of the
earth' (Amos 3:2) and 'Depart from me ... I never knew you' (Lk
13:27).88 He then applies this to the Son apparently not knowing the
Day: the Father knows the Day both by knowledge and by
experience (llpa~I<;), but the Son knows only when the Day will be
but,living in a temporal succession from which the Father is exempt,
does not yet (presumably as a human being) know it by experience
because he has not yet brought it about. 89 In the Panarion Epiphanius
among the other heresies which he lists elects to tackle
Apollinarianism. He is sorry to do this because he admires Apollinaris
as an unusually learned man who had even endured exile
"Ibid. 34·5""9 (43, 44)·
"76.1-3 (95).
"76-78 (95""98).
"79.1-5 (98""9), quotation 3.99.
8820.1-10 (28, 29).
8921 . 1- 5 (29. 30).
 The Controversy Resolved
(presumably at the hands of Valens) for his anti-Arian Heviews. 90
encounters this heresy in the form in which it was championed by
Vitalis, with whom in the Panarion he has a long discussion about the
psyche and the nous of the humanJesus, neither of which, according to
Epiphanius, Vitalis will allow, though at his interrogation by
Epiphanius in Antioch he had agreed that there was a human psyche
there. 91 Vitalis and his party agreed that the nous is the hypostasis (that
which gives it individual existence) in a man, and were willing to
accept the conclusion that the humanity in Christ must have been
devoid of this (avull6<Jtutoc;)!Z Epiphanius contends thatJesus Christ
must have had a human mind, because he increased in wisdom and
knowledge (Lk 2:52), and a mind is necessary for increase in these.
But, say the Apollinarians, in our view desire and striving are part of
the mind; can we attribute these to Christ? Yes, says Epiphanius, we
must and can; Christ experienced hunger, thirst, weariness, sleep,
journeying, grief, weeping and anger. The mind does indeed desire,
but it can desire good as well as evil. 93 Epiphanius even tries to throw
some faint light on the subject of Christ's knowledge here:
'Intelligence-itself (aI)to<Juv.<J'C;) does not need intelligence
(crov.cr.roc;), nor does Wisdom-itself (autocroq>la) need wisdom, but
the text "he shall understand" is applied to (Christ's) human mind'. 94
Later he argues that the nous is not the hypostasis of a man, but is a
certain energy given us by God, and maintains that though the
incarnate Logos had a human mind, he was not imprisoned by it!' It
is clear that though on this subject Epiphanius did not make any great
advance on Athanasius he was compelled by the emergence of
Apollinarianism to pay much more attention to it and to work out a
fuller and rather more coherent picture of the functioning of the
human mind of Jesus!·
90Panarion 77.24.1--9 (437).
91See above, p.659.
"Panarion 77-23·1-<1 (436); 24-1-9 (437).
"Ibid. 77-26.1-,]; 27.1 (438,439).
9477.30.2 (442). For 'he shall understand' (oUVJ1oel) the GCS ed., Holl, gives as a
reference Isa 42,1, but the verb does not occur there nor in any other relevant
passage in RahlCs LXX, unless we are to accept 1tveuJ,lu (J'ol.ptac; Kat c:ruVEO'EroC; at !sa
II.2.
95 77 . 34 . 5 and 35·1-2 (446, 447).
96It is hardly necessary to say that, following his master Athanasius, Epiphanius
wholly rejects any possibility of Christ exhibiting weakness, either in the Agony in
Athanasius and His Heirs
On the older and more conventional themes of the Arian
Controversy Epiphanius has learnt from the past and knows where he
stands with an almost excessive meticulousness. The dilemma was
posed by the Ariaus that if God the Father and God the Son are both
'He who Is' (6Ibv), and if we allow that 'He who is' was 'with' 'He
who Is' (In I: I), then the question arises, was 'He who Is' generated or
was that which did not exist generated, and ifhe existed before, how
was he generated, and ifhe was generated, how did he exist before?
Epiphanius replies that you must not push to extremes the analogy of
existence and generation. We come from nothing and yet we can
beget others. But in the case of God the Father begets and the Son is
begotten but both also exist eternally!' This is simply his version of
Athanasius' 'God is not as man'. The Arians next object to the
introduction into theological discourse of ousia and homoousios, terms
to be found neither in the Old nor the New Testaments. Epiphanius
replies that ousia is to be found in the Bible, because ousia and
hypostasis are synonymous, and the latter term is Biblical. But sensing
rightly that this is a weak argument he hits back at the Arians in a
traditional manner by pointing to the non-Scriptural terms which
they use. 98 He defines carefully the difference between homoousios
and homooiousios: two things of quite different sorts of character can
be li)ce each other in ousia, as gold is like bronze and silver like tin. But
homoousios expresses essential likeness without identity. The term
implies two distinct things which are like in nature, it does not imply
a merging (<JtJvaAolq>l']). Ifwe simply say 'like', then we could easily
envisage something that was like but of a quite different nature, such
as an image out of any material. Homoousion alone Can express
likeness arising from generation. 99 Epiphanius was suspicious of the
th~ Garden or on the cross, and eliminates firmly the scandal of the cross, Pan.
69.62.1-9 (210, 21I); 63.1-8 (21I-213; 64-1-5 (21 3).
97Panarion 69.71.1-10 (218-220).
98Ibid. 69.72.I~8, 73·1-2 (220, 221). In most of his uses of hypostasis Epiphanius is
conte?t to regard It, as here, as equivalent to ousia , e.g. in a long explanation of the
meanmg of homoousios ()~ov yap 6J.loovo"lOV JuiiC; 61toO'taO'f:wc; to'tlSTjA.rotl1(6v, Anc.
6.4.(12), cf. 7·3 (I~). But m the same work, 31.1-9 (101-3), he clearly distinguishes
o~sla an~ hYP0s.!aslS, meaning by the latter 'individual existence'; cf. Pan. 69.80 (228),
t~v tplWV o{)croov nuiwv 01tocrtaaewv, j..uii~ 3t 8e6tll'toC;. This evidence alone should
dispose of th: theory that th~ Council of Alexandria of 362 cleared up the confusion
between ousla and hypostasIs once and for all. Epiphanius never applies the term
homoousios to the Holy Spirit.
99lbid. 73.36.1-9 (3 10,3 I I); cf. 7·8, 9 (348) where he insists that by homoousion he
does not mean taUtOVO'lOV but ta13tov tij 8&6tlltl Kai ooai~ Kat 311vaj.l&1.
665
 The Controversy Resolved
exponents of 'likeness in respect of ousia' and branded them (as we
have noted) 'Semi-Arian', and never accepted the claim ofMeletius
to be orthodox either. This point about homoousios is not Athanasian,
but is a refinement of his doctrine which he no doubt would have
accepted. With the other pro-Nicenes Epiphanius argued against
Aetius that ingenerateness characterizes God's being but does not
constitute it.100
He has several formulae to describe the Trinity: the Father truly
subsisting individually (tvult6cn:atoc;), and the Son truly existing
individually and the Holy Spirit truly existing individually, three
which are one Godhead, one substance (ousia), one object of worship
(lloi;oA.oyia), one God. 'OI Later, an ambiguous statement from the
Ancoratus:
'Three existing as one harmony (Ju~!p(J)v{a), one Godhead, of the
same substance (ousia), of the same Godhead, of the same hypostasis . ..
he shows to us three Persons (ltp6(J(J)"a) of a holy worship from a
threefold hypostasis' ,102
At that stage Epiphanius certainly had much to learn about clarifying
his terms. In the Ancoratus too it is someone whom he calIs 'the
heretic' (he does not identify him) who produces the expression
'three hypostases in- one ousia', Epiphanius seems to think it
Sabellian. ,o3 It is in fact precisely the formula which the
Cappadocians adopted and publicised: 'the heretic' might be
Meletius. And in the Panarion, as we have seen, he actually adopts
three hypostases and one ousia.'o4
Epiphanius was regarded by some of his contemporaries as a
marvel of theological skill. He undoubtedly took the trouble to be
well informed; he understood pretty well the theology of Athanasius
and was capable of developing it usefulIy in some directions. But he
was no great intelIect. His atteinpts, for instance, to answer the
arguments oCAetius, backed by forceful contemporary logic, are not
impressive. We may however forgive much to one who resolved to
record for posterity so much ofother people's doctrines and opinions,
and did so in so compendious a manner.
IOOIbid. 76.45.1--"7 (399).
IOIAncorGtus 10.5 (18).
IO'Ibid. 67.4.7 (82).
IOJIbid. 81.4 (101).
I04S ee above, n 98.
666
Athanasius and His Heirs
4. Ambrose
If we are to detect an heir of Athanasius in the West, it will rather
be Ambrose than Hilary, much though Hilary respected Athanasius.
From at least 375 till at earliest 381, Ambrose was involved in the
Arian Controversy, though it may not have occupied all his
attention. He mentions Athanasius twice in his writings,105 and
according to his editor in the CSEL series, Faller, he had read
Orationes con. Arianos III, the Letters to Serapion, the De Decretis, the De
Synodis, and the De Marte Ar;;.'o. His main anti-Arian work is of
course his De Fide, written at the express request of the young
Emperor Gratian, Books I and II between September 378 and
January 379, and Books III, IV and V towards the end of381. But we
also know his attitude to Arianism through the acts of the Council of
Aquileia and the comments on his behaviour at that Council made by
an independent but by nO means unprejudiced witness, Palladius of
Ratiaria. Ambrose had declared his hand on the subject of Arianism
when in 375 he had attended the election of a successor to Germinius
at Sirmium and unconstitutionally (for Sirmium was outside any
sphere of jurisdiction which he could claim from Milan) insisted
upon the choice of the pro-Nicene candidate, Anemius.'o7 .
We are accustomed to take Ambrose at the estimate of Augustine,
who admired him greatly when he found himself in Milan in the late
eighties of the fourth century,. and who paid him some handsome
compliments in his Confessions. But an impartial judgment must
conclude that Ambrose does not come creditably out of his
involvement in the Arian Controversy. His behavi<;:mr at the Council
of Aquileia was characterised by injustice and bullying. And if in
defence it is pleaded that this is the way alI ecclesiastics usually
behaved and were expected to behave in such circumstances, we must
observe that his disgraceful conduct was noted and resented by his
Arian opponents, Palladius and Maximinus. Though the bishop of
Aquileia was supposed to be presiding, Ambrose appears to have
taken the conduct of affairs into his own hands at an early stage. He
continuously attempted to make Palladius either agree to or
repudiate a letter of Arius, in the face of Palladius' continual protests
lOSEpp. 13 and 14; see G. Madec in PTAA 356-66.
106lncro duction 4*-12.*. He also knew the Letter to Epictetus; see below n II7.
l07Gryson Seolies Ariennes 107 points out the illegality of chis act.

The Controversy Resolved
at the absence of Oriental representatives to give the Council a faint
colour at least of being a general one;and in the face of his accusation
that Ambrose had tricked the Emperor, Gratian, into confining the
membership to those who were the opponents of Palladius and
Secundianus.,08 Palladius refused to make any statement about
Arius' letter, saying that he had never seen him and did not know
who he was, whereupon Ambrose took this as an agreement with
Arius' views.,09 Later, he accused Palladius, as he had accused him
from the beginning, of denying the Son's eternity and read out a list
of epithets from Arius' letter applying to the Father, all with 'alone'
before them, thereby implying that they did not apply to the Son,
but carefully omitted 'alone ingenerate', which might have
supported Palladius' case. "O After a long wrangle with Palladius and
Secundianus, mainly on the subject of procedure, which was purely
unofficial and could not constitute the acts of a council, Ambrose
suddenly revealed that he had placed shorthand writers behind the
backs of the two Arian bishops, taking down what they said, a move
which angered both of them because it was equivalent to taping a
conversation without permission in our day. The two attempted at
that point to leave the room, but Ambrose and others prevented
them doing so by threats and force." 1 The bitterness created by this
sort of behaviour manifests itself in the ugly case which Palladius,
writing about the Council of Aquileia afterwards, was able to make
against Ambrose. He called Ambrose a rebel, hinting no doubt that
his allegiance to the legitimate but Arian Emperor Valentinian II was
doubtful, a disturber of the peace, a litigious scoundrel, a catechumen
(referring to the indecent haste with which, in his view, Ambrose was
transformed from an unbaptised civil servant into a Christian
bishop)."2 He suggested that Ambrose's youth had been stained
with sexual vice. l13 He had had little scruple in deposing others from
108S ee Gryson. ScoUes Ariennes 222,224 (21, 24).
IO'Ibid. 226, 228 (27, 28).
"oIbid. 232, 234 (38, 39).
111 282, 284 (97).
112298 (114).
113 300 (IlS). He had hastily and on no good grounds deposed blameless bishops
whose tenure of their sees was longer 'than your years spent in lewdness and filth'
(/ascivos sordidosque tuos excederet annas). I do not think that Palladius knew of any
specific examples of misconduct on the part of the youthful Ambrose. but he
assumed that a young pagan man would be sexually promiscuous in the natural
course of events.
668
Athanasius and His Heirs
their episcopal status because his own had been so lightly and
questionably come by."" And even while enjoying all the
advantages of a strong claque to shout approval of his arguments and
a large majority facing in a council a minority of two fighting on
unprepared and unexpected ground, Ambrose did not always
succeed in winning the argument. We have seen earlier that Palladius
trapped him on the subject of the title 'Christ'. 115 And in answer to
Palladius' demand, which he pressed again and again, that Eastern
bishops should be present, Ambrose can only give the evasive reply
that the custom is to have one Council in the East and one in the West
[with thirty-two bishops, and the Italians excused attendance!), and
that the Eastern bishops could have come if they liked."·
When we tum from Ambrose's behaviour at Aquileia to his actual
defence of the pro-Nicene doctrine in his De Fide we gain the
unavoidable impression that Ambrose has not, like Athanasius and
Hilary and Marius Victorinus, struggled with the problem of
Arianism and thought it through for himself, but rather has learnt the
conventional arguments because these are the stuff which the official,
successful church hands out. Almost all his ratiocination proceeds
upon the method (which is, admittedly, a weapon not unknown in
Athanasius' armoury) of assuming as true what he is supposed to be
proving, and too often his arguments are, as rational discussion,
beneath contempt. 117 His account of the doctrines of Arianism 118 is
hasty and superficial, and includes the statement that the Son is
dissimilar to the Father and that he is not good, both of them gross
travesties of Arian doctrine. They rely, he says, on 'clever
argumentations' (versutis disputationibus).119 Ambrose appears, like
virtually all the Western theologians, to know nothing of the
doctrines of Aetius and Eunomius, though he occasionally names
them; all he can manage here is the vulgar taunt that Eunomius claims
114302, 304 (120).
llSSee above, pp. 1Og-IO. The place is ibid. 290, 292 (107).
'''334 (7).
117Cf. the remarks of Madec in PTAA 376 about Ambrose's attitude to
a
Apollinarianism: 's'iI se servait copieusement de la Lettre Epictele dans Ie De
Incarnationis dominicae sacramento [written CJ8S] c'etait moins pour combattre
l'apoUinarisme, que parce qu'Athanase lui otfrait un arsenal commode contre les
diverses erreurs christologiques'.
'''De Fide 1.5.34-42 (.6-.8).
119Ibid. 1.5.40 (17); it is here that Ambrose had his famous statement 'it did not
please God to save his people by dialectic'.
 The Controversy Resolved
to know God better than Paul knew him.'20 And the same tendency
which is visible at the Council of Aquileia to substitute sheer malice
for argument is visible here too:-
'Whom arc we to believe? John who reclined on Christ's breast or
Arius who wallowed in his own bowels as they spilled out, so that we
can recognize the same treachery in Arius as that of the traitor Judas,
since the same punishment condemned him?'121
He can contend that if the Arians say that the Son 'is devoid of
goodness', then they are saying that he is 'the author of evil'. '22 And
he can declare that it is not surprising that the Goths prevailed (against
the Emperor Valens, though Ambrose does not mention this fact,
because Valens was Gratian's uncle) when the Arians were
persecuting the orthodox in the very area where the disaster (of
Adrianople in 378) took place.'23 And he suggests that when the
Arians adduce the text 'Whosoever believes in me does not believe in
me but in him who sent me' Un 12:44) they are actually discouraging
belief in Christ.'2' . has no consistent usage. This is not to say that he confuses the Persons:
Ambrose uses the usual arguments for the Nicene view of the
divinity of Christ. He believes in and defends the doctrine of the
Son's eternal generation:
'If therefore his generation is not involved with time, it is possible to
infer that nothing took place before the Son since he is not involved
with time' (ex tempore}.125
He alleges quite incorrectly that the Fathers of Nicaea placed
homoousion in N in order to counter the Arian use of heterousion (a
word which had not yet been introduced into the controversy!).'2'
The word does not entail Sabellianism in Ambrose's opinion, as its
opponents allege it does.
'HomODusion (means) something different from something else, not
>2°V.[9.237 (307).
1211.19.123 (52).
122U Prologue 13 (62).
23
t 11. 16. 136-8 (104-6). Maximmus adverts to this silly argument, Gryson Scolies
Ariennes 214 (13).
124De Fide V. 10. I 19 (261); in fact of course they were emphasizing that Christ
was sent and was not acting as an independent agent.
12sIV.9.99 ([92).
126 111.15. 124 (151). It is here that Ambrose quotes the fragment of a letter of
Eusebius of Nicomedia which he says was read out at the council, and caused the
bishops to insert homoousion into N. See above PP.3I, 161.
Athanasius and His Heirs
identity with itself. That is why we correctly call the Son homoousion
with the Father, because by this word both the distinction of Persons
and the unity of nature are denoted' .127
Ambrose uses natura (nature) normally to indicate what the Three
have in common and substantia to indicate what they are; e.g.
commenting on Isa 45: 14, in te igitur est deus per unitatem naturae, et non
est deus praeter te per proprietatem substantiae, repulsam differentiae.'2.
The Son is 'the image of the Father's substance"2. But Ambrose's
vocabulary has one interesting peculiarity as far as terms for
discussing Trinitarian or Christological subjects in De Fide are
concerned. He uses the word persona in these contexts hardly at all,
only twice, to be exact. l3O He sometimes prefers the word proprietas
(individuality), and here joins the list of Western theologians who
either eschewed or were wary of using persona. He also uses proprietas
in a rather confusing way, for the possession of their divine nature by
the Three.l3' He can use nomen (name) for the same meaning, '32 but
'For the Father is not he who is the Son, but between the Father and
the Son there is a distinction of generation visible, so that God (comes)
from God, Eternal from Eternal, Perfect from Perfect ... one
Godhead, not confused, because it is one. nor plural because it is
uniform' (indijferens).
And he can compare, with proper safeguards, the one substance of
127 111.15.126 (152); this is one of the very rare examples of Ambrose using perSO'Ja
in this work, see below n 130.
128 1.3.27 (14): 'in thee therefore is God as regards unity of nature and there is no
God besides thee as regards possession of substance exclusive of diversity'.
1291I1.14.I08 (146,147). Ambrose never seems to have felt it necessary, as did
Gregory of Elvira, to substitute 'essence' (essentia) for substance.
l3°0ne we have seen above (see n 127); the other is V.3.46 (234). Ambrose is
arguing that Christ never speaks of pluralitas in defining his relation to the Father:
evidens est igitur quia, quod unius est substantiae separari non potest, etiamsi non sit
singularitatis, sed unitatis. Singularitatem dieo, quae Graeee monotes dicitur. Singularitas ad
personam pertinet, unitas ad naturam. He can of course use persona in other contexts,
e.g. V.8.II4 (259) ex persona hominis, and again at 10.12.4 (262).
131Examples of the former use (on Acts 17:28) ideo in illis tribus proprietasfili ...
declaratur II Prologue 7 (60), and (on Ps I 10 (109):3) utique ideo dixit, non ut eorporalem
alvum dec1araret, sed ut proprietatem verae generationis ostenderet IV.8.88 (187);
examples of the latter use 1.3.27 (14), see above n 128, and aliud forum aeternitatem,
aliud proprietatem substantiae ind!fferentis signifieat I. 1 1.69 (30), adeo generatio in paterna
proprietate, non in iure est potestatis IV.8.90 (188), ad proprietatem naturae (of Christ's
divine nature) V.8.I03 (253).
132
11 Prolog~e 3 (49)·
 The Controversy Resolved
humanity in all men with the one substance of God.'33 And
elsewhere:
'There is a certain undifferentiated substance of the distinct,
incomprehensible and indescribable Trinity. For we allow a
distinction of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. not a confusion, a
distinction. not a division, a distinction. not a plurality.'134
But Ambrose canalso use 'substance' (substantia) of the two different
elements in Jesus Christ, divine and human.13s And when he quotes
his Latin version of the notoriously ambiguous anathema in N he
gives it as ex aUa substantia vel ousia, where substantia translates
hypostasis.'3. Ambrose cannot therefore be said to have contributed
much towards clearing up the semantic confusion which so
persistently dogged the fourth-century search for the Christian
doctrine of God.
In the course of his argument Ambrose can on occasion fall into
extraordinary hermeneutical perversity. The Arians adduced the text
'No man is good but only one, God' (Mk 10:17) to show that the
goodness of the Son was less than that of the Father. Ambrose claims
that it means 'No man is good save God, but I am God!'.'37 And
when he attempts to show that Ps 139(138):15 exhibits the words
'substance' by following an eccentric Latin rendering 'and my
substance in the depths of the earth' instead of' and my bone (LXX to
60'<ouv Ilou) in the depth of the earth', even the CSEL editor awards
him an exclamation mark.13' He similarly builds worthless
arguments on another spurious discovery of the word 'substance' in
Nahum 2:7, 8.'39 Generally speaking, throughout all his writings
Ambrose tends to produce interpretations of the Bible whose
undoubted poetic quality may charm the uncritical reader but which
1331.2.16, 17. 18 (10, II).
'34[V.8.90 (188).
"'[[1.10.65 (132).
1361.18.120 (51).
137 11.1.19 (63): 'That is "It is not enough that you should call him good whom
you will not believe to be God. I do not seek disciples who believe me to be rather in
human terms a good master than in divine terms a good God' ...
138 111.14.110 (147).
139IIl. I4 . IIS (148); he shows himself a little uncertain about this triumph of
misinterpretation at 117 (149). In his Epp 72.24 (1304) he perhaps achieves a greater
height offolly by presuming to correct Aquila's version ofGn 17.9-14 by the light
of a bad Latin translation of an indifferent Greek translation (LXX) of the original
Hebrew which, of course, Ambrose did not know.
Athanasius and His Heirs
in fact represent little more than fantastic nonsense woven into a
purely delusive harmony.
On the subject of the Incarnation, Ambrose follows Athanasius
with some fidelity, but, like Epiphanius, has been compelled to
develop an acknowledgment of the existence of a human soul or
mind in Jesus a good deal further, and he does not reproduce
Athanasius' idea that the Logos cancelled the functioning of the
human psyche. This is of course one of the repercussions of the
Apollinarian Controversy, which did not in fact otherwise impinge
much on Ambrose's consciousness."O On the text 'let this cup pass
from me' (Matt 26:39 and pars.) Ambrose is at least more logical than
Athanasius: it is the man, the weakness of the human nature, which
says this: 'As a man he does not know the power of death; but as God
in a body he expresses the weakness of the flesh'.14' But when Christ
mourns or weeps he is not mourning for himself, for he has nothing
to mourn for, but for us, our griefs, pains and sins."2 But still
Ambrose very plainly recognizes a human soul (anima) in Jesus
Christ:
'He is not distressed as the Power (of God), his Godhead is not
distressed, but his soul is distressed, he is distressed as regards his
acceptance of human weakness. And therefore because he assumed a
soul he also assumed the passions of the soul'. 143
The Lord hungered and endured other human experiences in order to
show that his body as well as ours endured human weakness, and in
order to share our weakness.'" But there is a limit to this admission:
the human weakness had no effect whatever on the divine power:
'You must not be so irreverent as to think that it is weakness when you
see the wounds. Those were indeed the wounds of the body, but there
was no weakness of that wound in the source from whence the Life of
all was ftowing'.145
For Ambrose, as for Athanasius, Paul's expression 'the weakness of
God' (I Cor I :25) had no meaning. If there was any weakriess, it was a
140As Madec has observed. See above, n 117.
41
• 1I.5.4I (70-72). quotation 44 (71).
•• 2[1.7·52-57 (74, 75).
'·'7·56 (75)·
144III.J.6 (110) .
•• S[V.5.54 (175. 176).
 Athanasius and His Heirs
The Controversy Resolved
not to know as man, citing Lk 2:52.153 Ambrose admits this as a
weakness precisely not of God but of man. Arian Christology could possible argument, but prefers to opt for the other view:
at least do better than this.
Nor did Ambrose leave any room for 'the foolishness of God' 'It is much better, I think (to assume) that the Son who when he "was
(I Cor 1:25). The apparent ignorance ofJesus caused Ambrose, as it conversant with men" (Baruch 3:37 (38)) acted as a man and assumed
flesh and took on OUf condition, so that he said that he did not know as
caused Athanasius, considerable trouble. He establishes an exact
a result of our ignorance, not that he was ignorant of anything'.154·
division between what Christ says as man and what he says as
God."o Ignorance was assumed, indeed even pretended, for our Though Ambrose has recognised the existence of a human mind in
benefit: 'for me he is ignorant of the Day ofJudgment, for me "he Jesus Christ much more fully and with less embarrassment than
does not know the Day or the hour" (Matt 24:36). For how could he Athanasius, he in effect confines its operation to what we might call
who made the days and the times not know the Day?'·47 ' "But it is the subconscious mind or even the nervous system, what the Greeks
written that he asked a question." Learn the distinction: he asks as Son called psyche, and did not permit it to function as a mind.
of Man, he gives commands as Son ofGod'."8 Facing later the same The intellectual heritage of Athanasius was to be influential in later
embarrassing text, Matt 24:36, he first says that some MSS omit the years for a long time, in the Christology of Cyril, for instance. But his
words 'neither the Son' ('of that day and hour no one knows, nO even immediate heirs in the work of finding a viable Christian doctrine of
the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but only the Father') and hints God did little to modify or develop his doctrine in fruitful directions.
darkly that the Arians deliberately interpolated the words, but finally In fact initiative and creative activity in this task had even before
faces the difficulty: of course the Son of God could not be Athanasius' death passed to another group of theologians living in
ignorant."9 It is not good for human beings to know everything, quite a different part of the Roman Empire, those three men who are
expecially to know the Day ofJudgment (and so Christ wasjustified known as the Cappadocian fathers.
in denying knowledge of it). 150 But why, Ambrose asks, did Jesus
refuse to tell his aposdes, not in a manner which suggested that he
knew but would not tell, but as if he genuinely did not know?'51
There are, he goes on, several places in the Bible where God appears
to be ignorant, even though God in fact knows everything: Gen
18:21; 11:5; Ps 53(52):3; Lk 20:13 (and pars.). The solution to this
problem is this:
'This fact is that there is a divine custom in Scripture ... that God
pretends not to know what he knows'.
This principle the Son followed in imitation of the Father.'52 The
presence of the human mind in Jesus is ignored at this point. A little
later, however, Ambrose reverts to this very point. Some argue, he
says, that as Christ assumed our weak body, so he could be thought

146II.9·77.78 (84, 85); the Chalcedonian Formula was later to quote it .

47
• 11.[1.93.94 (9[).
>4'111.4.32 ([[9).
'''V.[6.[93ff (28911). "'18.222 (301). These people could not be Arians, because they allowed a
15°17.209-11 (295--6).
human mind in the incarnate Word.
1St 17.214 (297).
15418.222 (~OI).
"'[7.214-9 (297-300), quotation 2[9 (299-300); cf. [8.220 (300).
675
674

. had been with Athanasius, the doctrine of the Son. At the same time it
21
The Cappadocian Theologians
I. Introduction
By the term 'the Cappadocian theologians' only three are usually
meant, all of whom were born and brought up in Cappadocia and
spent ~ost of their lives there. These are Basil of Caesarea. Gregory
ofNazla~zus. and Gregory of Nyssa who was one of Basil's younger
brothers. BasI! hved from about 330 to 379; Gregory of Nazianzus
froni 329 to 389; and Gregory of Nyssa from about 335 to about 395.
These three writers, though each differs clearly from the others in
some respects, all have certain features in common, apart from the
fact that they were bound together by blood relationship or by close
fnendshlp. They were together decisively influential in bringing
about. the final fO.rm of the doctr~ne of the Trinity and thereby
resolvmg the conflict about the Chnstlan doctrine of God which had
vexed the Church for fifty years before their day. They all lived in
different Circumstances and faced different problems from those
which Athanasius had experienced. By their time the theological
issues had in some ways narrowed themselves as far as the status of the
Son ,:"as concerned. But in another sense they were facing larger
questIOns. because their chief concern was the whole Trinitarian
doctrine, including the place and status of the Holy Spirit, the
mtegral, developed Christian doctrine of God, and not mainly, as it
I Strictl~ speaking,. Eusebius of Samosata and AmphiIochius of Iconium were
Cappadoclan, theologians (as of course Eunornius, Aerius and Gregory and George
of AI~xan~na we~e also!). But nothing written by Eusebius survives and
Amphlloc~lus. whIle he virtuaUy owed his theology to the three great
Cappadoclans (and especiaUy to Basil), contributed nothing whatever to their
tho,ught, and anyway his remains, such as they are, seem to have been written
ma~nly ~fcer 38 I. See the admirable hook by K. Hall Amphilochius von Ikonium
which. IS, ,as welJ as a compilation of almost' all our information about
AmphdochlUs, a useful account of the theology of the three eminent Cappadocians.
676
The Cappadocian Theologians
must be realized that though they were successful as no writers before
them had been in finding a satisfactory and clearly defmed
vocabulary for working with their subject, they were none of them ~
and Basil least of all ~ wedded to a formula nor determined to impose
a set form of words which should subsequently be a compulsory text
for deciding what was and what was not orthodoxy. There never has
been a single formula adopted by the majority of Christians designed
to express the doctrine ofthe Trinity, and the Cappadocians never
imagined that. there c.ould be one!
The Cappadocians all relied on the aid of contemporary
philosophy more than had either of the great theologians of the
doctrine of the Trinity who had preceded them, Athanasius and
Hilary. The subject will be taken up again later in this book. At the
moment it is enough to say that though the Cappadocians deride
pagan philosophy at times in a manner which was by their time
conventional and almost expected among Christians. they are
manifestly more Platonist than were Athanasius or Hilary, and their
Platonism is rather more than that involved in a general popular
Platonic outlook. and even than the Platonism of the Middle
Platonists, though they are obviously indebted to that tradition.
They had. in fact. inherited a definite tradition of Platonic
Christianity from Gregory Theodorus and beyond him from
Origen. The conviction that:
'there is nothing created nor subservient in the Trinity nor externally
contributed. nor is the Son less than the Father nor the Spirit than the
Son'3
was for them almost a native, ancestral tradition. But in addition to
this they are indebted at times to Plotinus, either through Porphyry
or in some other way. Basil is aware that Plotinus had propounded a
doctrine of 'three ultimate realities' (tpliiiv apXlIciiiv U1tOcrtUcrEOlV).4
2The Creed of Constantinople of 381 (C) does not of course set out this doctrine
in set terms, and the . Athanasian' Creed, which does, has never been officially
adopted by the Eastern Church (and till the Filioque clause is removed from it, never
will bel).
3The quotation is from the Symbolum of Gregory Theodorus (Thaumaturgus),
Hahn Symbo/e §I, 253-5, as given by Gregory of Nyssa in his Vita Gregorii
71laumaturgi. Dehnhard calls attention to it, Das Problem 32-3)'.
4See below, p.691.
 The Controversy Resolved
Basil by no means takes over this doctrine unmodified: he would·
certainly have refused to accept the term 'ultimate' (apXl1cii'>v) because
he believed that there was only one Ultimate Principle (apxlj) in the
Godhead. But that a reputable and much respected pagan
philosopher had propounded a doctrine of three hypostases was of
considerable advantage to theologians who were trying to commend
a doctrine of God as three hypostases in one ousia.
Though Basil wrote several letters to Athanasius in Alexandria
showing the greatest respect for him and Gregory of Nazianzus
delivered a eulogy on him after his death, none of the Cappadocian
theologians derived their theological tradition directly from him.
Their intellectual pedigree stemmed from the school of Basil of
Ancyra.1t was with the bishop of Ancyra that Basil of Caesarea paid a
visit to the Council of Constantinople at the very end of the year 359
- not greatly to his credit nor profit. The doctrine of'like in respect of
ousia' was one which 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 as applied to the Son, 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, for instance,
to Lucifer of Calaris, who did not understand it, or eventually to
Athanasius, who did. It was important for the Cappadocians only in
as far as it was part of the creed N, and this creed they were always
anxious to champion and commend. Again, they were facing
different opponents from the theologians whom Athanasius had
opposed. They are aware of the arguments of Homoian Arianism, of
course, and quite. often set themselves to rebut them. But the
Arianism which they regarded as their most dangerous enemy was
Neo-Arianism and in particular the teaching ofEunomius. This was
partly because Eunomius' influence happened to extend to the parts
of the Eastern Church with which the Cappadocians were most in
touch, but also because during their lifetime Neo-Arianism wa~ at its
most vigorous and presented itself to many acdve minds as the
logical, philosophically best-equipped version of the Christian faith.·
Athanasius was never required to cope seriously with this particula.r
obstacle. Neo-Arianism was in fact a transient phenomenon, but the
Cappadocians encountered it in its hey-day. They also had to come to
terms with Macedonianism, a refusal to accept the full divinity of the
Holy Spirit. This particular idea occupied much of the attention of
the Cappadocians and compelled them to explore and develo·p the
678
The Cappadocian Theologians
doctrine of the Holy Spirit as it had not been investigated before,
even by Athanasius. 5
The Cappadocians, however, certainly learnt from Athanasius.
They learnt the necessity of the doctrine of the eternal generation of
the Son. They learnt to reject even the slightest approach to a
subordination of the Son. And they learnt what Athanasius had learnt
only by hard experience, the problem oflanguage, the ambiguity of
language used about God. They recognize fully and without
consternation the analogous nature oflanguage. 6 They were indeed a
splendid trio of theologians, bu," part of this splendour derived from
the fact that they were standing on the shoulders of their
predecessors.
2. Basil of Caesarea
It is possible to reconstruct the career of Basil in considerable detail,
because we possess not only an account of his life in the form of a
eulogy by his friend Gregory ofNazianzus 7 and accounts of parts of
his career by his brother Gregory of Nyssa, 8 but more than three
hundred and fifty letters of Basil himselfhave been preserved, which
throw a flood of light on his intentions and activities. In addition we
have some material from the church historians and some from other
sources, such as the Letters of Pope Damasus. It is beyond the scope of
this work to enter into all the details of Basil's career and into debates
among scholars about the precise dates of some of its incidents. 9
5The doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Cappadocians and e1sewhere is treated in
the next chapter, 22.
6S ee Hanson Studies in Christian Antiquity cap. 13.
'Ora,io XLIII (37:50411).
sCon. Eunom. 1.120--5 (288-9); 127-14.2 (293-6).
9The most recent succinct account is that ofW. D. Hauschild in the article Basilius
deT Grosse in the TRE (Bd. 5. 301-13) which contains an extensive bibliography.
-r:he account o~~. Travers Smith in his St. Basil the Great was a useful and, worthy
piece ~fwork ~n ItS own day hut is now superseded. The account of Margaret Fox
The Life and T,mes oJBasil the Great as Revealed in his Works is stil1 useful. E. Amand
de ~endie~a 'Ba~ile de Cesaree et Damase de Rome' is worth consulting. For more
d~taded ~IScusslons see Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 169-77, 179-195;
Sm~onettl Crisi 405-34; P.]. Fedwick The Church and the Charisma of Leadership in
BaSIl oJCaesarea (and especially his Appendix A), and Y. Courtonne Un Temoin du
IVe oriental: Saint. Basile et son temps d'apres sa co"espondance. 45-280. G. May
proposes rather different dates for some of the events of Basil's career in 'Die
Grossen Kappadokier und die staatliche Kirchenpolitik von Valens his Theodosius'
679

The Controversy Resolved
Basil was born in Cappadocian Caesarea of a wealthy land-owning
family, one among a large number of children. His family had long
been Christians; his grandmother, Macrina, who was largely
responsible for his religious education, stood in the tradition of
Gregory Theodorus, the great Christian figure of third-century
Cappadocia. Basil may have learnt some of his education as a rhetor
from his father, who himself had' taught rhetoric before his early
death. It was in Caesarea that Basil met Gregory, son of a bishop of
Nazianzus in Cappadocia, and became one of his closest friends. He
studied rhetoric in Constantinople for a time, and in 350 or 351 he
and Gregory went to Athens for further study, where, among others,
they made the acquaintance ofJulian, later to be Emperor. About 355
Basil returned to Caesarea and spent a short time teaching rhetoric in
his native town. But his thoughts were turning from a secular career
to more serious things. In 356 he was baptized by Dianius bishop of
Caesarea, and he began to evince a special interest in asceticism. In 356
and 357 he made a tour of monastic sites in Syria, Mesopotamia,
Palestine and Egypt, perhaps in the company of his friend Eustathius,
later to be bishop ofSebaste. He returned to Caesarea, but in a short
time he had left it to start a regime of ascetic life on a family estate at
Annesi in Pontus, encouraged by his mother Emilia and his sister
Macrina (357--9). In 359 in the train of Basil bishop of Ancyra he went
to Constantinople for the council gathering there, and took part,
probably with little success, in a debate or debates with Neo-Arians,
and then returned to Annesi. He was alienated from Dianius because
the latter had signed the Creed of Constantinople in 360. In 36!-
Gregory joined Basil from N azianzus at Annesi, where together they
followed an ascetic mode of life and occupied themselves in
compiling an anthology culled from the works of Origen, the
Philocalia, which fortunately survives. In 362 Dianius died after being
reconciled to Basil and acknowledging his acceptance of a pro-
Nicene faith. Basil had returned home a little before this, but
returned to Annesi very soon. Eusebius, a lay official unlearned in
322-6, and so does R. Van Dam in 'Emperor, Bishops and Friends in Late Antique
Cappadocia·. a paper which is helpful in supplying some of the political background
to Basil's career. D. H. Dehnhard Das Problem des Abhiingigkeit des Basi/ius von Plotin
is an excellent monograph, although it has not the last word on the subject. The
accounts of Basil in the ancient church historians are to be found in Philostorgius HE
VIII.II-I3; Socrates HE IV.II and 26; Sozomenus HE VI.IS-I7. 21.1, 2, 26.10;
Theodore, HE IV: 19; Jerome De Vir. III. CXVI.
680
The Cappadocian Theologians
theology, was chosen and consecrated bishop of Caesarea. In 364
Basil came back to Caesarea and was ordained presbyter by Eusebius.
In the same year, a coolness sprang up between the two and Basil
went off to Annesi again. Next year, however, in view of the
forthcoming visit of the pro-Arian newly-created Emperor Valens to
Caesarea, Eusebius asked Basil to return, and Basil obeyed his
summons. Thenceforward until the death ofEusebius in 370 or 371 10
Basil was in Caesarea playing a large part in the administration of the
see. On the death of Eusebius, Basil was elected bishop, not without
strenuous efforts on his belralfby the bishop of Nazianzus, Gregory's
father, and by Basil himself. He thereby became theleader of the pro-
Nicene party in the (secular) diocese of Oriens.
The rest of his career until his death in 379 was occupied in a
strenuous struggle to maintain the pro-Nicene cause, against the
violently pro-Arian policy of the Eastern Emperor Valens: the
apparently incurable disunity of the Eastern Church, the SUspIcion
and apathy of the Western bishops led by Damasus of Rome and fed
by the intrigues of Peter, successor of Athanasius from 373 onwards
who had early in his reign as archbishop been chased out of
Alexandria by Valens and taken refuge with Damasus. Basil was also
hampered by his own frequent ill-health. He died before he was fifty.
Two events in particular marked the beginning of his episcopate. In
371 or 37211 the Emperor Valens visited Caesarea again. Basil may
have expected exile, for Valens' Arian proclivities drove him to take
brisk action againstpro-Nicene bishops', Gregory of Nyssa was to be
driven out of his see and Eusebius also from his see ofSamosata. The
confrontation between the two is described by the two Gregories in
dramatic terms with dialogue which would not be out of place in
envisaging an encounter between Henry II of England and Thomas,
archbishop of Canterbury. In fact the meeting was probably less
sensational than this. Basil made no doctrinal concessions and Valens
left him in possession of his see. He probably talked to him about a
project in which he required Basil's aid. He expected hostilities with
the Parthians beyond the Eastern frontier; he suspected that the
lOThe usually accepted date is 370, but May and Van Dam argue strongly for 371.
The evidence that Basil had earlier attended the Council of Lampsacus (364) does
not exist; in Ep 22.3-5 (829) he says that Eustathius consulted him before setting out
for that Council, but not that B. accompanied him. Eustathius of Sebaste attended
the Council ofTyana in 366, but we have no evidence that he took B. with him.
I 1 Here again May and Van Dam prefer the later date.
681
 The Controversy Resolved
Parthian king was intriguing with the king, or the nobles, of the
kingdom of Armenia, which lay between the two empires; and he
wanted Basil to establish and fill episcopal sees in Armenia, in order to
strengthen the influence of the Roman Empire there. The other event
was probably not connected with Valens' visit to Caesarea, and may
even have taken place before it. This was the division of the province
of Cappadocia into two. This affected Basil, as metropolitan of the
whole of Cappa do cia, seriously. It would diminish his influence, and
consequently perhaps the whole pro-Nicene cause in the area. The
bishop of the. most important town in the new province, Tyana,
whose name was Anthimus, instantly claimed that he was
metropolitan of the new province, and not Basil. Hierarchical amour
propre was involved as well as doctrinal considerations. It is as difficult
to persuade a bishop to surrender part of his see to another as it is to
persuade a dog to part with a bone. Basil, highly indignant at finding
his native town and his see reduced in importance by half, responded
by establishing as many new sees in the new and in the old provinces
as he could in the short time available and staffing them with men
who would be loyal to him. He made the town of Nyssa (in
Cappadocia prima) an episcopal seat and persuaded his brother
Gregory to become bishop of it. He made a new see at Doara (in
Cappadocia secunda) and appointed his man (Eulalius) to it. And he
even raised a small unimportant place called Sasima to the dignity of a
see, and persuaded or bullied his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, against
his judgment and will, to become bishop ofit. In his autobiographical
poem Gregory later gives a vivid picture of the shortcomings of
Sasima. It was a mere post-town, full of flies, dust, government
officials and criminals being transported somewhere else, a fluid and
unprofitable population. 12 It is wholly unlikely that Valens divided
the province simply to spite Basil; he thought the move would be
administratively useful.
In the summer of 372 Basil set out for Armenia to perform the task
which Valens had asked him to undertake there. On this occasion he
also met Meletius, who was in exile on his estate in Getasa in
Armenia. Meletius was an old friend of Basil's and throughout his
career as a bishop Basil was steadfastly loyal to him. He fust spent two
days.at Sebaste with his friend Eustathius who was bishop of the
place, but was unable to arrange about appointing bishops because of
"De Vita Sua 439-46 (74).
682
The Cappadocian Theologians
the opposition of the bishop ofNicopolis, Theodotus. Theodotus, a
pro-Nicene, suspected Eustathius' orthodoxy and not long
afterwards refused to associate with Basil because of his friendship
with Eustathius, even though Basil had in his meeting with
Eustathius extracted from him a statement agreeing with the doctrine
ofN.!3 Between 372 and 377 Basil engaged in a series of attempts to
bring about a move by Western bishops to restore unity and
orthodoxy to the East, all without success. Next year, in 373, a
scheme for reconciliation between Basil, Eustathius and Theodotus
engineered by Meletius fell through. Eustathius had repudiated his
agreement of the year before, and Basil distrusted the sincerity of
Theodotus. The same year saw Amphilochius, a protege of Basil,
installed as bishop of !conium. In 374 Eusebius of Samosata was
driven into exile by the agents of Valens, and in the year following
the same fate befell Gregory of Nyssa. Most of Basil's plans and
policy now began to disintegrate. In 374 Eustathius unexpectedly
turned against Basil and all he stood for. Eustathius was indeed an
extraordinary person. In his youth he had been notorious for his
advocacy of extreme asceticism, almost to the point of Gnosticism.
He disapproved, for instance, of Christians marrying. According to
Basil he had begun as an Arian. He was ordained presbyter by
Hermogenes bishop of Caesarea about 340 and was regarded as
belonging to the party ofEusebius of Nicomedia/Constantinople in
the capital city. Later he left Constantinople and with it Arianism and
became an adherent of the views of Basil of Ancyra. By 358 he had
13Eustathius' career is summarized by Basil in Epp 244 and 263. and his
subsequent behaviour described and deplored. But we must remember that this is a
one-sided account, given by a former friend now alienated and embittered. Loefs in
his EustatMus von Sebaste strives earnestly to redress the balance. Dorrie, in his De
Spiritu Sancto 29-43. has carefully reconstructed the story of the relations between
Basil and Eustathius during these years. In 372 he met Eustathius at Sebaste and after
two days' discussion had drawn from him his subscription to a document which
established his pro-Nicene position on the Son and on the Holy Spirit. Both then set
off to Nicopolis to meet Theodotus. but halted and then parted when the news
reached them that Theodotus would not welcome them. A little later B. met
Meletius on his estate at Getasa in Armenia, and Theodotus was there too. T. was
still suspicious ofB. because of his association with E., but informed B. that E. had
now repudiated the agreement reached with him at Sebaste. Next year B.
contemplated accepting M.·s invitation to COl11e to Nicopolis to take part in a
reconciliation between T., B. and E. Because Eusebius of Samosata would not
accompany him. because he Was ill. and because he did not trust the sincerity of the
parties concerned, B. did not go. Thus collapsed also the plan for appointing
Armenian bishops.
68 3
 The Controversy Resolved
become bishop of Sebaste in Armenia and in that capacity attended
the council of Ancyra." In the same year he was formally deposed
(by Homoian Arians) in favour of Meletius, who was thought to be
more inclined to Homoian opinions. But the people of Sebaste had
conceived a strong attachment for him; they drove out Meletius
(who retired to his original see of Beroea in Syria). But Eustathius
suffered deposition again in the general drive against the disciples of
Basil of Ancyra eariy in 360. He then went to Rome, the delegate,
along with Silvanus of Tarsus and Theophilus ofCastabala, of what
might be called the •continuing Homoiousians', where he was
welcomed by Pope Liberius and agreed to a pro-Nicene formula
submitted to him by the Pope. Armed with this he returned to the
East, where a council held at Tyana endorsed the renunciation of the
creed of Nice/Constantinople and the acceptance ofN. The council's
plans for a larger eirenic council to be held at Tarsus were vetoed by
Valens, but Eustathius succeeded at this point in regaining his see of
Sebaste. Basil was therefore apparently quite justified in regarding
him as on the side of the angels, and, as we have seen, Eustathius had
under his influence already signed two satisfactorily pro-Nicene
statements. Basil planned in 374 or 375 a gathering of bishops in
Cappadocia at which Theodotus ofNicopolis would be reconciled to
Eustathius in the presence of bishops of Cappadocia and Armenia.
But Eustathius unexpectedly upset all his plans by refusing to attend
the proposed meeting and joining his friend Theophilus in his see of
Castabala in Cilicia, alleging that Basil was heretical because of his
association with Apollinaris of Laodicea." By 375 Eustathius had
become the moving spirit of a campaign of slander against Basil, and
. had joined the party of the Macedonians, dubbed Pneumatomachi by
their opponents, who repudiated the divinity of the Holy Spirit (Basil
alleged that Eustathius had returned to his original Arianism). In the
same year Theodotus died and Valens' prefect Modestus, who was
already conducting a campaign of deposition and exile against the
pro-Nicenes, was able to refuse the candidate for the see supported by
Basil and instal one put forward by Eustathius (who was now by
formal imperial recognition what he had long been in fact, bishop of
14For this council, see above pp. 349-57 .
.15For some account of the relations ofBasil and Apollinaris. see below, pp. 695-6.
The negotiations between Basil and Damasus and with him the Western bishops are
dealt with in a later chapter. 23. See also n 13 above. For Amphilochius' Council see
PG 39:96.
The Cappadocian Theologians
Sebaste). The long friendship between the two friends, Basil and
Eustathius, foundered in mutual reproaches and the exchange of
acrimonious correspondence.
In 376 Basil had the satisfaction of hearing that a council in
Iconium presided over by Amphilochius had produced a statement
supporting N and reflecting Basil's doctrine of the Holy Spirit. In
August 378 everything was changed by the disastrous defeat of the
Roman army by the Goths at Adrianople with the result that the
Emperor Valens disappeared and never was heard of again. Valens
had just before his death planned to recall exiled bishops, as he had
previously when faced with a crisis. But after Adrianople all exiled
bishops returned anyway, including Meletius, Eusebius of Samosata
and Gregory of Nyssa. On January 1St 379 Basil died.
This bare sketch cannot do justice to Basil's many-sided activity as
bishop of Caesarea. He founded hospitals in his see for the sick and for
travellers. He encouraged the institution of a type of coenobitic
monasticism which is the classic model of Eastern Orthodox
monasticism to this day. Some of his letters constitute the basis of the
canon law of the Eastern Church. He corresponded with a host of
officials, clergy, religious and friends in high and low places. He is
now justly recognized as a Doctor of the Church by the Roman
Catholic Church and is the bright particular star of the Eastern
Orthodox Church. He was a man of unusual ability and great self-
discipline and could often exhibit remarkable tolerance and patience.
But he was also a man of imperious temper who did not like being
contradicted or thwarted and who tended to use his friends as tools
for gaining the ends which his policy demanded rather than people to
be valued as friends for their own sake. One of these was, of course,
his younger brother Gregory whom he conscripted into becoming
bishop of Nyssa in order to support his older brother's plans to retain
ecclesiastical power. Basil always underestimated Gregory's worth,
though Gregory always looked up to him and respected him.'6 He
similarly used his friend Gregory of Nazianzus for his own ends in
making him bishop of Sasima. Unlike Basil's brother, Gregory
fiercely resented this. He never actually visited his formal see of
Sasima, though;t remained as an embarrassment to him for the rest of
his life; in his autobiographical poem written after Basil's death he
165ee Basil Epp 100, 190 and 215. and May 'Einige Bemerkungen tiber das
Verhaltnis Gregors von Nyssa zu Basilios dem Grossen' in EPEKTASIS, 509-15.
685
 The Controversy Resolved
could still deplore his friend's ruthlessness in personal relations."
Basil did not refrain from personal canvass and intrigue to secure his
own election as bishop.'. Prestige could speak of Basil's 'usual
disregard of other people's views' ,'9 and Emmanuel Amand de
Mendieta likened the epistolary confrontation of the equally
imperious Damasus and Basil to a battle between two goats, forehead
to forehead and horns to homs?O
In addition to his Letters21 Basil's surviving work consists of a
Commentary on the Hexaemeron,22 his Adversus Eunomium Books 1-
III,23 his classic treatise De Spiritu Saneto (On the Holy Spirit),2'
several Homilies, a little work called De Fid! (On Faith),
commentaries on Isaiah and the Psalms which contain little relevant
to the subject of this work, and moral and ascetical treatises which are
equally remote from our theme,25 and finally a small but valuable
discourse called "po, <ou, Ntou" a piece of advice to young men
about how they should read pagan literature, a practice which Basil
by no means discourages?" The dates of his more important works
must be established as far as possible. The dates of his letters are of
course distributed throughout the whole of his career. 27 Most recent
authorities agree on dating the Adv. Eunomium to 364.2. Each homily
has to be dated separately, though it is difficult to determine how
many were delivered before he became bishop. De Fide probably
17De Vita Sua 460-3 (76). where he accuses B. of qn.).apxia Qove of power). and
476-85 (76) and Epp 48; see Van Dam 'Emperor, Bishop and Friends' 68-'72.
18As Fedwick reluctantly admits The Church and the Charisma of Leadership 48.
19St. Basil the Great and Apollinaris of Laodjeea, 2.
20'Basil de Cesaree et Damase de Rome' 135-6.
21Edited (with ET) in full by E. I. Deferrariin the Loeb series, and up to Ep 218 by
Y. Courtonne (with Fr T) (Bilde ser) much more satisfactorily.
"Edited by S. Giet (with Fr T). SC ser.
23PG 29:497--670. Books IV and V are now (with one exception to be mentioned
later) almost universally acknowledged to be by a later hand. A good modern
edition of this work is long overdue. I have consistently referred to this work as
Adversus Eunomium in distinction from Gregory of Nyssa's Contra Eunomium; it
would be helpful if others would do the same.
24Ed. B. Pruche (with Fr T) (SC serlo The second edition of 1968 is much the
better. It will henceforth be referred to as DSS.
2SThey are all to be found in PG 29-32.
26Ed. F. Boulenger (Bude ser), with Fr T.
27The editors do their best to date them, and Fedwick in Appendix A to his
Church and Charisma tries to date as many as possible.
28See also above, p. 618 (and n 83). Kopecek gives a careful analysis of this work.
History 362-87.
686
The Cappadocian Theologians
should be placed relatively early in Basil's episcopal career, and the
Commentary on the Hexaemeron late, perhaps even in the last year ofhis
life. The DSS was composed in part during 374, and in 375 finished
and sent to Amphilochius to whom it is dedicated. It seems wholly
likely that a considerable part of it represents the gist of the discussion
which took place between Basil and Eustathius in 374. 29 Much print
has been expended upon the question whether a small work in
homiletic form· to be found at the end of Book V of Adversus
Eunomium 30 and headed De Spiritu is from Basil's hand. It is written
in a noticeably' more elegant and flowing style than the rest of Book
V; the interesting point is that it is full of echoes of passages in
Plotinus' Enneads.31 There does not seem to me to be anything in the
wo~k positively precluding Basil's authorship. There is one passage in
whIch the author may have called the Holy Spirit 'God' (ge6,) but the
reading 'divine' (geio,) is possible too. The author speaks of the Spirit
'made like to ~od who sends him forth'32 which is perhaps not quite
Basillan. But ItS treatment of the Holy Spirit as uncreated and
endowed with every exalted epithet except homoousion and theos is
eminently reminiscent ofBasil. We may perhaps regard it tentatively
as an early work of his, a trial run for DSS.
Near the end of his life, when he was writing a commentary on the
openmg words of Genesis, Basil described God thus:
'Blessed nature, unstinting goodness, the object of love for all who
share reason, deeply-desired beauty, the origin of all existing things,
the fountain of life, intellectual light (voepov <pro,) unapproachable
WIsdom, he it was who "In the beginning made heaven and earth .. '.33
Father, Son and Holy Spirit are 'uncreated nature, sovereign in rank,
29 ~ su?gesrion origi~ally put forn:ard by Dorrie, and adopted with some
modlficatl~n by Pruche In hiS Introductt0I?- to the DSS and more cautiously still by
Dehnhard In Das Problem 65-6. The subject of the composition of DSS will be
discussed in a later chapter (22).
30PG 29:768-7J. .
31 Or rather from Plotinus as we know him in the Enneads, but whether it reached
the ~uthor of De Spiritu from Porphyry's edition of Plotin us, called the Enneads or
?Ot .IS a moot point. Rist in 'Basil's "Neo-Platonism"; its Background and Natu~e'
10hIS Platonism and its Christian Heritage, wishes to minimize Basil's debt to Plotinus'
denies the work to Basil (191-211) an~ ;wants to giv~ it to Gregory of Nyssa:
De~nhard, who has no qualms about BaSil s debt to Plotmus, attributes the work to
BaSIl (Das Problem 32-<16).
32De Spiritu 2 (772), tip tK7tf:J.11tOVn abto eetp 6J.10l0UJ.1SVOV.
"In Hexaemeron 1.2 (9) [29:96].
687
 The Controversy Resolved
constituted as goodness' (it <pUO"'KTj dya96t1]';). The Son enjoys
equality of nature with the Father and perfect unity with him,
'because he is sharer of his nature; not created by a fiat, but shining out
continuously from his ousia'.
The Holy Spirit is always associated with the Father and the Son,
'possessing everything himself co-substantially in his nature,
goodness, rightness, holiness, life'. 34
In reply to the argument of Eunomius that we are led inevitably to
the conciusioIithat God's ousia, being ingenerate, can have nothing to
do with generation or that which is generated, Basil replies shortly
and sharply that if that were so, then God is not a Father and the
Scriptures are false. But if we takeJn 14:19 and 12:45 seriously we can
be sure that:
'The character of the prototype is seen in the impression and the
knowledge of the archetype comes from the image. '35
God does reveal and communicate himself. He rejects the contention
of Eunomius that God's ingenerateness constitutes his ousia.
Ingenerateness in God is what Basil calls an epinoia, using it in the
sense in which Origen had employed it, meaning 'aspect'. There is no
more reason to regard ingenerateness as that which constitutes God as
God (expressing, as Eunomius said, his 'being what he is') than to
regard other aspects as constitutive, such as his creative activity, his
providence, his foreknowledge; in short
'I would myself say that God's ousia is ingenerate. but never that
ingenerateness is his ousia'. 36
Basil believes tliat he is teaching in the tradition of Gregory
Theodorus of Cappadocia when he says, of the Three Persons of the
Trinity' 'their nature is the same and their Godhead one'. 37 Each of
34HomiliesXV.2. 3 (29:465, 468, 469). 'Co-substantially' translates
O'l)vouO'tc.o~&vroc;;
it is a deliberate avoidance of the word homoousios or its cognates.
"Ad•. Eunom. l.I7 (SS2).
'·Ibid. 1.5 (517-21), 8 (528), II (537).
37~p 210.3. 4. Some heterodox Christians in Neocaesarea had alleged in a letter to
Anthlmus ofTyana that Gregory Theodorus had said in his Eahesis Pisteos that the
Father and the Son are two in epinoia but one in hypostasis. As this was rank
Sabellianism to Basil it caused him great embarrassment. He could only say that
Gregory had made this statement 'not while teaching officially (aOYf.la'tuc:ro~) ... but
while engaged in controversy' (6:YO>Vlc:rtl1ciO~). ibid. j. In fact it is unlikely that this
688
The Cappadocian Theologians
the Persons of the Trinity is uncreated and incomprehensible
(dKat<lA.1]ltto.;); but this does not apply when we come to analyse
what is peculiar to each and ask how the epinoia of each can be
distingnished:"
'From the Father is the Son through whom are all things, along with
whom the Spirit is always inseparably conceived (auV81tlVOeitUl) for it
is not possible to attain to a concept of the Son unless one is first
enlightened by the Spirit' .39
The Son makes known the Spirit through himself and with himself,
and his distinguishing characteristic is thus described:
'He shines as sole only-begotten (1'6vo<; I'0voy&v<ii<;i from the
ingenerate light'.
And it is the Father's characteristic 'to be Father and to exist as derived
from no cause'. But in all other respects the Persons (ltp60"colta) of the
Trinity are inseparably united and no object can intrude nor space
exist between them. 40 Basil. however, admits that there is a certain
order (taS'';) arising out of their possession of the same ousia; the
Spirit is third in order and even rank (dSicol'a).41
For the generation of the Son he allows the analogy of light being
produced from light, a very old model used first, as far as we know,
by Tertullian. The Father is 'ingenerate light', and the Son 'generate
light' .42 Earlier in the same work he had suggested the analogy of an
art (ttXV1]) being imparted from one mind to another. The giver does
not lose but the receiver gains. Yet even here the lapse of time in the
process of giving and receiving renders the analogy imperfect. 43 In
strong contrast to Eunomius, who has no difficulty in concluding that
everybody can very easily know virtually all about God, Basil insists
throughout his works that we cannot know God's essence (ousia). We
can learn from what he calls Ko'Vi] ~vvo,a (general principles or
formula was that of Gregory Theodorus; see Hubner 'Gregor von Nyssa als
Verfasser' 468.
"Ibid. )8.).
39
4.
4°4· Th~ r~ader must note that Basil's doctrine of the Holy Spirit wiU be treated in
more detaIl In the next chapter (22).
<lAd•. E"nom. 1.20 (557), ).1 (656).
_42Ibid. II.28 (637).: Eunomius had attacked this doctrine; the Greek is O:,,(EVVll'toV
cpOl<; and 'YEVVll'tOV cpOl<;, Cf. R. p, C. Hanson. Studies in Christian Antiquity cap. 16.
4JAdv, Eunom. II,r6 (605). .'
 The Controversy Resolved
universally accepted opinion, in this instance} that God exists, but we
cannot know what he is. We know God indeed by his effect on us
(and of course Basil allows that we know him through the Scriptures
and in religious experience). We know his activities (tvepyeiu,) and
his works (ltou'l"Utu), and hence we know his character or qualmes
(e.g. his goodness). But his ousia is only known to the Son and the
Spirit. The divine writers in the Bible only speak of his ousia in
metaphors and allegories, describing him as amber (Ezekiel) or fire
(Moses and Daniel), in images which taken literally are often
contradictory .. To say that he is ingenerate does not tell what he is, but
('if I may use an expression forcing the language') how he is, the
mode or modes of his existence. 44 And when Basil has to approach
that crux interpretum which sounds like a minute-bell through the
whole Arian Controversy, Proverbs 8:22 ('the Lord created me the
beginning of his ways'), he goes very cautiously. His arguments are
three: - I am saying that there are "three ultimate principles" (tpei, IipXlKIl,
(i) This is the only place in the Bible where the particular expression
occurs.
(ii) Proverbs is a book notoriously full of riddles and dark sayings.
(iii) Some interpreters say that the Hebrew would be better translated
'possessed me' (tKt1\"ut6 "e) than 'created me' (gKn"" "e)45
Basil's most distinguished contribution towards 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 an equivalent to ousia, to mean substance. 46
But usually he distinguishes their use in Trinitarian contexts with
care. He defmes hypostasis as 'that which presents and circumscribes
that which is general and uncircumscribed within any object by
means of the peculiarities which are manifested'.47It is necessary to
distinguish the hypostases within the Godhead. 48 But much more
often Basil uses hypostasis to mean 'Person of the Trinity' as
distinguished from 'substance' which is usually expressed as either
44[bid. l.12 (540). 14 (544-5) and 15 (545).
'S[bid. [l.20 (616-7). Cf. Simonetti, Studi 68-9.
46Adv. Eunoni. 1.20 (556) where he takes hyposttJsis'in Heb. 1:3 to mean ousia and
again in DSS XX[V.4 (608), DSS 16.38.136 (380), of the substance of all creatures.
47Ep 38.3. ~ to K01V6v te Kat aJrepiypamoy tv tcp ttVl 1tpa.YJ1un atU trov
exUPQ1V0JJ6VroV lC)u:o,w,trov 1tUplCJ'tcooa Kat 1ttplypacpoucru.
• 8DSS 5.7.80 (272).
The Cappadocian Theologians
ousia or 'nature' (physis) or 'substratum' ("ltoKel"evov}.49 The reason
why Basil in the doxology of the eucharist deliberately used the
formula 'Glory to the Father with ("eta + gen.) the Son and with the
Holy Spirit' as well as 'Glory to the Father through (lila) the Son in
(tv) the Holy Spirit' was, he explains, because
it established 'the peculiarity of the hypostases'. and also 'it preserves a
special witness of the eternal community (1Co1.Vrovia~) and endless
union' (cruva'PEia~).50
But he also explains in what sense he does not use the term hypostasis,
a little earlier in the same work:
'Observe, please, in the process of creating (higher powers) the
originating cause of all existent things, the Father; the creative (cause)
the Son; the teleological (cause) the Spirit: ... and let no one think that
61(0"t';"",, (hypostases», nor that the Son's activiry is imperfect. For
there is one ultimate principle (lipx1\) of all existent things, creating
through the Son and perfecting in the Spirit'.51
The 'three ultimate principles' form the title of one of the treatises of
Plotinus (Enneads V.I), and it is impossible to be blind to the fact that
Basil is here directly quoting the Neo-Platonic philosopher, but of
course he does so only to differ from him. He also has in mind the
Arian claim that the Son compared with the Father is imperfect. It is
not surprising that Basil fmds himself embarrassed when he comes to
remarking on the anathema of N which forbade anyone to say that
the Son is of a different hypostasis or ousia than the Father,52 and it is to
his credit that he perceives that this identification of the two is
embarrassing. His explanation is unconvincing, but at least he
realized that explanation was necessary here. 53 He also has to explain
that he does not intend to say (as certain Arians allege) that the Son is
'homoousios in respect of his hypostasis' (as of course was the logical
conclusion to be drawn from- N). He may have given this false
49E.g. Hom. XVI.4 (480) 6n:OKttJreVOV. In Ep 159.1 Basil directly says that ousia
and physis are synonyms. Cf. Pruche Inttod. to DSS 163 n 5. And for much useful
information and comment on B's use of Trinitarian vocabulary see ibid. 177-196.
50DSS 25.59.177 (460): 'peculiarity' translates t&t6tllta.
"Ibid. 16·38.136 (376, 378).
52S eeabove, pp. 163. 167-8 .
5JEp I25.I.
 The Controversy Resolved
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
Here we have encountered an important and controverted point in
Basil'stheology. This is not .an isolated instance of his comparing the
relation of ,substance' to 'Persons' in the Trinity with the relation of
the general to the particular. We have seen it entailed in his defmition
of hypostasis quoted above (p.690). Elsewhere he can compare the
relation of ousia to hypostasis to that of 'living being' (~roov) to a
particular man (tOV aEiva /iv9pcoltov) and apply this distinction
directly to the three Persons of the Trinity.5. This apparently
'generic' treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity, suggesting that the
three are each particular examples of a 'generic' Godhead, will come
up for consideration later. 57
Basil can on occasion use the word prosopon as an alternative to
hypostasis:
'For the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son, since as the
former is so is the latter and as the latter is so is the former; and in this
(consists) the unity (to fv). According therefore to the peculiarity of
the Persons (prosopOn), there is one here and one there; but according
to the community (toIC0Iv6v) of the nature, they both are One' (fV).58
But he can readily use prosopon in the traditional exegetical sense of
'character' or 'part' (almost as in a play) which God or Christ or
others were supposed to have assumed and in that part to have spoken
in various places in the Bible. 59 This weakened or looser sense of the
noun probably led Basil to use it less often than he might have done in
spite of the fact that as a substitute for hypostasis it had the advantage
of never having been open to confusion with ousia. Basil can also use
instead of hypostasis the expression 6ltap~le; ('subsistence') or tpOltOe;
Olt6.p~Ecoe; ('mode of subsistence') which was quite clear and much
used by his successors.· o We Can therefore see without difficulty that
54lbid. 214.3.
55Ibid. 4.
56Ibid. 236.6. Cf. Ad", Eunom. II.4 (577) which comes dose to the same concept
but does not quite reach it.
"See below, pp.696-9, 734-'7·
"DSS 18.45 (149) [406).
"E.g. Hom. in Hexaemeron lX.6 (204-5) [514-(8).
··E.g. Adv. Eun. 2.17 (608); Ep 235-2; DSS 18.46 (408) [(52).
692
The Cappadocian Theologians
in the important area of vocabulary Basil's fairly consistent usage
dissipated much confusion and pointed the way for understanding
and consensus in the future as Athanasius had never quite succeeded
in doing.
Basil resiles from the idea of speaking as Justin Martyr, Origen and
Eusebius of Caesarea had spoken, of 'a second God' (aeUtEpOe; 9EOe;),
far less a third! God, he says, cannot be numbered; we cannot treat the
distinct hypostases as first, second and third. There are not three
gods.· 1 A little later in the same work he declares that we must not
imitate the heretics in numbering God, but we can speak of an order
among the Persons, first, second and third, without thereby
depreciating or subordinating any.·2 He expresses the ·same thought
differently in one of his Homilies, where he is perhaps trying to teach
popular theology to a relatively unsophisticated audience: he is not,
he says
'giving two names to one thing indicating the individual aspect (!aiav
evvotav) by the title of each ... even if they are two in number yet
they are not disjoined in nature; and anyone who says "two" does not
introduce separation'. And he goes on to say again that there are not
three gods but two prosopa and one phySis (nature). and in fact one
ousia for both (Father and Son) .• 3
But he insists at the same time that the Father is the sole origin (arche)
or source (pege) or root (pi~a)64
Basil emerged from a background, not of the strongly pro-Nicene
theology of Athanasius, but of the school of Basil of Ancyra and
beyond him, as we have seen, of Gregory Theodorus and of Origen.
It is not therefore surprising to find that he does not treat homoousios as
an indispensable watchword. He does not make it a prominent part
of his defence of N against Eunomius. Even as late as in the DSS he
can say of the Son:
'If he remains unalterable in respect of ousia, he will also remain
unchangeable in respect of power'. 65 without applying homoousios, as
61DSS 18·44. 4S (148, 149) [402--6]; part of this has already been quoted; see
above n 58.
62lbid. 18.47 (153) [414]. According to Pruche, in [DC, the reference to 'heretics' is
a covert hit at Plotinus. But it could simply signify pagan polytheism.
63 Hom. XXIV.3 (604, 605).
"DSS 16.38 (136) [378) (arehe) 3S quoted above, p.691, Hom. XXlV.4 [60S)
(areloe) [609) (rhiza and pege).
65DSS 8.19 (104) [J(6).
 The Controversy Resolved
the situation might be thought to call for. In one of his letters he says
that in his own view 'like in respect of ousia' (OJ.lotO~ Kat' ooaiav the
I itself. '70
slogan of the party of Basil of Ancyra) was an acceptable formula,
provided that the word 'unalterably' (ci"apa~M"tro<;) was added to it,
for then it would be equivalent to homoousios 'according to the proper
interpretation of homoousios·. but that if 'unalterably' is omitted. then
the phrase becomes suspect and susceptible of an unorthodox
interpretation. Basil himself prefers homoousios. 66 Basil has moved
away from but has not completely repudiated his origins. What he
means by 'a proper interpretation of homoousios' is explained when in
another letter he says that it is arrogant to refuse to assent to the
decision of the fathers (i.e. to N) and object to homoousion, but that it is
not blameworthy to hesitate over a term which has been 'attacked by
other (orthodox) people. Here he is referring to the Council of
Antioch of 268, and incidentally betraying the fact that that Council
did repudiate the word homoousios. 67 Those who met at Antioch. says
Basil,
'attacked the word as not satisfactory, for they said that the word
homoousios produced an impression of a (generic) substance (ousja) and
things deriving from it, so that substance once divided supplied the
epithet "consubstantial" for the parrs into which it had been divided'.
But this cannot apply to God, for no substance can be perceived prior
to the Father and the Son nor underlying them. 6 '
Basil goes on to defend the application ofhomoousios to the Son (as we
shall see, he never applies this term to the Holy Spirit):
'things which are on the same level (cio&A.<pa) with each other are not
called consubstantial (6~006(),la) as some people have thought, but
when the cause and that which has its subsistence (G"ap~lV) from the
cause are by origin of the same nature they are called
consubstantial. '69
And he goes on to introduce another argument in favour of
homoousios:
'this expression (homoousios) also corrects the fault of Sabellius for it
excludes identity of Person (hypostasis) and introduces the concept of
66Ep 9.3. This is the letter in which B. criticizes the theology of Dionysius of
Alexandria. See above, PP.77-8, 191-3.
67S ee above, PP.70-'12.
68Ep 52.1.
69 2 .
The Cappadocian Theologians
the Persons (prosopon) intact, for nothing is consubstantial with
It will be perceived that Basil has grasped and reproduced the
'derivative' sense which Athanasius tended to attach to the word
homoousios as applied to the Son.71
Considerable light is thrown on Basil's ideas about the relation of
the ousia of the Son to that of the Father if we glance for a moment
upon his correspondence with Apollinaris. 72 This consists of Letters
361 and 363 (Basil to Apollinaris), 362 and 364 (Apollinaris to Basil).
Doubt has in the past been cast upon the authenticity of this exchange
ofletters, pardy because it was thought hurtful of Basil's reputation
that he should have corresponded in a friendly manner with and even
asked for advice on theological matters from someone who later was
branded as a heretic. But the work of G. L. Prestige and of H. de
Riedmatten has made-it almost impossible to regard these letters as a
forgery, so exactly do they fit the historical situation between 360 and
7°3·
71See above, pp. 441, 443, 648.
72ft is of course available in the Epp edited by Deferrari, but is (as de Riedmatten
observed) badly edited there, and is better read as edited by de Riedmatten in the
article referred to below. Essential reading on the subject is G. L. Prestige St. Basil the
Great and Apollinaris of Laodicea (ed. H. Chadwick), H. de Riedmatten 'La
Correspondance entre Basile de Cesan~e et Apollinaire de Laodicee', and K.
Woolcombe's review of Prestige's work in the Journal of Theological Studies (see
bibliography). When Eustathius finally broke with Basil in 375 he reproached him
with his previous association with ApoUinaris and in a document called 'The Letter
to Aziza' circulated a statement purporting to come from Apollinaris of what
Eustathius regarded as a Sabellian character. He never directly said that this
document was composed or accepted by Basil. He never went further than alleging,
in the manner ofall witch-hunters, guilt by association. The allegedly incriminating
document. however, is extant; Prestige, who edited it in his posthumous work,
called it 'The Eustachian document'. It is not Sabellian, though at points it comes
fairly close to Sabellianism, and it remarkably resembles the doctrine conveyed in
A's second letter to Basil (Ep 364). It is also very like a document quoted by Basil in
his Ep 129 and by him attributed to Eustathius who was apparently circulating it as
app~oved by Apollinaris, Basil's friend. The only serious difficulty in accepting this
correspondence as genuine is that Basil in defending himself against Eustathius'
smear campaign admitted (though reluctantly and deviously) that he had
corresponded with A, but said that this had taken place twenty years before (i.e.
before 375) and when they were both laymen. The extant correspondence could not
possibly have been as early as that. We may conjecture that Basil is referring to an
earlier lost exchange of letters (which still if the extant correspondence is genuine
makes out B. to be at the very least disingenuous) or that his strong desire to disavow
the connection caused his memory to fail him badly, or, more simply, that he was
misrepresenting the true state of affairs.
 The Controversy Resolved
364. The significance of the acceptance of the authenticity of these
documents lies in the fact that they show us that on two occaSIOns
(probably early in 360 and late in 363) Basil consulted Apollinaris
about the wisdom of accepting the homoousios as applIed to the Son,
and received from him two letters (probably soon after the respective
dates of Basil's two letters) firmly advocating an acceptance of
homoousios in a sense which clearly is very little different from that of
Athanasius, certainly not at all in a sense which would fit well with
the concept of 'like according to ousia' (OI'OlO, Kat:ou"iav) nor
homoiousios. IUs a very likely conclusion to draw that It was 10 fact
Apollinaris who effected Basil's transition from being a follower of
Basil of Ancyra, who taught 'like in respect of ousia' and repudiated
homoousios, to being a whole-hearted champion ofN and acceptmg
homoousios.
But in what sense did Basil accept homoousios? Harnack in his
History of Dogma argued that Basil and all the Cappadocians
interpreted homoousios only in a 'generic' sense, that is to say that It
was a disguised form ofHomoiousianism, that unity of substance was
turned into equality of substance. Ousia, he said, came to mean
something half-way between 'Person' and 'attribute'. This was not
the sort of unity in the Godhead which Athanasius had envisaged and
though he tolerated it he never completely accepted it, and the West
was for long suspicious ofit. Harnack defines Basil's solution as 'one
divine substance in three subjects'. The Father becomes the source
(pege), ultimate principle (arehe) and cause of the Godhead, so that the
unity rests in him and not in the consubstantiality of the Three. 73
In his first letter to Apollinaris (361) Basil, after dismissing the usual
hostile Arian interpretations of homoousios as not accepted by him,
gives his own interpretation of it:
'We have assumed that whatever ousia is hypothetically taken to be
the Father's, that certainly must also be taken to be the Son's.
Therefore if anyone were to say that the Father's ousia is intellectual
light, eternal, ingenerate, he will say that the ousia of the Only-
begotten is intellectual light. eternal, generate. 74 It seems to me that
for such a concept the expression 'unalterably like' (.htapa1.AclKtOl,
61'0100) fits better than homoousion. For light which has nO difference
7JHistory of Dogma IV.8o--89. quotation from 85-6·
74Reading.ytVVllt6v from de Riedmatten's text (op. cit. 205) for Deferrari's
&'y6vVlltOV.
The Cappadocian Theologians
in being greater or less is not identical (because each remains within
the peculiar limits (1tEplypaqni) of its ousia), but could, I think, rightly
be described as "like unalterably-according to ousia".'75
Manifestly at this stage Basil did not think that the Father and the Son
had the same ousia. Later, when he had accepted homoousios as a
proper term to apply to the Son, he still argued that it was preferable
because it actually excluded identity of hypostases.'· This, with the
instances which we have already seen in which Basil compared the
relation of hypostasis to ousia in the Godhead to tha~ of particular to
general, or of a man to 'living beings', forms the strongest argument
for Harnack's hypothesis, as far as Basil is concerned."
Counter-arguments have been advanced by severai scholars, the
most elaborate of 'which have perhaps been those of Bethune-
Baker'· and Ritter.'· Bethune-Baker's account of the antecedents of
the homoousion of N was not altogether satisfactory,·o but he made
some good points in his monograph, the most important of which is
that Basil and the other Cappadocians used 'nature' (Physis) to mean
'sum of characteristics or attributes', which could be shared in a
'generic' sense, but that ousia for them meant real substantive being,
which could not be repeated .• I But as Basil quite often uses physis asa
75We have already seen Basil comparing this term to homoousios in his Ep 9,
above, pp.693-4. Bethune-Baker translated what I (following Deferrari) have
rendered as 'hypothetically' (lCa9' \m69tO'lv) as 'fundamentally' (The Meaning oj
Homoousios 41).
76See above, pp.694-5.
77The appeal to Tertullian's una substantia Ires personae to support this argument is
far-fetched. There is no evidence that any of the Cappadocians had read TertuUian
nor anyone reproducing his thought. The chief supporters ofHamack's theory are
Loofs and Gwatkin. according to Bethune-Baker (The Meaning oj Homoousios 4),
but Kopecek (History 381) accepts it. Ritter (Das Konzil27o-2) traces it to Zahn's
book on Marcellus of Ancyra. The other chief argument upon which the favourers
of this theory relied was that thetK'tii~ouO'ia~ ofN was removed in C, presumably
to accommodate this 'generic' view. But there are other explanations of this
omission, and anyway all the evidence seems to show that C was regarded at the
time of its composition not as a cancellation of N but a supplement to it. All pro-
Nicenes would consequently regard themselves as committed to the expression tK
tij<; ooO'i~, whether C mentioned it or not.
78Tlle Meaning oj Homoousios.
79Das Konzil 27<>-93. See also F. Lebon 'Le sort du "consubstantiel" Niceen',
who makes it dear that in most of his writings B. envisaged only one ousia in the
Godhead, but who does not refer to the Apollinarian correspondence.
80S ee above, pp. 190-202 .
. SlOp. cit. 49-57.
 The Controversy Resolved
synonym for ousia (and Bethune-Baker admits this) his argument is
weakened. One of Ritter's most important points is that the formula
adopted by Basil 'one ousia, three hypostases' was not derived from
the school ofBasil of Ancyra. It was not a formula designed to make a
'Homoiousian' account of the Trinity acceptable to Athanasian pro-
Nicenes, because the Homoiousians did not coin it nor use it. Its
nearest ancestor (but even ,then not a direct one) is the Tomus ad
Antiachenas. In his twenty-fourth Hamily, which is an example of his
attempting to explain difficult theological points to a popular
audience, Bas\! says quite explicitly that though there are different
Persons (prasapa) there is only one ausia for both Father and Son (and
one physis, for that matter).82 And in the DSS he disruisses the idea
that the distinction between the Godhead and the Persons is that
between an abstract essence, such as humanity, and its concrete
manifestations, such as man, so that the Holy Spirit could be regarded
as a sub-class within the Godhead. 83 Pruche believes that Basil here
explicitly rejected the idea of God's ausia as Aristotle's second ausia,
i.e. a general existent, capable of being divided into concrete subjects,
and by ausia meant 'I'essence concrete de Dieu, telle qu'elle existe et
telle qU'elle ne souffre pas aucune disparite entre Ie Pere et Ie Fils'.
That ausia had so many meanings troubled Basil, and this is why he so
often used physis instead of ausia. 84
Two final points should be considered in this difficult question.
Basil reproduced the 'derivative' meauing which Athanasius had
attached to hamaausias, and Basil showed himself reluctant to apply
hamaausias to the Holy Spirit. This reluctance may not have been a
purely diplomatic one. Hamaausias was a' word which applied
particularly to the relation of the Son to the Father (though, as we
shall see, Athanasius could apply it occasionally to the Spirit). It is a
priori unlikely that holding these views Basil would have been ready
to indulge in a wholly 'generic' view of the Trinity. Harnack cannot
be said to have proved his far-reaching theory. But Bethune-Baker
cannot be said to have disproved it either. Basil did not consistently
follow out the view which he sketched in Ep 261 nor his unfortunate
analogy of general and particular for the relation of the hypastases to
"Hom. XXIV.3 (605).
8J DSS 17 and especially 41-43 (394-8).
84Ibid. Introd. 181-2, quotation lSI. Lebon also believes that the Cappadocians
gave a Platonic and not an Aristotelian sense to ousia. For a further discussion of the
meaning of ousia in Basil, see below Pp.734--'7.
J
The Cappadacian Theolagians
the ausia. But neither did he reach the idea of God attributed to him
by Prestige:
'Regarded externally as possessing distinctive features and mutual
relations, God is three objects. Regarded internally as expressing a
single unique reality, God is one object'."
We need not be surprised ifhe was not entirely consistent. He was in a
sense a pioneer in theology. Though he came from what might be
called an 'Homoiousian' background, he had never been an Arian;86
his intellectual roots lay in Gregory Theodorus and in a modified
version ofOrigen's theology. Faced with the task of coping with the
doctrine ofEunomius at a period when few could effectively answer
him, and later with the unexpected phenomenon of a party which
apparently renounced Arianism but refused to take the logical step of
extending divinity from the Son to the Holy Spirit, Basil produced a
doctrine of God as a single ausia with three distinct sets of
recognizable proprieties or peculiarities (yvOlp,,,,"cai lIh6'TJ'"<; (Adv.
Eunam. Ii.28 (637)), each set forming an authentically existing
hypastasis, the whole bound together inseparably in a common ausia
or nature, no hypastasis being subordinate to or less than the others,
but the Second and Third deriving from the First as their source or
ultimate principle. It was well designed to bring about theological
consensus. It was open to modification and refmement by the other
two of the Cappodocian trio. In Basil's lifetime no such consensus
appeared, but shortly after his untimely death the fruits of his work
were gathered.
3. Gregory of Nazianzus
Our sources for the life of Gregory of Nazianzus are his own works,
especially his long autobiographical poem known as De Vita Sua,87
85Basil ofCaesarea and Apollinaris ofLaodicea 54 n 4 to the ET. For Basil's hesitation
in applying Izomoousios to the Spirit, cr. W. Moner, 'Macedonius, Macedonianer'
lIS·
86He reminds Eustathius reproachfully of this Ep 223.4.5 (828-9).
87Edited, with German tr., by C.Jungck (1974), but also to be found in PG 37.
The lines are the same in Migne and Jungck. I give the page ofJungck's edition in
round brackets. Most ofGregory's works, and some pseudo--Gregoriana are to be
found in PG 35-38. '
 The Controversy Resolved
his Orations,.· and his Letters,·9 the letters of Basil his friend, the
ecclesiastical historians, and Jerome in his De Viris IlIustribus.Jerome
had been a pupil or hearer of Gregory in Constantinople from 379 to
380 till the end of Gregory's stay in that city. Though he intensely
disliked Meletius, the friend and ally of Basil and to a lesser degree of
Gregory, he warmly approved of Gregory and described him as 'my
teacher, and one from whom I learnt as he expounded Scripture'."o
Philostorgius, whose theological views differed entirely from
Gregory's, described him and Basil as able champions of the
homoousion, widely learned men, and outstandingly good writers."'
Rufinus (whose translation into Latin of some of Gregory's Orations
survives) described Basil and Gregory thus: . education in Cappadocian Caesarea; he started the third stage of his
'Both on leaving the university were in demand for the profession of
ThetoT. And Basil spent his time splendidly fulfilling this task, but
Gregory his in more splendidly spurning it'. 92
In fact Gregory's Orations and his Letters and his poetry constitute all
that has come down to us of his works. If he wrote any
commentaries, they have not survived. 93 His Orations are distributed
in date between at latest 361 (probable date of his priesting) and 381
S8A,J. Mason edited the 'Five Theological Orations' (27-31 in Migne) in 1899;).
Bernardi edited nos. 1-3 and 4-5 between 1978.and 1953;J. Massay nos. 20-26 in
1980/81 and P. Gallay nos. 27-31 in 1978; these last three editions published in the
SC series.
89Edited by P. GaUay in 1964 (Bude ser).
90De Vir. Ill. CXVIJ (praeceptor meus et quo Scrip/uras explorante didici) see also
CXXVIII. He caned Meletius 'the spawn of the Arians' (proles Arianorum, Ep. 15.2,
3). Paulinus had priested Jerome.
91 HE VIII. II and IIa.
92HE XI.9 ambo de auditoriis digress; ad profitendam rhetoricam rogabantur, quod opus
magnifice quidem implebat Basilius, Gregorius vero magnificentius contemnebat. This is a
fine epigram, but not altogether accurate. Gregory had a deservedly wider
reputation as an orator than Basil, and practised the art more deliberately.
93The determination of the manuscripts of Gregory's work and of the
authenticity of the works ascribed to him constitutes so difficult a task that no major
modenl series has yet produced an his work. He has not been edited for GCS.
bformation about manuscripts, editions and works can be had in F. Lefherz Studien
zur Gregor von Nazianz (which curiously does not appear in Mossay's article in
TRE), in F. TrisogJio's Grigorio v6n Nazianzo (cap VII 'Attribuzioni e Autentica'),
and in the article 'Gregor von Nazianz' by J. Mossay in TRE Bd 14, I64-'7j. The
complicated state of MSS and works does not mean that it is impossible to
reconstruct either Gregory's life or his work. It is the marginal works only which
are affected; aU agree in recognizing as authentic the main bulk of the literature
attributed to him.
700
The Cappadocian Theologians
(when he left the capital city for ever). His Letters were written at all
periods of his career, perhaps a third of them after 381. His poetry
dates mainly from his later life. The important De Vita Sua was
written in 382.
Gregory was born in the year 329 or 330 at Arianzus, an estate
belonging to his father, who was at the time bishop of Nazianzus, 94
and who was also called Gregory. His mother's name was Nonna.
His younger brother was Caesarius, a man of brilliant promise and
ability, particularly in medicine, whose promising career in the
imperial civil. service was cut short by an early death. Gregory
received his elementary education in Nazianzlls, his secondary
education by studying oratory under the rhetor Thespasius in
Palestinian Caesarea (when Akakius was bishop and Euzoius one of
his fellow-pupils), and then spent a short time in Alexandria, and next
(c. 350) went to Athens where he spent nearly ten years studying
mainly rhetoric but also some philosophy under the pagan Himerius
and the Christian Prohaeresius (Socrates HE IV.26). Here he met
Basil, if he had not met him already, and became his close friend.
Whether he underwent any Neo-Platonic influences in Athen.s is
much debated. The question will be discussed later. 95 When Basil left
to begin his monastic regime about 356, Gregory did not accompany
him, but in 358 or 359 he returned to Cappadocia with Caesarius. He
did a little teaching of rhetoric (for which he was admirably
qualified) in Nazianzus, but, as in the case of Basil, his thoughts soon
turned to a more spiritual vocation. He was baptised, and between
359 and 362 he made some visits to Basil's monastic establishment at
Annesi, but his attempts to join his friend in the ascetic life never
lasted long. He found the life too strenuous and rigorous. In 361 his
94Scholars in the past have been painfully anxious to place Gregory's birth earlier
than this to avoid the (to them) embarrassing necessity of admitting that Gregory
senior as a bishop was not only married but exercised his conjugal rights while a
bishop: Benoit argues phrenetically (16 n 1 and 765-'71) for an early date. Gwatkin
(Ae 153) opts for 325; Mossay (164-5) is curiously attracted by Suidas' date of 300
(which entails concluding that G. did all his best work at the age of about 8o!), but
finaIJy decides for 329/30. Rosemary Ruether's Gregory of Nazianzus (1969) is the
best recent account of G. 's career. A. Benoit Saint Gregoire de Nazianze (1876, repr.
1973) is fulsome, one-sided and uncritical, but has the merit offollowing G.'s career
almost from year to year. J. Mossay art. 'Gregor von Nazianz' in TRE Bd. 14,
164-'73, is succinct and useful. See also Trisoglio Grigorio de Nazianzo 7-10
(Biografia).
9SSee below, pp.867-8.
701
 The Controversy Resolved
father ordained him presbyter suddenly, without prep~tation, and
rather against his will. He would have preferred a life of qUiet
contemplation and study to that of active ministry. 'I was hurt by this
arbitrary act', he says.9. In the year 371 (or 370, accordmg to how we
date Basil's career) he was involved in the great campaign to have
Basil elected bishop of Caesarea. Basil, he says, enticed himto come
to Caesarea on the pretext that he was ill and near death, but m fact all
he wanted was Gregory's support m . th e campaign.
. 97 G regory soon
returned home, disgruntled; though he wrote letters to. vanous
people in suppprt of Basil, he refused to be pres.ent at the election itself
and it was not till the end of the year that the nft between friends was
healed.
In 372 Basil by exerting great moral pressure persuaded Gregory,
against his will and judgment, to allow himself to be c?nsecrated
bishop of Sasima. The ceremony was performed m Nazlanzus and
thereafter Gregory never visited Sasima. The town was n~ doubt as
unattractive as Gregory painted it, but it occupied a strategic position
between the old province of Cappa do cia and the new, commanding
a pass through the mountains which mule-trains, tax-collectors and
other officials had to thread, and it was liable to be raided from the
mountains too. Gregory refused to be dragged into the dispute
between Basil and Anthimus. He rejected overtureS from Anthlmus
and tried to mediate between him and Basil. Finally in characteristic
fashion he ran away to some eremetical retreat in mountain country
and was only with difficulty persuaded (probably in the year 373) to
return home in order to assist his aged father With hiS episcopal
duties.98 In 374 Gregory senior died and his death was followed
shortly by that of his wife Nonna. Gregory now felt h!mselffree.of
episcopal obligations. He tried to persuade the authontles to appomt
another bishop of Nazianzus. They failed to do so, and the people of
Nazianzus pressed him to stay as their bishop. But he refused, and left
the place altogether for the monastery of St. Thecla in Seleucia in
96De Vita Sua line 345 (70) fji.:YT]O'Q"tij wpavvllh. He places his priesting in the
reign of a persecutor (De V.S. 338-50 (70) Ep 8); this is more likely to indicate
Valens than Julian.
97Gregory Ep 40. . .
98A little before this series of incidents Basil and Gregory had together VISIted
Sasima and had there met resistance from the armed retainers of Anthimus and had
been involved in a scuffle: Basil Ep 47; Gregory De V.S. 447-501 (76, 78). Nazianzus
itself was in the new province. Cappadocia Secunda.
702
The Cappodocian Theologians
Cilicia, and there remained for four years (374-S).99
Gregory's career varied between a readiness to undertake onerous
public office and a nervous refusal of it. One might almost describe
him in the words which Winston Churchill applied to T. E.
Lawrence as 'backing into the limelight'. Early in 379, by which time
the reign of Valens was over and prospects were much brighter for
the pro-Nicenes, he responded to a call to come to Constantinople
and preach the pro-Nicene faith in a private house (the Arians having
possession of all the churches in that city) which was later made into a
little church and called the Anastasia (De V.S. 583-606 (82». Here he
developed and expanded his full oratorial powers on behalf of the
cause which he championed. Here he delivered the -famous Five
Theological Orations. He had several vicissitudes. At one point he
was attacked by a furious hostile mob. loo -For a period he was taken in
by a remarkable ecclesiastical confidence man called Maximus, a
plausible fraud who first gained Gregory's warm friendship and
finally, backed by the agents of the eternally intriguing Peter of
Alexandria, attempted to have himself consecrated bishop of
Constantinople in competition with Gregory.IOI The eloquence of
one of the great masters of rhetoric of the age and the lucid and
cogent arguments which he advanced won for Gregory not only a
great reputation but also a continually increasing number of
adherents to the Nicene Creed.
Meanwhile events affecting the government of the Roman
Empire had moved fast. 102 Theodosius, on acceding to the imperial
throne of the East, has soon declared himseIfunequivocaJly in favour
of the pro-Nicene cause. Meletius had returned to Antioch and had
been recognized by the great majority of both former Homoiousians
99De Vita Sua 518-44 (78-80); 545-{;0 (80).
'''Epp 77 and 28; De V.S. 1053-'73 (104. 106).
10IDe V.S. 745-1055 (90--104); Orat. XXV (a fulsome eulogy of Maxirnus);
XXVI (a searing denuQ.ciation orhim). Maximus first tried to win Theodosius to his
support in Thessalonica. but in vain. He then returned to his puppet-master in
Alexandria, but when Peter saw that Maximus' credentials and claims would not be
generally accepted he dropped him. He next tried Damasus in Rome, but Damasus
was too wary to be taken in by him. Ambrose, however, for some considerable time
regarded him as the Catholic bishop of Constantinople. Maximus ended in
discredited obscurity in Italy, an ecclesiastical Perkin Warbeck. See Ritter Konzil
von Constantinople SO-52; Benoit op. cit. 477-8.
I02For a more detailed account of the results of the accession of Theodosius and
the course of the Council of Constantinople of 38 It see cap. 23.
70 3
 The Controversy Resolved
and original pro-Nicenes as the legitimate bishop of that see and had
moved into the official residence of the bishop. Soon afterwards
Theodosius deprived the Ariaos· of every place of worship in the
city,'03 and summoned a .council to the capital city, which was
primarily to include the Eastern churches, without the Egyptians, but
was later to comprise the bishop of Alexandria (now Timothy, Peter
having died), his suffragans, and the bishop of Thessalonica
(Acholius), who regarded himself as the representative of the bishop
of Rome. One of the first acts of the council was to denounce
Maximus and. declare Gregory Catholic bishop of Constantinople.
The fact that he had been de iure bishop of Sasima and de Jacto bishop
of Nazianz us was ignored. After all, the first president of the council,
Meletius, had a varied history of translations from see to see (Beroea,
Sebaste, Antioch) behind him. The subject of what precisely was the
order of events at the council will be considered later. Enough to say
that when Meletius died suddenly Gregory, bishop of the city where
the council was taking place, became president of the council; that he
disagreed strongly with the decision of the bishops present to choose
Flavian, a faithful pro-Nicene layman and later presbyter of the
continuing Eustathian or Paulinian group, as bishop of Antioch, and
not Paulinus, and that when, at Theodosius' invitation, the Egyptian
bishops and Acholius of Thessalonica arrived they at once began
questioning everything that the council had already done and
impugning the right of Gregory to be bishop of Constantinople on
the grounds that his appointment broke canon 15 of the Council of
Nicaea against bishops moving from one see to another. Finally
Gregory became so much exasperated with the difficulty of
controlling the council and the personal opposition which he was
encountering at it that he persuaded the Emperor to agree to his
resigning the see of the capital city, delivered a tremendous
valedictory oration in the church of the Apostles, and in the summer
of 381 retired to Nazianzus, never again to return to
l03Gregory gives a vivid description, De V.S. 1074-1112 (106,108). ofa great
crowd attending his enthroning on a late summer evening. Theodosius cannot have
been present because he did not enter Constantinople till November 380, and by the
late summer of 38 I Gregory had left the capital for good. In his will (pG 37:289-96),
which gives every sign of being authentic and which he made on May 31st 381, he
twice describes himself as 'bishop of the Catholic Church in the city of
~onstantinople·. He had now ceased to regard himself as an unofficial, stop-gap
bIShop.
The Cappadocian Theologians
Constantinople. 100 His resignation was accepted by the council with
an unseemly promptness, as he complains. 105 Gregory reckoned that
he had aroused dislike because of his uncompromising refusal to play
the part of a wordly, rich prelate, rejoicing in the pomp and
circumstance attached to his see and happy to engage in ecclesiastical
intrigue. There may well be some truth in this, but it is also likely that
the fathers of the council found him a most unsuitable chairman who
lacked any diplomatic skill, differed bitterly from the majority on
some lmportant pOlOts, and was rather a liability than an asset. He had
left the city a\ the end of June.
He spent the rest of his life in or near Nazianzus. The see of
N azianzus had ~ot been filled, and for a year he acted· as its bishop.
Durmg that perIOd, while he was away attending a spa for his health,
a group of Apollinarians occupied his· church and consecrated a
bishop for the see. Gregory did not hesitate to call upon the secular
authodty to use soldiers in order to eject them. 100 But after a year of
this kmd of work he declared that it was too much for his health and
nerves, and insisted upon retiring (383). On this occasion he
persuaded the bishop ofTyana, his metropolitan, to take steps to fill
the see and his cousin Eulalius, not the bishop of Doara but one who
was already a chorepiscopus under the bishop of Nazianzus succeeded
hi~ ..'07 He spent the rest of his life in retirement, mainly;t Arianzus,
~nung poems and letters, acting as spiritual counsellor and assisting
hlsfnends and relations in various ways. He died in either 389 or 390 .
Gregor? of Nazianzus was a man whose personality was complex
and volaule. He behaved for part of his career like one conscious of
great powers and of a great vocation, one who was a fitting
compamon of the other two great Cappadocians. But he had an
extraordinary incapacity to face crises when they occurred in his
career, as they occur in all careers. During the crisis caused by the
audacIOus attempt of Maximu, to supplant him as bishop of
104Socrates HE V.); Sozomenus HE VII. 7; Theodoret HE V. 7; Gregory De V.S.
1546--1855 (128-44); Orat. XLII.
l05De V.S. O).1(l)t; 160' 010« 1t'AEiov ii KaAOOt; txei lilpvro t£'tillllJ.1' £1J1C6lro O1}Valv60'£1
1868--9 (144). . ,
106G
regory EPP 13 1- 1)2, 135. 136, 138, 139; also 152, 153. 182. It is in Ep 125 that
he ~sks.the prefect Olympius for aid against the Apol1inarians; c£ Epp 202. Earlier,
whJle In Constantinople, he had asked the government to outlaw Arianism.
Tolerance, w,as excellent when the pro-Nicenes were not in power, but only then.
See May DIe Grosser Kappadokier' 332.
107Epp 157 and 182.
705
 The Controversy Resolved
Constantinople, Gregory tells us that at first he thought of flight. lOS
He was iII (it is wholly likely that the illness was induced by nervous
tension). But his friends persuaded him that it was enough to retire to
a place near the city and return after a few days. But on almost every
other critical occasion he ran away. When he found that Basil
expected him to canvass vigorously for his election as bishop of
Caesarea; when his aged father had to face a schism in his see of those
who disapproved of his views as being too Homoiousian, his reaction
was to run away. 100 When he had been consecrated bishop of
Sasima; when. the people of Nazianzus wanted him to be bishop of
their town on his father's death; and finally when he was faced with
the double demand of acting both as bishop of Constantinople and
president olthe council meeting in that city, he took refuge in flight.
Those who were anxious to see an effective and distinguished bishop
of the capital city (which his successor in that office certainly was not)
might well have flung at him the taunt which Dante flung at Pope
Celestine V:
'che feee per viltade il gran rifiuto·.
In short as a defender of a great theological cause he suffered from the
defect of not being completely reliable. Even though he gave himself
the advantage which was very rare in the ancient world of leaving
behind him an autobiography, we cannot acquit him of
pusillanimity.
He was undoubtedly a great exponent of that art which was in his
day admired almost above any other, rhetoric. He abandoned early
the conventional themes of ancient rhetoric, but he never sacrificed
his skill, no matter what religious or ecclesiastical subject he was
pursuing, any more than Augustine did in the next generation. His
prose is rich, glittering, full of colour and interest and variety. He has
at his fingers' ends every resource which a contemporary writer
could command; the prose of Basil and of Basil's brother Gregory
seems tame beside his. This fact has sometimes been made a kind of
reproach to Gregory ofN azianzus, as if Basil and his brother ofN yssa
were the real theologians of the trio while Gregory was a mere
propagandist or even a Great Communicator, but not a distinguished
theologian in his own right. Prestige condescendingly described him
10·Oral. XXVI.7 (1239).
1090 rat. XVIII.I8; Socrates HE IV.2j.
706
The Cappadocian Theologians
as a 'dignified popularizer'. 110 Danielou once suggested that 'He has
something like a contempt for the dull technical uniform of the
Biblical commentators and polemical theologians' .111 And indeed
we cannot possibly admire him in one or two of his rhetorical
enterprises, as when in a eulogy on Cyprian of Carthage he confuses
him with another and largely legendary Cyprian, or when, in retreat
from the schism at Nazianzus which he has left his father to face, he
composes two bitter and grossly unjust invectives on the recently
dead Emperor Julian, in one of them (IV.3) lauding with adulatory
commendatio!, the Christian Emperor Constantius, a figure whom
in a later Oration (XXV) he was to criticize freely. 112
But in justice to Gregory of Nazianus it must he allowed that he
was more than just a competent theologian. He had his own kind of
brilliance, oflucidity and offorce, though he was not as original and
as much of a pioneer, perhaps, as were Basil and his brother. And it is
quite incorrect to imagine that he was not sincere in his theological
views. Trisoglio in a long essayl13 has shown how entirely Gregory
was dedicated to the task of teaching and propagating the full
doctrine of the Trinity as he understood it. 'In Gregorio', he says, 'Ia
theologia risplende' .114 The lapse of time shows no variation in his
attachment to the Trinity; only vicissitudes bring a more melancholy
emotion to his language in championing the doctrine." 5 It is no
doubt significant that though he gave no more orations, theological
or other, once he had turned his back on Constantinople for ever, he
continued to pursue theological themes in much of the poetry whose
composition occupied his leisure for the remaining period of his
life. 116
Gregory devotes most of his Second Theological Oration (Orat.
XXVIII) to the incomprehensibility of God. We cannot know 'his
110GPT 234.
Ill'Patristic Literature', P.99 in The Pelican Guide to Modern Theology Vol. 2.
112See Moreschini 'L'Opera e la personiJit:l dell' Imperatore GuiIano' passim and
especially 429-30. Lucifer ofCalaris had at least the courage to attack the Emperor
while he was still alive.
113'La poesia della Trinita neIl'opera di San Gregorio di Nazianzo' passim.
114Ibid. 7zl,
115
739 .
116We can only regret that verse (or at least Gregory's verse) is not the best
~edium for conveying accurate and detailed theological ideas, any more than it was
m Gregory's case for conveying autobiographical and historical fact. Hence our
difficulty in r~constructing the course of the Council of Constantinople from his
references to It, even though he was closely associated with its transactions.

The Controversy Resolved
primal and pure nature in itself, that, I mean, which is perceived in the
Trinity'. All that we can know is his greatness manifest in 'the
creatures and these things which are established and governed by
him'.'17 God's nature is inconceivable (1i1.1]7tTO,) and
incomprehensible (ti7ttpil.1]7tTO,). We can indeed know that he exists
(6<1 Ecr<lV) but not his nature (q>U<rl,), though this does not invalidate
the Christian gospel,ll. It is in fact impossible not to believe in God if
we look at the uniformity and regularity ofnature. u9 To imagine
any relationship of God to space is to limit him; even notions like
'light' and 'righteousness' are bound up with our existence in space
and time which we cannot eliminate when we think of God.'20 In
this situation, we are tempted to make what we can see into God,
which is idolatry. Or the soul can take another course, the right one:
'to recognize God through the beauty and order of things that are
seen, and to use our vision as a guide to that what is above vision, but
not to be deprived of God because of the magnificence of what is
seen'.121
Nobody has ever found, nor ever will, what God is by nature and
ousia.'22 Any knowledge of truth and of purpose (logos) and of 'the
intellectual things' (Ta V01]Ta) is very difficult, because we can only
obtain it with our sense-organs (TroV alcrOi]crtOlV) by which we are
confined and misled. Knowledge of God, as the highest object, is all
the more difficult, has greater obstructions and its achievement is
more toilsome. 123
This apophatic, agnostic theology, however, does not prevent
Gregory from accepting and even extending the vocabulary already
employed by Basil to expound his doctrine of the Trinity. Like Basil
too, Gregory, though he knows of the arguments of Homoian
Arianism, is more concerned to meet the trenchant, rationalist
arguments of Eunomius (who, of course, would have wholly
1I70rai. XXVIII.3 (29). I quote the Theological Orations from the edition of
Mason, with occasional references to that of Gallay and the other SC editors, the
other Orations from Migne.
0I8Ibid. 5 (J2).
119
6 (32, 33). Gregory does not seem to distinguish clearly between what we call
revealed and natural knowledge of God.
12° 10, 13 (30,43-4).
12'13 (44).
<2217 (48).
<23 21 (53)·
708
•
The Cappadocian Theologians
dissented from Gregory's views on the incomprehensibility of God).
Gregory uses the terms ousia, hypostasis, idiotes, prosopon and physis
very much as Basil does. He tends to identify loosely the hypostases
and the peculiarities which distinguish them (idioteteis). He can speak
of 'one nature in three peculiarities ... subsisting distinctly' (1<aO'
SaUTa,).'24 He does not regard verbal distinctions as of great
importance:
' ... when /say that you are surrounded by one light of God and three:
three as regards the peculiarities or hypostases, if you like to name them
so, or prosopa (for we shall not split hairs about names as long as the
syllables set forth the same meaning); but one as regards the ousia, or
Godhead. For it is, as it were, divided indivisibly and united in
division. The Godhead is One in Three and the Three are One, the
Three in whom is the Godhead, or, to speak more-accurately, who are
the Godhead"2'
And sometimes Gregory can use Trinitarian language without
having recourse to any of these terms:
'God ... exists in these three Highest, Cause and Creator and
Perfecter, I mean the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit who are
neither so much divided from each other as to be separated in natlire '.
nor so much constricted as to be limited to one Person' (prosopon).126
And his vocabulary is sometimes confusingly volatile: do not
inquisitively investigate, he says 'the nature (Physis) of the Father, the
subsistence (OUcriOlcrIV) of the Son, the glory and power of the Spirit,
the single Godhead and splendour in the Three, the undivided nature
(Physis) and confession and glory' .127 He can also describe the Son as
the 'image' (eikon) of the Father, and has indeed a whole 'iconic'
theology in which man is the image of Christ the image, and has as his
duty to 'respect the prototype' image. 12 • But he recognizes the value
<240 ra t. XXXIIl.I6 (236).
125Ibid. XXXIX. 11 (345). See K. Holl Amphilochius von lkonium 171. A little later
(177) Holl says that the concept of hypostasis in Gregory is weak; it approximates to a
mere point or moment in the Godhead. He prefers prosopon. Cf. E. P. Meijering
'The Doctrine of the Will and of the Trinity in the Orations of Gregory of
Nazianzus' 231-2.
1260rat. XXXIV.8 (249). It should be noted that Gregory's doctrine of the
Incarnation is dealt with later in this chapter and his doctrine of the Spirit will be
considered in the next chapter.
mOrat. XXXII.31 (197).
ma(~ci>j!Sea t6 apxttunov Orat. XXXVII." (308). In XXXVIII. I 3 (325) he calls
Christ 'the unalterable image' (o:napaUalC'to<; dlCci>v). See also below P.713.
709
 The Controversy Resolved
of the distinction between ousia and hypostasis and observes it
faithfully. The Council of Alexandria (of 362) had, he said,
established this distinction. The Italians (i.e. the Westerners) intended
to make this distinction but the poverty of their language (a language
in fact unknown to Gregory!) was unable to express this distinction,
and so they spoke of three prosopa in order to avoid identifying ousia
and hypostasis.!2.
He carefully defines on several occasions the unity and the
distinction of the Godhead, repeating in more lucid and lapidary
language what Basil had already taught. There is, he says, an Origin
(arche) of Godhead 'timeless, undivided, unlimited', and he honours
the Origin equally with the Beings derived from the Origin:
'(they are) separated neither by time nor by nature nor by worship;
they are one with distinctions and distinct with unity. even if it is
paradoxical to say so; to be worshipped not less because of their
relation to each other than because each is perceived and accepted in
his own right (lCaO' taotoii); a perfect Trinity consisting of Three
perfect, and we must abandon (the concept of) a Monad for the sake of
plenitude, and go beyond a Dyad (for God is beyond the duality of
matter and form which constitute corporeal things), and we must
define (God as) a Trinity for the sake of completeness . . . so that the
Godhead does not remain constricted nor expand infinitely. because
the former is illiberal and the latter disorderly; the former is wholly
Jewish, and the latter pagan (t).).l]v'lC6v) and polytheist'130
Gregory is not willing to number the Trinity.''' It is necessary
'to know one and the same nature of the Godhead, recognized by
unoriginatedness (dvapxCfl) and generation and procession.
comparable to our own mind and reason and spirit' (with a disclaimer
against putting much trust in earthly analogies).
One can envisage each as God only in theory as the mind separates the
inseparable. 'The Three are God mutually (IIBt' u).)"lj)"rov) known by
the identity of movement (lCIVlj(JBro,) and· of nature'.'32 In his Third
1290ral. XXI.35 (1124-5); see Lebon 'Le sort du "consubstantiel'" 637-8.
l3OO,at. XXII!.7 (1160). . have approved of Basil's analogy of three men for the Trinity. But see the next
131Ibid. 10 (1161); but at Oral. XXIX.2 (76) he says that the Three differ in
number but not in ousia.
132 11 (I r61. 1164); c( Orat. XXVI. 19 (1252) 'the ingenerat~. the generated and
the proceeding (npo'i6v). one nature, three peculiarities' (Uh6tT)t&<;), and XXVII.I8
(304) 'the One is to be worshipped, rightly perceived, and the Three, rightly
distingu~shed as long as the distinction is of Persons (prosopon) but not of divinity':
7 10
The Cappadocian Theologians
Theological Oration he defines what the Persons of the Trinity have
in common: 'equal dignity of nature, agreement of will (yvrolll],
(JI'II1tVOla), identity of action (lClvlj(JBro,), convergence towards unity
(t6 tv) of those who derive from it'. And he goes on to use language
which might suggest Sabellianism, were it not quite obvious that
Gregory is not a Sabellian:
'So the original Monad, moving into a Dyad, finishes in a Trinity.'
He is ready to describe the Son as a 'progeny' (ytVVl]II'l) or 'issue'
(1tp6~)"l]lIa), but modifies this statement by the words 'or I do not
know how one is to describe these matters once all visible analogies
are abandoned'.'''
Gregory allows that the concept of Godhead shared by the gods
according to Greek philosophy is no more than a notional
community, and he implies that the same applies to our common
humanity.I3' But he has nO hesitation in adopting Basil's comparison
of the relation of the generic to the particular to the relation of the
ousia to the hypostases, inasfar as he sees the fallacy of the Eunomian
doctrine of the superiority of the Father by reason of his being the
origin of the Son as lying in the attribution to the underlying essence
of what is predicated of the particular possessor of that essence. He
says that it is like arguing that because so-and-so is a dead man then
mankind is dead.' 35
He stoutly defends the doctrine of the eternal generation of the
Son; the generation is not to be thought of as taking place in time. I36
To the Eunomians' point that the Son must have been begotten either
against the Father's will- which is absurd - or by his will, in which
case the will becomes a kind of mother of deity, he answers that the
will is not something separate from the person, but is the person
himself'37 Meijering points out that Gregory here differs from
1330ral. XXIX.2 (76). Moreschini 'n platonismo cristiano di Gregorio
Nazianzeno' 1390-1 discusses this passage and decides that it is 'un Plotinus
rielaborato'. Ruether refers to the passage also op. cit. 131.
1340ral. XXI.I5 (1097); c( XXIX.I4 (92). This means that Gregory should not
example.
1350ral. XXIX.15 (93), in Mason's interpretation of Gregory's meaning. For
Gregory's Trinitarian theology, see Holl op. cit. I s8-96.
1360ral. XXIX.S (80); he argues from the often noted fluidity of tenses in the Old
Testament.
13'lbid. 6 (80, 8.).
7II
 The Controversy Resolved
Athanasius. God was not (as Athanasius' exaltation of nature above
will implies) compelled to generate. Freewill for Gregory is what is
lasting and enduring, and God generates out of pure freewill. But he
adds, in the same passage, that God may in generating transcend his
will; we do not, anyway, know how God generates. Further, in God
will and action coincide.13' On the much-disputed text Prov 8:22
Gregory takes the same line as Athanasius: the speaker here is Christ
himself referring to his human nature.'39 But for him the really
crucial text in this chapter occurs in verse 25 (,He begets me before all
the hills' LXX). The Eunomians argued that if God never ceases to
beget, then his action is incomplete and must one day cease,
consequently it must one day have begun. Gregory simply replies
that this does not follow for there are things which have begun and
yet are eternal, like angels and souls. But his real case is that the nature
of God is God and belongs to that class which must be God, though
varied in aspects (epinoiai) and names."· He follows the usual
Cappadocian line of objecting to the selection by Eunomius of
ingenerateness as the sole, crucial, characteristic ofGod. ' " When he
comes to answer another Eunomian argument, Gregory takes a new
line of argument. 'Father', say the Eunomians, denotes .either a
substance (ousia) or an activity (energeia); if a substance, then the
Father is of a different ousia (heterousios) from the Son; if an activity,
then the Fatherly activity makes the Son, and the thing made cannot
be of the same ousia as the maker. Gregory answers that the name
'Father' denotes neither essence nor activity but relationship (OXE"',),
though he 'suggests that somehow (he does not explain how) this
relationship includes both being and activity."2 It is noteworthy that
Gregory on several occasions insists that the Father is the cause of the
138Meijering 'Will and Trinity in Gregory of Nazianz us· 226-7; see as well as the
passage in Orat. XXIX just cited 8 (84}.and XX.9 ,(1076). For the relation of God's
will to his nature in the thought of Gregory of Nyssa. see S. Gonzalez 'La Formula
).lia oucr{a, 'tpet~ {)1tOO"t'tlOE1C; en San Gregorio di Nisa', 65-'70.
1390rat. XXX.2 (lOS). But Simonetti (Studi 70) observes that before taking this
line here G. first suggests, very reasonably, that the reference is to the general
immanent wisdom of God rather than to Christ.
,.°lbid. XXIX.l] (91.92).
141 Ibid. Io-U (88, 89).
'''Oral. XXIX.I7 (95, 96); XXXI.7 (140). 9 (133-4). Meijeririg ('Will and
Trinity' 231-4) concludes that Gregory's position here is strictly speaking illogical.
But Trisoglio (,La Poesia della Trinita' 722) notes this identification of Person with
relation-with apparent satisfaction. It is a curious anticipation of Augustine's view.
712
The Cappadocian Theologians
Son (though a timeless cause), and tries to make this view consistent
with traditional pro-Nicene doctrine by stating that this causality
does not apply to the ousia of the Father:
'the superiority (to ll&i~ov) does not apply to the nature, but to the
cause. No consubstantial things are greater or less in ousia.'143
Gregory of course maintains consistently against Arian
depreciation of the divine status of Christ that all the texts suggesting
his inferiority to the Father refer to his human nature and not to his
divinity.'4' He would like to treat In 6:38 ('I came down from
heaven not that I should do my own will but to do the will of my
Father') similarly, but cannot because manifestly Christ's human
nature did not come down from heaven. So he contents himself with
saying that the Son has no will apart from that of the Father.'" He
argues in the same way about Christ as the image of God:
'(he is) image because he is homoousios, and because this (his
consubstantiality) derives from the Father and not the Father from it
... consequently he is the living (image) of the Living One, and has
greater immutability than Seth (deriving) from Adam and any
generated thing from that which generated it'. And Gregory
continues, 'this is the nature of simple (i.e. not composite) things, not
to be like in one respect and unlike in another. but the whole to be a
copy of the whole, and this is more than mere likeness'
(acp olloioollU).'·6
It is not surprising, therefore, that Gregory should have rejected the
idea that the Son was, to put the matter succinctly, a convenient
1430ral. XL.43 (420). Cf. XXX·7 (112) t~".mi~ov J,ltv tan ti'jr; alt{a<;, to 08 iaov
ti'j<; <pUo"Eror;. Meijering ('WilJ and Trinity' 229-30) thinks that Gregory is here
influenced by Plotinus, in whose system the One who causes the Nous thereby is
ontologically superior to the Nous. Gregory, like Basil, claimed to derive his
theology from Gregory Theodorus (the Wonderworker). See Holl Amphilochius
118, and Rist, 'Basil's "Neo-Platonism'" 208-I1. Nautin in 'Gregoire dit Ie
Taumaturge' so analyses the evidence for the existence and career of this Gregory
that little is left to him but a name.
144See Orat. XXX.8-IO (1I3-II6).
145Ibid. 12 (119-20). But Gregory is no MonotheIetist; he believes in the free-will
of the Son, for freewill to him denotes ontological solidity.
146 20 (129); note at the beginning the slight hint that Gregory sees homoousios as
having that 'derivative' sense which we have observed in Athanasius and Basil, and
at the end the hit at the Homoians (and perhaps even the Homoiousians). Gregory
has no gene about applying homoousios both to the Son and (as we shall see) to the
Spirit.
7 13
 The Controversy Resolved
philosophical device, a means whereby God can communicate with
the world without which he would be incommunicado, or, in other
words, that the Son (or the Spirit) waS created or produced in order in
his turn to produce creation. Gregory denounces this suggestion in a
complicated passage:
[fwe teach that the Son or Spirit is without origin (/ivapxa) or has his
origin elsewhere than in God. we run the risk of dishonouring God.
But if however much you exalt the Son and the Spirit you do not
place ~hem above the Father, nor divorce them from his causality
(altla) but derive the excellent generation (ytvVllJ.<a) and the
wonderful procession (np6050<;) from Him - [ shall ask one more
question of you, obsessed though you may be with ingenerateness and
unoriginatedness (q"Mlytvv'ltt aU "al 'l'IAnvapx&): whether you
dishonour God more in making him the origin of the sort ofbemgs
that you derive from him [i.e. a created Son and Spirit] than (the
origin) of, not these beings. but those who are similar in natur:. of
equal rank (6J,1ocS6;(Ov). and such as OUf argument wants to envIsage
them? ... Is there anything greater for God than to be Father of the
Son, which is an addition of glory not a reduction, and similarly (to
be) Sender of the Spirit?'
Gregory goes on to say that to make the Son and the Spirit mere
instruments of creation, as if he needed to create such tools and could
not create by a mere act of will, is to dishonour God.'47 [n this
doctrine Gregory was joining Athanasius and Basil in demolishing a
tradition of thought which could certainly be called time-honoured
and might well have been regarded by many before the middle of the
fourth century as Catholic.
In his Trinitarian doctrine, then, as far as we have examined it,
Gregory can be said to display no great originality. He differs in some
points from Basil, but in none of great importance. His articulation of
Trinitarian doctrine is clearer, rather more forceful and expressive
than that of his friend, as becomes a great stylist, but that is all. But
Gregory as we shall see in the next chapter, was capable on occasion
of striking theological originality when he came to set out his
doctrine of the Holy Spirit."s
1470rat. XXIII.6 (1157. 1160).
t48He has his own ideas on sin, though not altogether satisfactory ideas. See]. M.
Szymusiak 'Gregoire de Nazianze et Ie peche' and B. Otis 'Cappadocian Thought as
a Coherent System' 10g-II8 (much the better of the two papers.)
The Cappadocian Theologians
4. Gregory of Nyssa
The date of the birth of Gregory of Nyssa is quite uncertain. He was
certainly born after BaslI and probably some considerable time after
him, because he looked up to Basil with great respect as to a much
older brother.149 All we can say is that he was born at some point
between 331 and 340, and probably in the second rather than the first
half of that period. When Basil was teaching rhetoric in Caesarea
between 355 and 357 Gregory was his pupil. He began his career as a
teacher of rhetoric and he must at some time have acquired a good
education and some knowledge of contemporary philosophy. He
was married, and remained in that state till his wife died about 387
(by which time he had been a bishop for fifteen years). They had a
son. It is all the odder that in his earliest work, 'On Virginity' (De
Virg.), he should treat marriage as a regrettable pisaller instituted by
God simply as a result of the Fall. He was consecrated bishop of Nyssa
in 372, complying with his elder brother's ecclesiastical policy. Basil
to the end of his life appears to have regarded Gregory with affection
but also with a certain contempt. He was appalled when in 371 he
discovered that Gregory had forged a letter purporting to come from
their uncle with the worthy but imprudent intention of reconciling
the two men.'so And in a letter written in 375 Basil said that the only
possible bearer of a proposed missive to the West was his brother
Gregory, but that he could not trust Gregory's good sense as far as to
send him on this mission. 'Sl Basil also disapproved of an attempt
which Gregory made shortly after being consecrated bishop to bring
about a reconciliation with a group of disciples of Marcellus in
Ancyra.'52 In 375 the anti-Nicene policy of the Emperor Valens
which had spared Basil struck down his brother. Gregory was
accused at a council dominated by Homoian Arians meeting at
149Most of those who have written on Gregory of Nyssa have made observations
and conjectures about the dates of his career and works. One of the most recent and
careful studies, whose conclusions have been largely accepted in this work, is that by
Gerhard May 'Die Chronologie des Lebens und der Werk des Gregor von Nyssa'.
See also,]aeger Gregor von Nyssa's Lehre vom Heiligen Geist 79-109, and Balas' art.
'Gregor von Nyssa' in TRE XIV 173-81.
150Basil Ep 58. See Courtonne Saint Basile et son temps 37-38.
151 Ep 2 I 5. See Courtonne, op. cit. 269-'70, and May 'Einige Bemerkung tiber das
Verhaltnis Gregors von Nyssa zur Basilios clem Grossen' 510.
152Basil Ep 100. See R. Hubner 'Gregor von Nyssa und Markell von Ankyra'
201-4·
715
 The Controversy Resolved
Ancyra of maladministration of church funds and some irregularity
in his election as bishop. He was (probably in the next year)
summoned before the court of the vicarius Demosthenes. As he was
being brought there under escort he managed to escape. He was
formally exiled, probably by Valens himself, and in 376 a council at
Nyssa deposed him. We do not know where he spent his exile, except
that it was not with his sister Macrina and brother Peter at Annesi in
Pontus. 153
In 378 on the death of V alens Gregory returned to his see of Nyssa.
He was present at the death of his brother Basil on January 1St 379. In
the autumn of that year he attended Meletius' council at Antioch, and
on his return journey to Nyssa he visited Annesi and was present at
the death-bed of his sister Macrina. Some time after this (exactly how
long is difficult to determine) he wrote an account of his sister's life
and death (Vita Macrinae). It is a fairly simple and moving tribute
from a brother who greatly admired her, devoid ofrhetoric. In Nyssa
he encountered difficulties with Arians; imperial policy against
Arians of all descriptions had not yet manifested itself. Soon after he
had established himself securely in his see he was called to travel to
Ibora in Pontus (perhaps in the early months of 380) to help to choose
a bishop for that see. While he was there the pro-Nicenes in
Eustathius' see of Sebaste asked him to assist in placing a pro-Nicene
bishop there, for Eustathius had recently died. While he was in
Sebaste he was offered the see, but after some consideration refused it
and returned to Nyssa.
He had already by this time produced several of his written works.
De Virginitate is usually reckoned to be his earliest; it must have been
composed between the years 370 and 378. His work on Christian
perfection (De Perfectione) seems to assume that he has a long time
ahead of him to approximate to perfection, and should be placed in
this early period. His Commentary on Ecclesiastes (In Ecclesiasten)
refers to Arianism as still in power, and must be therefore dated
before 381. His works on the creation of man (DeOpificio) and on the
Hexaemeron (the six days of creation) were intended to defend and
complete his brother Basil's work. They can be placed in 379; they
reveal the fact not only that Basil is dead but that his brother Peter has
153S ee Benoit, SaintCregoirede Nazianze 375-6 and Courtonne, op. cit. 117-18,
as well as May's article 'Die Chronologie'. The evidence all comes from Basil's
letters, especially Ep 136.1.
716
The Cappadocian Theologians
been made bishop of Sebaste (Eustathius' see). It might be best to
place his little treatise 'On the difference between ousia and hypostasis'
(Ep 38 in the collection ofBasi!,s letters) during this period. It was also
in order to defend the memory of Basil that about this time Gregory
began his major anti-Arian book, Contra Eunomium; the first two
books were written between summer 380 and spring 381. The
dialogue On the Soul and Resurrection, in which Macrina is one of the
speakers, was written after her death, in 380 at earliest. His short
works full of discussion of Trinitarian theology, Ad Eustathium de
Trinitate, Ad Ablabium quod non sint tres dU, Ad Simplicium de fide, imd
Ad Graeeos or Ex communionibus notionibus, could well be placed at this
period in Gregory's career when he was particularly preoccupied
with contending against the views of both Arians and
Macedonians, 1 54
Gregory took a part, perhaps an active part, in the Council of
Constantinople in the summer of 38 I. To this period we may refer his
funeral oration on Meletius (In Meletium, a very different affair from
his tribute to Macrina, full of artificial rhetoric), and his De Spiritu
Sancto, adversus Macedonianos, which deals with the very topical
subject of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. It is on the whole most
satisfactory to envisage the work known as In Suam Ordinationem and
also as De Deitate adversus Evagrium as composed during the Council
rather than at one of the later councils which took place between 381
and 383 in the capital city. This must be one of the most misnamed
works of antiquity, because it was not delivered on the occasion of
Gregory's (or anybody else's) ordination, nor was it an attack on
anybody called Evagrius; it deplores the absence from the council of
the Pneumatomachi and rebuts their arguments (i.e. the
Macedonians).'55 If Theodoret is correct in his statement that the
Council of Constantinople reconvened in 382, Gregory must have
attended it (HE V.8.IO). Another council was certainly summoned
by Theodosius to the capital city in 383, as a final attempt to bring
154Gregory's authorship of Adversus Arium et Sabellium has been so strongly
contested that we cannot use it to illustrate his doctrine; in spite ofJaeger's defence of
it (Gregor von Nyssa's Lehre 27-50).
155Gregory's part in the Council of Constantinople of 38 I will be considered
again in cap. 23. A discussion of his doctrine of the Holy Spirit is reserved for the
next chapter (22). For the date of In Suam Ordinationem see May 'Die Datierung der
Rede "In Suam Ordinationem" der Gregor von Nyssa und die Verhandlungen mit
den Pneumatomachen auf dem Konzil von Constantinopel 38 I'.
7 17
 The Controversy Resolved
about unity in the church.' s • To this council Eunomius presented his
Confession; it is therefore reasonable to date Gregory's answer to
this, Refutatio Confessionis Eunomii to this year. The long third book
of his Contra Eunomium was written between 381 and 383. At some
point during these years also he was sent by a council of
Constantinople on a journey to Arabia and Jerusalem for some
purpose, no doubt connected with the establishment of pro-Nicene
bishops in Arabia (he visited Jerusalem as a sightseer). But it is
probably going too far to think of Gregory as one of the major
figures managing ecclesiastical politics during the last decade of the
fourth century. He had neither the political influence nor perhaps the
diplomatic flair required for this task. It is possible that it was for the
council of 383 that he wrote his work De Deitate Filii et Spiritus. In
385 he was again in Constantinople to deliver funerary or
commemorative orations on the lately deceased princess Pulcheria
and Empress FlacilIa. At some point in this period we should also
place his Contra Fatum, an argument against the determinists of his
age. His Cateehetieal Oration, a general apology for Christianity, was
written some time after 381, as it refers to works of his on the Trinity
as already completed. It is not a work for catechumens, but is directed
to a pagan public.
After about 385 Gregory turned his attention away from
Trinitarian theology towards asceticism and the mystical system of
doctrine which particularly appealed to him. His short anti-
ApoIIinarian treatise Ad Theophilum cannot however be placed
earlier than 385 when Theophilus succeeded Timothy as archbishop
of Alexandria and his longer work on the same subject, Antirrheticus
adversus Apollinarem (refuting ApoIlinaris' On the Divine Incarnation,
which appeared in 387) cannot be placed earlier than 387. His Life of
Moses (Vita Moyses) and his commentary on the Song of Songs (In
Cantieum Cantieorum) are the works of his old age. The latter was
written for the rich young widow Olympias, whom the Emperor
Theodosius was so anxious to marry off again to somebody who
would forward his political plans that for a period he forbade her to
associate with any office-bearers in the church. She resisted his plans
for her and by 391 he had abandonee! his attempts to control her
career. We might place the In Cantieum Cant. in that year or after it.
Throughout his life Gregory was in touch with monks and nuns,
156S ee below, P.589.
718
The Cappadocian Theologians
though he never seems to have spent any long time in the actual
practice of a monastic regime. Fifteen sermons of Gregory (one or
two of which have been mentioned already) and thirty letters are
extant.'57 In 394 he took part in the Council of Constantinople held
in that year. We do not know the exact date ofhis death. It must have
taken place at some time between 394 and 400.
Gregory of Nyssa is to be sharply distinguished from the other two
Cappadocian theologians in that he devised a doctrinal, indeed a
philosophical, system more coherent and more elaborate than any the
other two ever produced.' ss There can be no doubt about his debt to
Platonic philosophy, and especially to the form or forms which it had
taken by the second half of the fourth century A.D., and among these
not least the thought of Plotinus. He taught a doctrine whereby
human beings are called by God to e.ver greater participation in
being, as far as their limitations can permit this. He made a sharp
division between created and uncreated reality. Created reality or
1571 have omitted from the list of Gregory's works the document called De
Instituto Christiano. W. Jaeger thought that he could show that it was by Gregory
when he found and edited some complete MSS of it. Ti1l then it was thought to be a
version of the 'Great Letter' of a certain Macarius, whose date and background are
obscure. But more recent scholarship has tended. to reverse the relationship and
regard De Inst: Christ. as an incomplete re-working of Macarius' original.
unconnected With Gregory. Most of Gregory's work has been edited in tlie
m~gnifice~t series of texts initiated by Jaeger and carried on by others, published by
Br~ll ofLelclen. I have quoted from this series where possible without naming the
editors"and elsewhere from the Migne text of Gregory, which occupies,PG vols.
44-46, except that for the Catechetical Oration I have used the text of J. Meridier
(Paris 1908, with Fr T). For the Contra Eunomium, the most important work of
Gregory for those who are examining his Trinitarian theology, I have given the
Migne references (which are all in Vol. 45) as well as those of the Leiden series
(which, incidentally, is referred to in diverse ways by different scholars as 'GN' or as
'GNO' or as 'Jaeger'). . •
158It is not within the scope of this work to give more than the merest sketch of
this system. Much can be learned about it from two works by}. Danielou Platonisme
Theologie mystique: doctrine spirituelle de Saint Gregoire de Nysse and L't're et Ie temps
,et
chez Gregoire de Nysse (which is a republication of seven essays published between
1953 and 1967 in a revised and enlarged form); D. L. Balas METOYl:IA 9EOY
Man's Participation in God's Perfections according to Saint Gregory oJNyssa; and Eternity
and Time in Gregory oj Nyssa's Contra Eunomium; P. Sheldon-Williams jGreek
Christian Platonist Tradition'; E. Muhlenberg 'Philosophische Bildung Gregors
v~n Nyssa'; Hon'sA.mphiloc~ius von Ikonium; H. Dorrie 'Gregor's TheoJogie auf der
Htntergrund der neuplatonlker Metaphysik'; B. Otis 'Cappadocian Thought as a
Coherent System', as well as several other articles to be mentioned later. For
Gregory's doctrine of sin (which is not dealt with here) see Danielou Platonisme et
theologie 61-4, L'£tre et ie temps 102-3, 133-53. 180-204; Balas Metousia theou
I18-19·
719
 The Controversy Resolved
being was itself divided into sensible things and intelligible things,
and among the latter he classed all angels and celestial or super-
human beings, for he transformed Plato's ideas or noeta into angels or
personal spiritual powers. Human beings stand on the frontier
between the sensible and the intelligible, partaking in both worlds as
both corporeal and intelligent. In place of Platonic philosophy's
highest good or truest reality (t6 oVtOlC; ov) he substituted God the
Father of Christian tradition. In the words of Balas, his philosophy,
instead of expressing, as in Plato, the relation of the sensible to the
world of ideas, expresses the relation of the 'created intelligible
world' (angels and human souls) to God. Instead of serving to
construct the descending hierarchy within the divine world, as in
later Platonism, it serves to exclude any intermediary nature between
the uncreated and created beings. 159 Gregory, like Plotinus,
summons those who would advance towards ever greater
participation in being (or reality) to look into their own souls. But he
does so with this difference, that Gregory sees perfection and
goodness and truth given originally to the human soul by God's own
indwelling when he made man in the image of God, and does not
regard the soul as divine. The most striking feature in his thought,
however, is that he teaches that God is infinite and that it is the destiny
of redeemed souls ultimately to spend eternity exploring God's
inexhaustible infinity, so that salvation is not so much an eternal rest
as an eternal movement. With this conviction of God's infinity goes
an even stronger asseveration than that of the other two
Cappadocians of God's incomprehensibility. The phenomena of the
sensible and also of the intelligible world (the noetoi etc.) can be
examined and known by the use of the human reason and the witness
of the Bible; and Gregory, like his namesake of Nazianzus, makes no
serious distinction between revealed and natural knowledge of God.
But beyond this knowledge of the created worlds stands God who
cannot be known. He is infinite and human knowledge cannot
compass the infinite. It is a timeless infinity in which God knows and
experiences everything as a single instant, not an endless succession.
Time is the product of creation, but God's being (ousia) is above
creation and divested of all measurement, space or temporal
sequence. To him everything is present as if it were now. '60
I S9 Metousia Theou 16 4.
160'11 ya trois ordres de realite. Dieu qui est u'tP&1ttoc,; [unchanging], l'esprit qui est
720
The Cappadocian Theologians
For Gregory, there are two ways of knowing God. We can discern
his attributes, such as goodness, wisdom, power, by looking at his
activity in the universe. Pagan philosophy can help here because it
can discover the nothingness of that which appeals to our senses and
only appears to exist, though it cannot identify true reality; only
grace can do that. Our nature which can respond to sensible things is
not our true nature, but is (though not in itself evil) given to us only as
the result of the Fall. The first way of knowing is one which proceeds
by analogy from the creatures. Scripture is of course essential here.
The second way of knowing God is the mystical way, and it leads us
to the knowledge of what really exists (ta ovta, ta vOllta or 01 VOlltoi).
For this the soul must look into itself, strip itself of anything bodily,
of anything which the sense can affect, even refusing discursive
reason (any opinion, doxa, which can be reached by induction
(propiep"is)), and enter a 'night of the senses'; and aballdonment of all
concepts and a plunging into divine darkness (yv6cpoC;) where it
knows only by or in faith. The rejection by Gregory, along with the
other Cappadocians, of the concept of the pre-existent Christ or
Logos as the subordinate mediator of our knowledge of God has led
him to the formulation of this doctrine. 161 But even at its highest the
redeemed soul when it shall have embarked on its endless reaching
forward or exploration (epektasis is Gregory's word) of God can
never know God's ousia, his actual being. 162 This doctrine is however
in his view compatible with the conviction which, as we shall see,
Gregory holds firmly along with his brother Basil and his namesake
of Nazianzus, that we can know and must believe that God is one
ousia and three hypostases (see below, p. 725 and n 182). He said that
this knowledge tells us what God is like, how he is constituted (",iiC;
I;attv) but not what he is (ti I;attv). Though in fact Gregory has fused
anime du mouvement historique, la matiere qui est animee du rnouvement
cyclique. L'esprit est present dans la matiere mais illui est ineductible. L'esprit cree
est done inte:,mediaire entre l' atpElt'toc,; clivin et Ie tpoml [movement] cyclique'
DanieIou, L'Etre et Ie temps 94. '
1611n place of God's ingenerateness Gregory presented God's infinity. which is his
master-thought. The conviction that the being of Christ is the same as that of God
demanded a re-thinking of the traditional concept of God; unoriginatedness cannot
~imp~y be i~generatednes~. Gregory found the answer in the concept of God's
Infimty whIch Greek phtlosophy had tended to avoid. So Miihlenberg 'Die
philosophische Bildung' 235-5.
162For this account of Gregory's doctrine of the soul's knowledge of God, see
DanieJou Platonisme et theologie 99-160.
721
 The Controversy Resolved
many contemporary ·philosophical ideas into his doctrinal system,'63
he is wary about acknowledging his debt to pagan philosophy and
prefers to delude himself (as almost all his predecessors and
contemporaries did) into believing that the philosophers had been
anticipated in their ideas by Moses and the prophets.'6' On more
than one occasion he exclaims at Eunomius' passion for formal
philosophical terms:
'Enough of this logical demonstration by which his argument
syllogistically moves towards its conclusion!'.165
And at the particularly jargon-filled statement of his opponent he
says 'What connection has this absurd piece of scholarship with
Christian doctrine?' To say that each ousia has its own energy, and the
Father's 'energy' creates the Son and the Son's the Spirit is not
Biblical doctrine but technical philosophical jargon.'66
Most writers upon the subject of Gregory's thought have admired
it. DanieIou describes him as an original thinker in his own right:
'This theologian and mystic can be considered as one of the great
philosophers of his time' .'67 And Muhlenberg claims that Gregory's
philosophical system ('Bildung') consists of a new concept of God
and a new doctrine of being, bound up with it.'68 Stead, on the other
hand, regards Gregory as a very incompetent thinker, not
particularly original, and as far as his 'technical apparatus' goes 'one
receives the converse impression of total incoherence'.169 He is
imprecise, unnecessarily verbose,' 70 self-contradictory,' 71 and
I6'See below, pp.867'""9.
164Cf. Danielau 'Gregoire de Nysse et la philosophie' 16-17·
lti5Contra Eunomium 11.306 (45:1015). But Gregory can also, with equal justice.
laugh at Eunomius'literalism in imagining that when the Bible describes Adam ~s
naming the animals in the garden of Eden this literally ,happened (~n .2:19-20); a1l1t
means is that God gave man the power to deVise names. (lbl~. 11.39?-409
(45:1044-48». Later in a fine passage he explains anthropomorphisms III the Bible as
God accommodating himself to our understanding, like a mother talking baby-
language to her children (419 (1049». The influence of Origen is obvious (cf.
R. P. C. Hanson Allegory and Event 210-232). On the argument about the nature of
names, see Simonetti Crisi 462-8; Balas Metousia Theou II3; Muhlenberg, 'Phil.
Bildung' 241-2. ~ .. .
166d~ yap KOlVIDvia 't'iP XPlatltlVQ) lOyQ) 1tPO~ n)v IlIDpav9EIO'av O'oq>lav; IbId. III
(viii) S4 (4S:849). Cf. i.ISS-I60 (4S.297, 300) 188'""9 (3 08).
.167'Gregoire de Nysse et la philosophie' 16-17, quotation from 17.
168'Philosophische Bildung' 244.
169'O n tology and Terminology in Gregory of Nyssa' 108.
17oIbid. 112, 113. 171 Il 6.
722
The Cappadodan Theologians
adopts philosophical opinions at second-hand without CrltIClsmg
them. '72 However, his Trinitarian doctrine is not greatly affected by
his philosophical ideas, and the fact that those who have written
about these latter have tended to a large extent to ignore the former
supports this view.' 73 To these ideas we must now turn.
If we allow that Letter 38 among the collection of Basil's letters is
not by Basil but by his younger brother Gregory, we have here a full
and careful account of his concept of the meaning of and distinction
between ousia and hypostasis. We can do so with all the more
confidence because the writer of this letter constantly states that
God's ousia, which he dearly equates with his nature (Physis) , is
infinite and beyond our comprehension. '7. Gregory begins with an
unqualified account-of the relation between hypostasis and ousia as the
same as that between the particular, and the universal or generic. The
infmite incomprehensible ousia is contrasted with the circumscribed
and recognizable hypostasis.' 75 He goes on to say, not that we
experience Father, Son and Holy Spirit separately or distinctly, but
that the authority of the Scriptures demands that we shall recognize
these distinctions, and emphasizes as strongly as he can the inseparable
unity and equality of the Three in spite of the distinction:
'For· it is impossible to perceive separation or division of any sort. so
that the Son should be thought of without the Spirit or the Spirit
disjoined from the Son, but there is perceived among them somehow
the ineffable and inconceivable unity and distinction; the difference of
the hypostases does not dissolve the continuity of their nature nor does
the community of their nature dissipate the particularity of their
172 11 6. When Professor Stead first delivered this paper. at an international
conference several scholars in the later discussion (as the report which follows
St~ad's paper shows) objected that he was judging Gregory by the standards of
XXth·century linguistic analysis. And indeed he gives the impression of deploying
too rigorously what the ancients would have called Platonic subtilitas.
173Rist actually says (though discussing Basil, not Gregory) 'there is not a trace of
the influence of Neoplatonic speculation in that area of Trinitarian theology from
which the Council [of Nicaea] had excluded Platonism forever', Platonism and its
Christian Heritage XII.2oo. For Gregory's doctrine of the truth see Gonzalez op. cit.,
passim.
174Neither qf the recent editors ofBasH's letters Courtonne and Deferrari. accepts
the attribution of this one to Gregory, but scholars writing even more recently upon
Gregory seem to be agreed upon his authorship of it, and certainly the arguments in
favour are strong. See R. Hubner. 'Gregor von Nyssa als Verfasser der sag. Ep. 38
des Basilios' in Epektasis 403--go.
t75Ep 38. 1-3.
723
 The Controversy Resolved
characteristics (to 18{a~ov trov yvmpurIlUtmv). Do not be amazed if we
declare that the same thing is united and distinct and conceive, as in a
riddle, of a new and paradoxical unity in distinction and distinctness in
union',176
Gregory then adduces the analogy of the rainbow, in which the
colours can be observed distinctly but can also be seen to be
inseparable from each other. 177 Stead criticizes the unsuitability and
inadequacy of the analogy of universal and particular for the relation
of ousia and hypostasis, and he observes truly that Gregory on many
occasions uses hypostasis and ousia in a variety of meanings which do
not at all correspond to the meanings which they are supposed to
convey when used in a Trinitarian context. 17. Certainly the analogy
of universal to particular is a very unsatisfactory analogy when we are
speaking of the relation of Substance to Person. But we have no
reason to suppose that either Basil or his brother Gregory ever
imagined that this was the only analogy applicable to this subject, and
in this letter we have a proof that Gregory could produce another. In
fact it is likely that he thought that the best way of describing this
mysterious relationship was by a series of analogies modifying each
other, and that he recognized that hypostasis is a word which can be
used in many senses is shown by his attempting to explain,
immediately after his production of the analogy of the rainbow, how
it is that Hebrews uses the word hypostasis (1:3, stamp of his nature,
xapalCt1)p tlj, ultoGtuaem,) in a quite different meaning from that
which he has been attaching to it. l79 He expands this account of the
relation of the Persons in his little work Ad Graecos, when he uses
prospon rather than hypostasis. We do not say 'three gods', he explains
because God is not God because he is the prosopon, but because he is the
ousia (of the Godhead). ,.0
God is not God because he is Father nor the
Son because he is the Son, but because both possess the ousia of
Godhead. Each Person (prosopon) is 'substantive' (tVOUGlO,) and called
1764 . the quotation from the very end.
177
5.
178'OntO}ogy and Terminology' 117-119. That Gregory's concept of ousia was
quite different from Basil's has been shown by Hubner. op. cit. n 174 above.
Gregory's was ultimately Aristotelian, Basil's Stoic rather than Platonic.
17')Ep 38.7. 8. cr. p. 671 above whcrc- Basil is embarrassed by the identification
of ousja and hypostasis in N.
t 80 Ad G;aecos (in the Leiden ed.) p. 19 (PG 45(76). Ad Graecos has a subtitle 'based
on accepted ideas' (dtto 'troY KOlVroY tvvOtrov, ex communihus notionibus).
The Cappadocian Theologians
God because they share this ousia. ' " We can ouly know the ousia of
anything by observing its characteristic ({oimlla), as we know a man's
choleric or sanguine nature by observing its characteristics. If we call
Peter and Paul and Barnabas three persons (prosopa) but still see that
they have one ousia (humanity), how much less should we call God
,
three ousiai because he has three prosopa. , 2 And he goes on to speak
at some length on the limitations and inaccuracy involved in using
this analogy of three men,l83 and later deals with an objection based
upon the different uses of the two words ousia and hypostasis as he
employs them. ,.4
He manifestly was aware of some of the defects of
the analogies and the vocabulary which he used.
In his refutation ofEunomius' Confession of 383 Gregory goes into
rather greater detail on this subject. He gives a summary definition of
the Trinity:
'On the score of ousia he is One; that is why the Lord gave instructions
in the Law to observe one Name. But in the recognizable
characteristics (YVroP1U'tucotC; iOll:oJlacnv) of the hypostases he is
distributed into the faith of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, inseparably
distinguished and unconfusedly united' .185
And, a little later:
'the peculiarity (!816TI]<;) of the hypostases renders the distinction of the
Persons (prosopon) dear. and unconfused and one Name of the
statement offaith presented (llpOl,.ill8vov) (to us) indicates plainly the
singleness of the ousia of the Persons in our -belief, I mean of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' .18.
He adds that'these distinctions do not imply a difference of nature,
181 20 , 21 (176).
182Ad Graecos p.22 (177). Cf. Can. Eunom.1.498 (404), 'We have learnt of the
Father and the Son from the truth and have been taught the unity of nature in the
two Persons ({),1t"OKelJ.t1:vol~) while the natural relationship of each to the other is
signified by the names and by the very utterance of the Lord also.' But he still insists
that the name of God is irrelevant, for he is only known by his activity or effects,
ibid. 11.149 (960); Ad Ahlabium Pp.42-43 (120-1). We do not know what the
Godhead is, only its 'energies' which we experience; we can recognize the Persons
because we can perceive cause and effect, e.g. that the Son is from the Father and that
the Spirit is also from the Father (and not vice versa), that is, their relations 'to 1t~
elval, Ad Ablabium pp. 55-;; (133, 136).
183Ad Graecos PP.23-27 (180-1); cf. Gonzalez, op. cit. 38-52.
184 pp. 28-33 (181, 184-5).
185Ref. Can. Eunom. 6 (469).
186Ibid. 12 (472); the one Name is of course God.
725
 The Controversy Resolved
but only 'the recognizable characteristics of the hypostases'. We do
not mix up the Persons with each other but we can know
'each in the peculiar characteristic ~f the hypostasis in infinite
perfection both observed separately' and not divided from the
union',187
And he goes on to suggest that the reason why God in the Bible
refrains from disclosing his name is that it was a sign that his essence is
incomprehensible, though we can know God sufficiently to achieve
salvation."8 Kannengiesser has shown that the first book of
Gregory's Contra Eunomium (though it has been observed to betray
some signs of hasty composition) follows a logical method. He first
treats ofthe fundamentalideas which Eunomius in his Second Apology
brings to the fore, then refutes them according to the conventions of
philosophical dialectic,and then brings on arguments and texts from
Scripture, treating the work section by section.'8'
Gregory understands very well that Eunomius' doctrine of a
reduced Son effectually prevents God communicaring himself, and
perhaps is designed to do so:
'He says that the ingenerate and unapproachable Light cannot reach
the point of experiencing suffering (nuB'll1utrov) and allots such an
arrangement to the generated One because such a thing is appropriate
and natural to him. '190
18713 (472). Cf. Danielou Plalonisme et theologie 38 and Balas Metousja Theou
s6--?; for the incomprehensibility C?f God see Danielou op. cit. 99·
188 14-16 (473) cf. Con. Bunom. III (i) 108 (604). For an analysis of Gregory's use of
ousia and of several other technical terms see Grillmeier CeT 372-4. At Con.
Bunom. 11.298, 299 (1012) Gregory defines epinoia in these terms 'since the Lord
foresaw each type of activity of his human existence in varied forms, he is
recognized successively through each of these names as his overseeing providence
and energy changes into the type (corresponding to) the name. Now a name like
this is stated by w to be called epinoia'; later explanation reveals that under this
heading he includes any figurative, metaphorical description of God or of Christ in
the Bible which illustrates some aspect ofms character or activity. This concept is
taken directly from Origen. This is, of course, not the only meaning attached to the
word epinoia by Gregory. For the interesting question, raised by Holl. whether
Gregory was influenced by the views of Marcellus of Ancyra and made special
efforts to reconcile his surviving disciples to the pro-Nicene church. see R. Hubner
'Gregor von Nyssa und Markell von Ankyra'.
189Kannengiesser 'Logique et idees motrices dans Ie recours biblique selon
Gregoire de Nyssa' 99-101. Gregory mmselftells us that he was obliged to write
Con. Eunom. in a hurry, see Ep. 29 (87).
"oCon. Eunom. III (x) 42 (904); cf. ibid. III (ii) 73 (644) and 12<>-22 (661).
726
The Cappadocian Theologians
Gregory of Course agrees that Christ is a mediator, but holds that his
only mediatorial role was in the Incarnation.'" Here he joins
Athanasius and his fellow-Cappadocians in making the great step
forward in theological thought which marked a departure from
almost all those who had gone before them. In accordance with this
conviction he interprets the key-text of Prov 8:22 by referring the
words to Christ's humanity, not to the pre-existent Logos.'92 In the
third book of the Con. Eunomium he devotes more space to this crux
interpretum. He first tries to show that this passage (with most in
Proverbs),is not meant to be taken literally; the words 'wisdom has
built herselfa house' (8:1) give us the hint; 8:22 is meant to be taken of
the humanity of Christ. In 8:28 the writer is speaking of God's power
and activity before the ages; 8:22 could not refer to the Son's
generation because neither wisdom nor any attribute to God can exist
after God (chronologically or ontologically) or can be created.' 93 He
claims that the Son is in a sense 'unbeginning' (anarchos) because
though he is not without cause, he is without temporal beginning."o
The intention of the Contra Eunomium, says Balas, was to show 'the
inconsistency of the intermediate position of the Son conceived by
Eunomius as being (in perfection) above and (temporarily) prior to
all (other) creatures, but inferior to and posterior to the Father'. He
must, Gregory argues, be either a creature basically as others or co-
equal and co-eternal with the Father."s One result of this is, as in the
case of the other Gregory, an unwillingness on the part of Gregory of
Nyssa to use models for the relation of Father and Son which had in
the past been employed confidently by orthodox writers. Only
under suitable safeguards he will use 'reflection of glory' (a7ta6yuO"l1u
M~'lC;) 'scent of myrrh', 'breath of God' and Logos and mind (voiiC;),
but, once again, to illustrate not subordinate derivation but the
191Ref Con! Eunom. 143, 144 (532, 533). Balis Metousia Theou 30-33 gives
several more examples from Gregory's works.
192Ad Simplicium de Fide (Leiden ed.) 62-63. It is interesting to observe that in the
treatise Adversus Arium et Sabellium (Leiden ed.) 75. whose authenticity has been
seriously doubted, a rather different interpretation of this text is taken.
193Con. Eunom. III (i) 21-65 (573-88). The same passage is dealt with more briefly
at Con. Eunom. 1.296-300 (341, 344). Cf. M.J. Van Parys 'Exegese et theologie dans
Ies Bvres Contre Eunome de Gregoire de Nysse' 183-5.
194Con. Eunom.1.468--g (396). See Balas 'Eternity and Time' 13S; the same article
has a useful account of Gregory's ideas about time, 133-4, and on the eternity of the
Son see ibid. 144.
195'Eternity and Time' 130-1, quotation 130.
727
 The Controversy Resolved
simultaneous necessary existence of source and what is derived from
it. The only point which the word 'Son' conveys in common
parlance in defining the relation to the Father is 'nature' (physis).'9.
The three differ neither in time nor place nor will nor behaviour
(Sltlt1'1oEUflU) nor energy nor experience (pathos).'97
At one point in the third book of his Contra Eunomium'98 Gregory
defines four different methods of generation, thus:
(i) Artefacts are produced 'from matter and by skill'.
(ii) Living beings are produced by a natural process 'from
matter and nature' (physis).
(iii) Some beings are generated 'by a material issue' (s~
""IKfj<; ultoppolu<;).
(iv) Language is generated from an immaterial cause (the
mind) acting through material organs.
The generation of the Son is to be thought of as analogous to (ii), but
modified by (iii), and the various references to it in the Bible make
this clear (especially ofcourse the 'effiuence' (LXX ult6ppolu) ofWisd
7:25 and the 'effulgence' (Ultuuyucrflu) of Heb 1:3). The whole is
summed up inJn I where the Son is described as (i) 'in the beginning'
and (ii) 'with God' and (iii) God (,only-begotten God'). Elsewhere he
says that when we call God 'Father' of the Only-begotten we
abandon all the undesirable attributes of the word 'father', and accept
everything in it which is agreeable to 'a concept worthy of God
which emphasises only the genuineness of the relation to his God and
Father."99 Not only must corporeal associations be purged away,
but also anything suggesting a difference of interval between Father
and Son?OO Analogies for the 'pre-eonian existence (OltUpi;lV) of the
only-begotten God' cannot be drawn from either the production of
lifeless things nor from corporeal generation?O' It is quite as wrong
196Ad Simplicium De Fide 63-64; Con. Eunom. III (vi) 35-39 (781, 784); Ref. Co~.
Eunom. 91""'96 (508-509). The history of analogies such as these in the IVth century IS
traced in Hanson Studies in Christian Antiquity cap. I I.
197Ad Graecos p.2S (180).
198IU (vi) 2?-28 (780); cf. Marguerite Harl 'A proposd'un passage du CONTRE
EUNOME de Gregoire de Nysse' 218-21, and the whole article is to be consulted
for Gregory's ideas about the Son's generation. She points out (225) tha~ Gregory is
teaching that Scripture describes what is in fact beyond huma,n .descrlptio~ by a
series of analogies modifying each other. and felicitously calls thIS une constItution
du langage theologique par retouches successifs.' See above PP.724-S·
"'Con. Eonom. I1I.(i) 77 (593).
'0'78 (593).
2O'lbid. I1I.(vii) 26-30 (812, 8'3).
The Cappadocian Theologians
to call the Son 'ingenerate' as it would be to call the Father 'generate'.
The Son can best be described as 'sent out in a generate manner from
the ingenerate Light' .202
The Son is of course regarded as the Father's image by Gregory;
sometimes he is called 'the image of the archetype' ,203 He is the
image of the archetypal goodness by nature, not just by participation,
'he is good by nature, or rather the only-begotten God is beyond all
good'.'o, And this is a proof of the eternal generation of the Son, for
as beautiful by nature and the fulness of all goodness the Son must
always have been in the Father.'o, And the awkward Marean text,
'why callest thou me good?' (Mk 10:18) is dealt with in the
conventional pro-Nicene manner by regarding it as a disavowal of
the goodness (in the ultimate sense) of Jesus' human nature, but an
assertion of the goodness of his Godhead. 20 •
Gregory will not allow difference of rank nor status among the
Persons of the Trinity, but, like his fellow-Cappadocians, he allows
that there is a certain order whiclr does not affect their equality:
'The same principle applies to the Holy Spirit affecting only a
difference in order (taxis). for as the Son is attached to the Father and
the fact that he derives his being from him does not diminish his status .
(Oltap~I<;) so the Holy Spirit holds to the Son who can be regarded as
prior (ltpoO&ropOUJl&vov) to the hypostasis of the Spirit in theory (epinoia)
on the score of origin' (ahia~). Extents of time have no application to
the prN'onian life. 'So if the matter of origin is removed, the Holy
Trinity is in no way unsymmetrical (dcruJJ.fprovcoC;) with itself.207
The only distinction we can find in the Trinity, he explains in one of
his letters, is 'the order of the Persons (prosopon) and our confession of
the hypostases':
,'The order is given to us in the Gospel according to which our creed
begins from the father, (and passing) through the Son in the middle
~eaves off at the Holy Spirit.'
But the difference of Persons which is manifested in the order of the
20'44, 47 (817).
'03Con. Eonom. L531 (416),636 (448).
'04Ibid. I1I.(vi) 18 (776).
2OsIlI.(i) 49 (581).
206III.(ix) 11-16 (860. 864). For this association of eternal generation and
goodness see Balas Metousia Theou 7C>-7I.
2071. 6 90 .69 1 (464); cf. 191-204 (309. 3 12). order does not affect the status of ousia.
 The Controversy Resolved
hypostases provides no reason for confusing them.20 •
In short, Gregory of Nyssa in his Trinitarian theology follows very
much in the footsteps of Basil and of Gregory of Narianzus. He
elaborates their account of the Godhead rather more than they. He
has no gene in describing the Holy Spirit as fully God. He uses a
technical vocabulary rather more than they. Perhaps for him prosopon
meant the Person as he was discernible in the Scriptures and to reason,
whereas hypostasis rather described what his distinct existence was.
He had no difficulty in fitting his Trinitarian doctrine into his larger
philosophical ideas which were not shared by his fellow-
Cappadocians. But he did not allow doctrine to be swamped by
philosophy, nor the witness of the Bible to be obscured by either.
Holl finely says of him that for him God was a life-imparting power
existing in three forms. 209
s. Conclusion
The three Cappadocian theologians may be said to have shifted the
emphasis and to some extent the ground in the great debate which
resulted in the formulation of the classic doctrine of the Trinity. This
was probably because to a larger extent than before agreement about
the nature of the Son had been achieved, partly because the question
of the status of the Holy Spirit came to the fore in their time as it had
not before, and partly because of the emergence of new opponents
who had not been in evidence till the last three decades of the fourth
century, Eunomians, Macedonians and, to a lesser extent,
Apollinarians. The three theologians were responsible, building on
the foundation which Athanasius had laid, for establishing finally that
the Son (and ultimately the Holy Spirit too) must not be in any sense
subordinated to the Father. They thereby extinguished a long
tradition of theological thought. The pre-existent Christ or Logos
could no longer be used as a convenient means of envisaging how the
metaphysically remote high god or supreme good could come into
contact with this transient, corruptible, passible world in which we
live. It was as incarnate that the Son was a mediator, but not as the
208Ep 24 (Leiden ed.) 7.77; similar statements in Adv. Macedonianos (Leiden text)
92-4, 100.
209 Amphilochius von l~onium 209.
730
The Cappadocian Theologians
divine Son. They refused to allow that ingenerateness constituted
God's essence, rather than merely qualifying it. They had no serious
trouble with the problem of determining whether God's nature or his
will produces the Son; against Eunomius, they insisted that the Son
was not the production of a sheer fiat of the divine will; unlike
Athanasius, they did not attempt to exalt nature above will, but saw
the two acting inseparably together. 210 They maintained steadily
that God's essence (ousia) could not be known but were confident
that we can know him from his activity towards us sufficiently to be
saved. They elaborated a new vocabulary for expressing a Trinitarian
doctrine of God and insisted that this was the only sound way, in their
circumstances and within the limits of their culture, of expressing the
ultimate burden of the witness of the Bible to his nature and
character. They were well aware of the limitations of human
language and showed no inclination at all to impose particular
formulae as the immutable test of orthodoxy. 211 They used
contemporary pagan philosophy with much greater confidence and
freedom than any Christian writer before them, though it is
tendentious to imagine that they surrendered to an Hellenization of
Biblical truth oicontributed to a process which wrapped the original
simple gospel in clouds of obscure metaphysical terms. 212
Two points must, however, be dealt with very briefly before this
chapter closes. The first is the doctrine of the Incarnation in the
Cappadocian theologians. As a group they are less concerned about
the doctrine of the Incarnation than were earlier writers such as
Athanasius and Hilary, partly because their attention was necessarily
210S ee above, pp. 71 1-12, and the reference there to Meijering's article. See also
Gregory of Nyssa Con. Eunom. IlI.(vi) 16 (773).
211 On this subject see cap. 13 ('Dogma and Formula in the Fathers') in Hanson
Studies in Christian Antiquity.
212See Harnack. History IV 106-7: 'The victory of the Nicene Creed was the
victory of priests over the faith of the Christian people'. God becomes an
incomprehensible mystery to be adored silently; and the reverse side of this is
'indifference and subjection to mystagogues'; hence the growth ofa cult of the saints
and relics and icons, and the Mass regarded as magic, etc. Even Simonetti's much
milder suggestion (Crisi 459""""61) that the period of the Cappadocians was one when
originality and creativeness in theology had declined seems to me to be going too
far. Nobody who has read Basil's DSS. Gregory of Nazianzus' Five Theological
Orations and Gregory of Nyssa's Contra Eunomium or Catechetical Oration could
doubt that these men were great writers in full command of their subject. For a
fuller treatment of the influence of philosophy on the Cappadocians. see below
cap. 24. pp. 8S6-<i9.
731
 The Controversy Resolved
distributed over a wider area, and partly because Homoian Arianism
was not so much their target as Neo-Arianism, and Neo-Arianism
was not deeply interested in the Incarnation. Apollinarianism,
though it certainly placed the Incarnation in the centre ofits thought,
was never as widespread nor as influential as Arianism. 213
All the Cappadocians maintained that in becoming man the Son of
God betrayed no inferiority in divine status nor compromised his
divinity,214 and that the Incarnation was an act of sheer grace and
love on the part of the Father (not a necessary device in order to
enable him to communicate with the world}.215 They do not
encounter quite the difficulties in which Athanasius enmeshed
himself when trying to fit the Synoptic accounts of Jesus with a
conviction of his divine nature. One reason for this is of course that
they do not enter into the question as finely as he. But another is that
they were compelled by the appearance of the doctrine of
Apollinaris, put forward with brilliance and conviction by one who
had accepted the doctrine of N ex animo and was a warm admirer of
Athanasius, to recognise that the incarnate Logos certainly had a
human mind. Basil during his controversy with Eustathius was
impelled to deny Apollinaris' doctrine of the Incarnation. Gregory of
Nazianzus2 !6 put the matter in a single iambic line:
lIS'i'\v < to > 1tap!66v, tOUtO Kai 1tpo")."\jf\~OV (,the sinoing element,
that was what had to be assumed'},217
And it is he who coined the famous phrase 'what was not assumed
was not healed'}!· Gregory of Nyssa took Apollinarianism most
213For the Cappadocians' thought on the Incarnation, see Hauschild, 'Basilius
von Caesarea' 309 (for Basil), Hall Amphilochius von Ikonium 178-95 (for Gr~gory of
Nazianzus) and 226-35 (for Gregory of Nyssa) and Grillmeier CeT 367-'77. Holl
acknowledges (op. cit. p. 153) tltat the doctrine of the Incarnation did not occupy a
central position in Basil's attention: I do not here discuss how far Gregory of
Nazianzus rejected and Gregory of Nyssa accepted the idea that the devil was
deceived by the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ. H. E. W. Turner The
Patristic Doctrine of the Redemption can also be consulted on this point.
214Basil Hom. XV.2 (468); Gregory of Nazianzus Drat. XLV.26 (657. 660).
"'Gregory of Nyssa Cat. Or. V. J; Con. Eunom. III (i) 91-92 (597); Ref. Conf.
Eunom. 142-4 (532-3). See Bath Metousia 52.
216Epp. 261.2 and 263.
217De Vita Sua 625 (S4); the necessary element was of course the human mind
(nous).
218Ep 101, PG 37: lSI to yap U1tp6GAll1ttOV a.gepU1ttUfoV. The whole of this letter
is devoted to refuting Apollinaris. Gallay does not include it in his edition of the
letters, regarding it as a separate treatise, and Lampe's Patristic Lexicon gives the
732
The Cappadocian Theologians
seriously of the three; he wrote a weighty work against Apollinaris'
book On the Divine Incarnation, calling his the Antirrheticus or Against
Apollinaris. 219 The consistent complaint of the Cappadocians against
Apollinaris is that while he allows a soul (psyche, something between
the nervous system and the subconscious mind) to Christ, he denies.
him a human mind (pneuma or nous). All three tend to solve the
problem of an immutable, impassible God in a mutable passible body
by attributing all the pathe, the human experiences, to the humanity
or human nature of Christ while insisting that the divinity remained
unaffected and uncom promised by them, and even among the pathe
they want to say that the ouly experiences suffered by the human
body were innocent ones, such as sleep or hunger, and not what we
call emotions. And they think that they can accomplish this the more
easily by attributing a human mind to. him 220 What had been
represented by the Arians as weaknesses in the divine Son they either
attribute to his humanity or explain away. Our Lord, says Gregory of
Nazianzus, retreated into the desert at the Temptation in order to
teach us to value such retreats, not because he needed to pray.22!
Christ's being apparently abandoned by God or being made a sin or
curse are mentioned only because we are so, not he; he did not really
suffer nor dread suffering.>22 Only the man, not the God, was
ignorant}23 Gregory of Nyssa does however counter the statement
of Apollinaris that Christ voluntarily submitted to hunger and thirst,
not by necessity, but by the process (akolouthia) of his nature when he
points out that there is no difference between necessity and process in
this case. 224
The two Gregories certainly have adopted a doctrine of two
wrong page in Migne. C£ Drat. XXII.13 (1145). Gregory wrote a poem against
Apollinaris too, X (PG J6); see especially StM;1 (469).
219Edited in the Leiden series. Gregory also attacked Apollinaris in his third
Epistle (Leiden text p. 24).
22°Basil Epp 261, 262; DSS VIIl.18 (99) (J06, J08); Gregory of Nyss. Cat. Orat.
XIII·s; XVI.I-3; Epp. 3; Antirrheticus 13S, 160. Gregory of Nazianz us is less anxious
to press this point, but see Drat. XXIX. 19: he remained what he was; he assumed
what he was not.
2210rat. XXVI:7 (1239); cf. Drat. XXIX:IS, where all human limitations are
referred to the humanity alone.
2220ra t. XXX.S (108).
223Ibid. IS. 16 (121, 125).
224.Antirrhetieus (Leiden text) p. 23 I (PG 1265); but at De Dei/ate Filii et Spiritus
Sanel! PG 46:564 he channels all weakness and ignorance into the humanity ofjesus
Christ.
733
 The Controversy Resolved
natures. 225 Whether Basil did,so is Iess clear. At Adv. Eunom. i.I8
(553) he speaks of two 'substances' (ousiai) in the incarnate Logos. But
later he writes of 'the characteristics of his nature' of the incarnate
Christ, as if he had only one nature,226 and he confirms this
impression a little further on in the same work, when he interprets
various sayings of Jesus indicative of his obedience to the Father as
showing, not that he is lacking in freewill nor deprived of initiative
nor is ,awaiting a pre-concerted signal, but is demonstrating hIS own
will (yvciJll'l) which yet clings in unswerving union to the Father.
Basil does not allot these words and sentiments to the human
nature. 227
The second point is one which we have already encountered in
connection with Basil. Did the Cappadocians' account of the Trinity
,assume a 'generic' interpretation of the divine substance? We have
seen that in the case of Basil the evidence is uncertain. One or two
texts in Gregory of Nazianzus could be given a 'generic'
interpretation. At one point in his third theological Oration he says
that the fallacy of the Arian argument about the relation of the Son to
the Father lies in assuming that what is predicated of a particular
possessor of a substance must also be true of the substance itself; it is
like arguing that because so and so is a dead man, therefore men
everywhere or mankind is dead. 22 • If this analogy were rigorously
applied to the relation of the first two Persons of the Trinity it would
imply a 'generic' idea of their substance. Elsewhere Gregory uses
these words:
'a Trinity, not an aggregate (cl1tapi91'1],n<;) of unequal objects .. , but a
22'E.g. Greg. Naz. Orat. XXXVII 2 (2B4, 2Bs); XXX.B (113); XXIX.IB (97),
two different functions operating.
226DSS VIILI7 (96) (304). Pruche labours to show that Basil was not
Monophysite here.
2271bid. VIII.2o (104) (316). The two Gregories have, of course, their own
peculiarities in their doctrines of the Incarnation. Gregory of Nazianzus, for
instance, has an account of how the two natures in Christ interlock with each other
(periciloresis) and interchange their characteristics (antidosis idiomatum). Orat. XXVII.
XXVIII, XXIX. Gregory of Nyssa adopts from Origen the idea that after the
Resurrection and Ascension the human body ofJesu;s was so wholly spiritualized as
to be virtually absorbed in the divine: Ad Theophilum (Leid. text) us, 126;
Atlfirr/leticus 201, 228-230. And several scholars have remarked how skilfully he
dovetails his doctrine of the Incarnation into his general philosophical. and
theological scheme, c.g. Sheldon-Williams 'Greek Christian Platonist Tradition'
447, 45 6 .
22KOrat. XXIX. r 5, quot(.'d already above, p. 71 J.
734
The Cappadocian Theologians
compreheasion (""....1]\jII<;) of the equal and equally honoured, for the
word [Trinity1unites what is united by nature and does not allow It to
be dissipated by a numbering which would dissolve things which are
not dissoluble.'229
And this could also be regarded as making for a 'generic' view of the
Trinity. Gregory of Nyssa's contrast between the infinite ousia of
God and the 'circumscribed' (perigraptos) or 'delimited' hypostasis of
each of the Persons is not really the same as a contrast between the
generic and the particular; all he means is that whereas God's
illimitable essence is wholly beyond our grasp he becomes
perceptible in hi,S hypostases. We have already seen that he can use the
analogy of a rainbow to illustrate the relations of the Persons in the
Trinity. All the Cappadocians at some point use the analogy of the
relation of the particular to the general in order to illustrate the
relation of the hypostases to the ousia in the Godhead, and this is
probably the strongest, argument on the side of those who favour the
'generic' theory. But it must be remembered that this is not the only
analogy which they use to illustrate the internal constitution of the
Trinity. One of the favourite illustrations with Gregory of Nyssa is
that of three men who are all members of the human race while
remaining individual human beings. At first sight this looks like a
strong evidence of his holding the 'generic' theory. But he is well
aware of the weakness of this illustration, and soon qualifies it.23o
Elsewhere he is ready to use the illustration of two lamps being lit by a
third to describe the relation of the Persons.231 And in the third book
of the Contra Eunomium he rejects all images for the relation of the
Persons to each other - ray, scent, and breath, even though they are
Scriptural- and will allow only Logos and mind (nous).232 Gregory
of Nazianzus at one point uses the illustration
2290rot. XXIII.IO (1I61). An important article on this subject is one which we
have already noticed. that of Lebon 'Le sort du "consubstantiel"Nic~en II'. But
Lebon is too much inclined to assume that when he has shown that a wnter uses the
expression 'one ousia' his point is proved, whereas it is possible that the meaning in
any case is 'one (generic) ousja'. Even where (as on pp.652-3) he produces an
example of 'identity' (tutk6tll«;) of ousia he has not necessarily proved his point.
Gonzalez's essay (op. cit.) is a good guide upon this subject.
230 Ad Graecos p. 22, where it iJ!ustrates the relation of prosopon to ousja; also
pp. 28-33 and 40-42. It is clear that he is not satisfied with it.
231Adv. Macedonianos P.9I.
2321II (vi) 35-40 (7B1, 7B4); at Ref. Conf Eunom. 91-<)6 (soB, 509) he opts again for
logos and nous.
735
 The Controversy Resolved The Cappadocian Theologians

'to know one and the same nature of Godhead recognized in
unoriginatedness and the Generation and the Procession, as with us in
the mind and the reason and the spirit\
and he adds a disclaimer of putting much trust in earthly
analogies. 233 At another point he produces the example of Adam,
created of clay, Eve, cut out of Adam's side, and Seth, born by natural
procreation of Adam and Eve, yet they are all consubstantial
(homoousios). He specifically says that this analogy, like all analogies, is
unsatisfactory. What he wants it to illustrate is simply that objects
which originate in different ways can be consubstantial, as the Father,
Son and Spirit, all of whom have different origins (or in the case of
the Father, none) are consubstantial. 23 ' He is ready to adopt the
analogy of light when he succinctly describes the Trinity as
(we perceive) 'the Son as light from the Father light in the Spirit
light'.'"
unless the user of it has the good sense to hold onto one point only in
the analogy and throwaway all the others. 2' o
One conclusion can be drawn from this evidence. It is dangerous to
argue confidently from analogies to the Trinity adduced from time
to time by the Cappadocians. They did not put much trust in them
themselves. And in the end the 'generic' thesis about their ide. of
God's substance depends upon taking their analogies strictly and
seriously. We should conclude that while none of the three held a
doctrine of identity of substance as strict as that of Athanasius none of
them believed in a thinly disguised form of the homoiousios. Far less
should we assume that they (or any other theologian in the ancient
world) held the too popular modem theory that God is three persons
in our modern sense, i.e. three centres of consciousness. We can best
end this chapter with a comment by Prestige on the work of Basil and
the two Gregories: 2"

But another statement in the same work is not easily reconcilable 'There is no longer any suggestion that God is one simply by reason of
the fact that the second and third Persons may in the last resort be
with the 'generic' theory; he says
resolved back into the first Person, since they derive their origin from
'Each of the three Persons is as entirely one with those with whom he him. The fact that now comes to be emphasized is that the Father is
is connected as he is with himself, because of the identity of the essence manifested in the Son and in the Holy Spirit wholly and without any
(tQi taOtQi tij, oOa\a,) and of the power.'23. detraction. The three Persons no longer lead back to a unity that is
primarily found in one Person; they are in a real sense one in
Towards the end of this treatise he finally rejects first the analogy of themselves'.
source/stream/river because it might suggest that the Godhead is a
process or flux 237 and then the analogy of the sun-ray-point oflight,
because it suggests a composite nature and because it does not afford a
proper illustration of the distinct reality of the Persons. 238 He next
tentatively suggests a more complicated analogy (which he says is not
his own) of water under sunshine producing a moving and dancing
reflection on the wall. 239 But he finally rejects even this and
concludes that no analogy or image for the Trinity is satisfactory
2330rat. XXIII. II (n6I, II64). quoted above. P.7IO.
2340rol. XXXI.II (145). We have seen above (p. 735) that Gregory of Nyssa can
introduce the analogy of three men too.
235Jbid. 4 (137). In the same place he allows the analogy afthe stream coming
from the source. Cf. Gregory of Nyssa's 'Only-begotten Light shining from the
true Light' (though he adds that these Lights do not vary in distance or nature).
Contra Eonom. 1.378 (369).
236 16 (152).
237
31 (169).
23'32 (169).
24°33 (172).
239 32 ( 169).
241GPT 233.

737

22
The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit
I. Introduction
The scope of this work excludes a treatment of the doctrine of the
Holy Spirit as it developed before the fourth century.' The strongly
eschatological nature of the Spirit in the New Testament had been m
the course of the history of doctrine dimmed and flattened. The early
second-century concept of the Incarnation as the taking of a human
body by the Holy Spirit had given way to a recognition of the
separate existence of the Holy Spirit from the Son in the Apologists
and even more clearly in Irenaeus and Tertullian, though the belief
that God is spirit continued to trouble theologians in their efforts to
create a consistent pneumatology. A strong tendency to subordinate
the Spirit drastically to the Son evident among some third-century
authors led some scholars in the past to postulate a phase of
'Binitarianism' when the Spirit was simply not recognised by the
theologians; but this theory cannot be sustained.> Even Origen's
sophisticated and carefully contrived doctrine of the Spirit as the
third in a hierarchically structured divine Trinity, each hypostasis or
ousia distinct from the other Two without losing a basic unity, did
I For the history of chis doctrine see H. B. Swete The Early History ofthe Doctrine of
tile Holy Spirit, The History of the Doctrine cif the Procession of the Holy Spirit and T~e
Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church; Harnack. History of Dogma IV, 108-19; Gwatktn
Studies in Arianism 26, 210; Simonetti C,;s; 64.362-'7; Stead Divine Substance 175-80 ;
Ritter Das Konzil von Konstantinopel 293-5 (n I); A.1. C. Heron The Holy Spi,it
1-86; V. Lai Nov;ziano: la Trinita lntro 22, 23·
2Novatian. who was supposed to be one of its exemplars, certainly recognised a
separate and divine. though radically subordinated, Holy Spirit: see his De Yrinitate
16.90 (II2, 114) (Loi). And the evidence from Victorinus of Pettau, who was
another writer appealed to in support of the theory, was misunderstood, partly as
the result of a wrong reading of the MSS by the CSEL editor, J. Haussleiter. See
Studies in Christian Antiquity cap. 14. esp. pp. 323-4. and Grillmeier CeT 19 8- 20 1.
The Doctrine of the Spirit
not alter the subordinate status of the Spirit within the Godhead. 3
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit emerged into the fourth century as
a minor concern of the church's theologians. The surprising thing is,
not that more attention was not paid to the Spirit, but that the
theologians continued to include the Spirit in the framework of their
theology. Contemporary, Middle Platonist philosophy (with the
doubtful exception ofNumenius), did not require acknowledgement
of the existence of three ultimate realities. The worship and religious
experience of the Church and the continually practised custom of
baptising into the Triple Name prevented the intellectuals from
omitting the Holy Spirit altogether from their calculations.
Alexander of Alexandria in his letter to Alexander ofThessalonica
refers in conventional fashion in his loosely-recounted Rule of Faith
to one Holy Spirit who inspired the 'divine instructors' of the
Scriptures' but otherwise does not give us any useful clues to his
pneumatology. We do not know whether he would have extended
to the Spirit his conviction that the Father and the Son represented
distinct hypostases (see above p. 141). None of the surviving
fragments of Eustathius of Antioch throws any light on his doctrine
of the Holy Spirit .. He certainly would have repudiated the idea of
the Spirit as a distinct hypostasis in the Godhead, and quite possibly
identified him with the pre-existent Logos. Marcellus of Ancyra
would have agreed with him in rejecting the doctrine of the Spirit (as
he did that of the Son) as a separate hypostasis in the Godhead. We
have already looked at one tell-tale passage in which Marcellus
apparently maintained that:
'If we were to examine the Spirit alone, it would be reasonable to
think that the Logos was one and the same thing with God. But if we
were to examine the additional fact of the Incarnation in the case of the
Saviour, the Godhead would appear to be extended simply by
activity, so that in all likelihood the Monad is geriuinely indivisible'.6
It seems likely that for Marcellus the Holy Spirit simply was God in
his temporary function as Logos before the Incarnation, resting on the
3 Apparently Theognostus at the very end of the third or beginning of the fourth
century followed Origen closely in this subordinating of the Spirit. See Harnack
Yheognostus, Fragments oj the Hypotyposes (TV 24.11) 75, 76.
·Opitz Urk III No. 14. 53 (z8).
sSee above. pp. 214-16.
6Eusebius of Caesarea, Eccles. Theol. 111.4.157 (frag. 60); see above, p. 226 and the
whole treatment pp. 226-28.
739
 The Controversy Resolved
man Jesus during the Incarnation, and when, in Marcellus' view, the
Incarnation was over, returning to his original function as Logos. The
conviction that God is spirit (pneuma) was dominant in Marcellus'
thought.
The ideas on the Holy Spirit ofEusebius of Caesarea, who objected
so strongly to the doctrine of Marcellus and was probably responsible
for his being ejected from his see, were themselves radical, if not
positively eccentric. He certainly accepted the subsistence of Father,
Son and Spirit as three hypostases, but in his case we cannot say, as we
can of Origen's doctrine, 'within the Godhead'. In his earlier work,
Praeparatio Evangelica, he can say:
'Now third, after the second Existent (ousia) established in the place of
the moon (i.e. to the Son as sun) is the Holy Spirit, whom they [the
Christians] also number in the primal and royal rank and honour of
the sovereignty of the universe. to control all that comes into existence
after these [i.e. the Son and the Spirit who have been labelled geneta,
"emergents" by Eusebius already], I mean the subordinated beings
and those who need assistance from them [i.e. the Son and the Spirit];
and the Spirit himself is subordinated to the Creator of the universe'
[i.e. the Son].'
The Holy Spirit holds the third place (taxis) and ministers to the
powers that are subordinate to him. He assists the Logos in his work,
and both are supported by the overflowing fount of being (physis)
from the Father. The Logos alone, as the primal emergent (gennema)
can mediate the ineffable and incomprehensible abundance of the
Father's benefits (ta aya8a). He administers and mediates them to the
Spirit, who conveys them to the spiritual beings below him. 8 As far
as this goes, the Spirit might still be described as God, but in his later
Ecclesiastical Theology Eusebius excludes this possibility. After
passages emphasizing the entire subordination of the Spirit to the
Son, 9 he writes:
'But the Spirit the Paraclete is neither God nor Son. since he has not
received his origin (genesis) from the Father in the same way as the Son
has, and is one of the things which have come into existence through
the Son',10
'Proep. Ev. VlI.I5.6.
'Ibid. 7, 8, 9; cf. P.E. X.20.I, and see above pp. 55-56.
'Eee. Theal. IIl.j.Ij!rI63; 6.164.
IOIbid.6. 164.
740
The Doctrine of the Spirit
Earlier in the same work Eusebius had said that there were three
entities believed in by the Church: the incarnate Son's human nature:
the Son of God inhabiting this having come forth [from the Father,
ltpolovta] and exisring substantially, and God the Father of this Son. l l
There is no mention of the Spirit. This pneumatology of Eusebius.is
indeed extraordinary with no exact antecedent, but it is faithfully
reproduced in every form of Arian doctrine thereafter. Perhaps the
recent definition of the Son as consubstantial had, as it were, raised
the magnitude of the word 'God' which previously had held a much
more indefinite range of meaning,'2 and Eusebius did not think that
the Holy Spirit deserved that intensity of significance. His admiring
disciple Eusebius of Emesa was Arian enough to take the same line;
we are to worship the Father and the Son, but not the Spirit.' 3
When we examine the creeds and confessions of faith which were
so plentifully produced between the years 325 and 360, we gain the
overwhelming impression that no school of thought during that
period was particularly interested in the Holy Spirit. The statement
of the Council of Antioch of 325 made only the slightest mention of
the Spirit, and N, composed a few months later, dismissed the subject
in six words Kal sl<; to ltv.ulla t6liytov (and in the Holy Spirit). Of the
four creeds drawn up at Antioch in 341, the first simply reproduces
the words of the last article of N, the third and fourth give a brief
account of the function of the Holy Spirit but say nothing about his
status. The second (the 'Dedication' Creed) pays more attention to
pneumatology. It runs:
'And in the Holy Spirit. who is given to those who believe for
comfort and sanctification and perfection . . . obviously (in the name)
of the Father who is really Father and the Son who is really Son and
the Holy Spirit who is really Holy Spirit. because the names are not
given lightly nor idly but signify exactly the particular hypostasis and
order and glory of each of those who are named. so that they are three
in hypostasis but one in agreement.'14
This creed does not of course say whether the Spirit is God or not.
111.6.64. 65.
12He may have meam here that the Spirit is not God the Father but if so he did not
say so. Compare the remark ofW.Jaeger that for the Greeks the word theos always
had a predicate. and never indicated an individual Person, as in Hebrew usage
(Gregor "Oti Nyssa's Lellre IIOti heiligen Geist 17.... 18).
13Sec above, pp. 395--6.
14See above. p. 286.
741
 The Controversy Resolved
The highly polemical doctrinal statement of the Western bishops at
Serdica in 343 is concerned about the confusion caused by the fact
that as well as being the Holy Spirit God is spirit. It says that the Son
without the Father would be logos without pneuma (spirit) and that in
the Incarnation the Spirit did not suffer, but only the human body,
and is very anxious to deny a purely moral unity between the Father
and the Son; the apostles, it says, had the Holy Spirit, but this does not
mean that they were the Holy Spirit." The later doctrine of the
Spirit as the bond of union (nexus amoris) between the Father and the
Son is faintly foreshadowed here, but the matter of the Spirit's status
is not decided. The statement of the Eastern bishops at Serdica simply
repeated the fourth Antiochene Creed of 341, with a warning
(directed against the doctrine of Marcellus) that the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit are not the same.'· The Macrostich, produced in 343 or
344 and presented later, vainly, to Constans, asserts that Father, Son
and Spirit are three really existing things (tpia ItpaYliata) and Persons
(ltp6orolta), that they are not identical and not three gods (anathema
IV), and that its compilers believe in:
'the wholly perfect and most holy Trinity, that is in the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit, calling the Father God and the Son God, but
these not two gods, but we confess one rank of Godhead and close
harmony of sovereignty' ,17
The omission of the title 'God' in the case of the Spirit is probably no
accident. The next creed, the First Sirmian Creed of 35 I, reproduces
the Macrostich and adds a few more anathemas: it condemns the
propositions that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one Person
(ltp6oroltov), that the Holy Spirit is 'the ingenerate God', .that the
Spirit is not distinct from the Son, that the Holy Spirit is part of the
Father, and that Father, Son and Spirit are three gods." Everywhere
the concern is not for the status of the Holy Spirit himself, but
(against Marcellus and Photinus) for his distinct existence and at no
point do these formulae commit themselves to saying that he is God.
The notorious Second Creed of Sirmium of 357 simply says of thO"
Holy Spirit, 'And the Comforter the Spirit is through the Son, who
was sent and came according to the promise, so that he might
15S eeabove, p. 302.
16See above, p. 398.
"Hahn Symbole §159, p. 195.
"Ibid. §160, pp. 198--9. See above, pp. 327-8.
742
The Doctrine of the Spirit
support, teach and sanctify the apostles and all believers'. The
Dated CrC"Cd of 359 and the formula suggested by Akakius at Seleucia
I.
in the same year have a rather longer pneumatological article, but one
that adds nothing theologically to what previous creeds have said'>"
The Creeds of Nice in 359 and of Constantinople in 360 have the
barest mention of the Spirit. The set of anathemas of Basil of Ancyra's
Council at Ancyra in 358 did not mention the Holy Spirit.
But during this period there are two interesting exceptions to the
otherwise universal relegation of the Holy Spirit to the category of a
matter of minor interest. The first is the doctrine of Cyril of
Jerusalem. He devotes considerable attention to the Holy Spirit, and
while he does not directly apply to him the word 'God' he defines his
status as virtual equality with God. He is 'honoured with the same
dignity of status as the Father and the Son'. As well as describing the
Spirit's function, Cyril says that the Spirit is 'honoured with the
Father and the Son and at the time of the holy baptism is included in
the Holy Trinity', a significant remark. He deprecates unnecessary
prying into the question as to the Spirit's nature (Physis) and
hypostasis. He subsists distinctly along with the other two Persons and
takes part with them in the same saving strategy towards us. 2 ' The
other exception is the 'Letter of George of Laodicea' which was
circulated, probably in 359, among the party of Basil of Ancyra who
favoured the formula 'like according to ousia'. Not only is the author
very firm on the distinct existence of the three Persons, but he clearly
includes the Holy Spirit in the Godhead:
'The Easterners confess that there is one Godhead embracing
everything through the Son in the Spirit, and they confess one
Godhead and one sovereignty and one rule, but still they recognize
the Persons in the properties of their hypostases, perceiv'ing the Father
subsisting in the paternal authority and the Son . .. and they confess
the Holy Spirit also, whom the Scripture names the Paraclete,
recognizing him as subsisting from the Father through the Son'.22
And later he labours to show that though both Father and Son are
spirit (pneuma), they are nevertheless distinct." When we later come
to discuss the origins of the so-called 'Assailants of the Spirit'
19See above. p. 345.
2°Hahn op. cit. §163. 204 and Epiphanius Panarion 73.25.9 (299).
21See above, pp. 407-8.
22Epiphanius Panarion 73.14.3, 4 (288, 289).
23Ibid. 17. 18 (290. 291).
743
 The Controversy Resolved
(Pneumatomachi, i.e. Macedonians) we must keep in mind that tliis
Homoiousian writer is one of the first to recognize the divinity of the
Holy Spirit.
We have no means of determining and very little even of
speculating about Arius'own doctrine of the Holy Spirit. There is a
wholly colourless reference to the Spirit in a creed carefully divested
of controversial points, an enigmatic remark to the effect that 'the
Spirit of eternity was in the superior Word!' and two allegations of
Athanasius to the effect that Arius taught that the ousia of the Spirit
was wholly unlike that of the Father,>' and that the Spirit was made
out of non-existence. 26 From such scanty evidence no firm
conclusions can be drawn. We may guess that Arius regarded the
Spirit as the creature of the Son, that it is most unlikely that he would
have used the word 'God' for him, and that he thought of him a;
existing as a distinct hypostasis from those of the Father and the Son,
but that is all. 27 Asterius in one fragment declares his beliefin God the
Father, his Son the only-begotten God and in the Holy Spirit, and
that the Father must truly be Father and the Son truly Son and the
Holy Spirit similarly!" and in another fragment that the Holy Spirit
proceeds from the Father. 2 • And Narcissus of Neronias made the
famous (and to Ossius shocking) statement that he believed in three
ousiai (by which he no doubt meant hypostases = Persons).30
The Homoian Arians, once their theology and· party had gained
maturity and cohesion, taught a doctrine in which the Spirit was as
neatly dovetailed into subordination to the Son as the Son was to the
Father. We have enough of the fragments of Palladius' reply to
Ambrose to be sure of this. The Holy Spirit is the obedient servant of
the Son, carrying out the tasks appointed to him. It would be absurd
to regard the Holy Spirit as similar or equal in ousia to the Son or to
the Father. None of the Three is similar to each other in that
respect. 31 Though these theologians are ready to ascribe a large range
of activities and privileges to the Spirit they maintain that he is not
24See above, p. 9.
25See above, p. 14.
260r. con. Ar. IIl.IS (169).
27See above, p. 23.
28Frag. XXX (65). see above, p. 35; the omission of the title 'God' to the Holy
Spirit is probably deliberate.
29Fragment XXXI (67). see above, p.' 36.
JOSee above, pp. 45. ISO-I. .
liSee' above, PP 563-4.
744
The Doctrine of the Spirit
God and is not to be worshipped. On the contrary, he himself
worships the Son (who in his turn worships the Father), and
intercedes with the Son as the Son does with the Father. They would
probably not have objected to saying that the Spirit is the image of
the Son who is the image of the Father, nor that he is not begotten but
proceeding. Bunhey were sure that he is not God.32 Germinius of
Sirmium, whatever views he may later have held, was being true to
type when in his argument with Heraclianus he declared:
" state that the Holy Spirit is the chiefof the angels and archangels. For
just as the Son is not like the Father in everything, so neither is the
Holy Spirit to the Son'. 33
Ulfilas' Rule of Faith as given us by Auxentius says of the Spirit:
'The Holy Spirit is neither Father nor Son but was made by the Father
through the Son; he is not first nor second, but placed by the Second in
the third rank; he is not ingenerate nor generate but created by the
lngenerate through the Only-begotten ... One God exists and one
only-begotten God the Lord subsists, and the Holy Spirit the advocate
cannot be called either God or Lord, but he received his existence
from God through the Lord; he is not originator nor creator, but the
Illuminator, but the Sanctifier, Teacher and Leader, Helper and
Intercessor . . . and Confirmer. the servant of Christ, the distributor of
graces, the pledge of our inheritance in whom we have been sealed for
the day of redemption, without whom nobody can say "Jesus is
Lord ... ·34
Eunomius' doctrine of the Holy Spirit differed very little from
this. The Spirit is the creature (ltoi1l1lu) of the Son who in his turn is
the creature of the Father, and he is third in rank. 3' He lacks
• 32Se~ .ab~ve. ,pp. 57?,:2. Meslin (Les Ariens 323) hazards the guess that this
doveta~lmg der:ves o~lgmal1y from Neo-Platonic ph~Josophy, 'pour JaqueUe toute
p~oces~lon ~st. necess~lreme~t Une degradation de l'Etre. une chute temoignante
dune mfenonte et dune dissemblance fonciere.'
33~lt~rca!io ~eracl.iani cum Germinio, PG Supp. 347. The Creed attributed to
Ger~lnlUs In HJlary s Coll. Anliar. A III (47) simply ends 'and in the Holy Spirit,
th:
t~at IS ~araclete, :,h? was, given to us from God the Father through the Son'.
SimOnetti,. <?sserva~lom Sull "AItercatio Heracliani cum Germinio'" maintains
that Germ~n.1Us was In fact less of an Arian than he is represented in this work. and
that the ongInal has been worked over in order to make his views more anti-Nicene
than they r~alIy ~ere. In any case, this is a typical1y Homoian Arian utterance.
Gryso~ ~co[les Artennes 195-6 gives a good summary of the Homoian doctrine of
the SPIrIt.
34Gryson. ScoUes Ariennes SO-52 (240, 242); cf. 63 (250).
"Basil Adv. Eunom. II.J2 (645-8); [/1.[ (653).
745
 The Controversy Resolved
'Godhead and creative power'. 36 In his (First) Apology Eunomius
described the Holy Spirit as third in nature as well as rank, not to be
worshipped, but he in whom worship is offered, coming into
existence by the Father's command through the Son, lacking in
Godhead and creative power, but complete in sanctifying and
instructing power. 37 In his carefully-phrased Confession which he
produced for the Council of Constantinople held in 383 he repeats all
these points. The Spirit is not comparable with the Father and the
Son, but he is the special, unique and pre-eminent product of the Son
'the first work and the most important, the greatest and the fairest',38
and he gives a long list of the Spirit's activities in the Church.'·
The doctrine of the Spirit in Hilary of Poitiers had already been
examined. 40 He starts from the premises which he inherited from
Tertullian. The Spirit is a distinct manifestation of the nature of the
Godhead, in fact of its substance, which of course is spirit.41 He
receives from the Son and proceeds from the Father, but what he
receives from the Son he also receives from the Father. One of his
distinguishing features is that he is gift: he is received. He is neither
generated nor created. He has a function and rank belonging to his
own Person. Hilary makes no distinction between the Spirit in the
economy of salvation and the Spirit in his relations within the
Godhead. Though several scholars have attempted to do so, it is not
possible to fmd a doctrine in Hilary of the mutual indwelling
(circuminsessio) of the Persons of the Trinity. The role assigned to the
Holy Spirit in his famous pithy saying sums up the particular
importance to him of the Spirit
infinitas in aetemo species in imagine, 'usus in munere
1
(,Infinity in the Eternal, revelation in the Image, experience in the
"Ibid. 3.5 (665)·
37 Apologeticus 2$ (861).
38Gregory of Nyssa ConJ. Rif. Eunom. 202 (557); 208 (561) (quotation from this).
"Ibid. 212 (564), 218 (565), 221 (565),223 (568),224 (568), 227 (569), 230 (569),
231 ~S69). 232 (572); see above, p. ~2I. Eunomius'little creed submitted by him in
36015 wholly colourless on the subject of the Holy Spirit, as on all other points. See
Hahn Symbole §190, pp. 260-1.
40See above, pp. 502-5.
. 41 See his early statement in the Commentary on Matthew 12.17 (284) 'What is more
mexcusable than to deny to Christ his being God and deprive him of the substance
(substantiam) of the Father's spirit in him, seeing that he perfects aU his work in the
Spirit of God?' So also ibid. 12.18 (286), it is to blaspheme against the Spirit if you
deny the Son's sharing in the Father's substance.
The Doctrine of the Spirit
Gift').42 But we must credit Hilary with the first bold and successful
attempt to incorporate the Holy Spirit into the structure of an
eternal, and not merely economical Trinity.
Lucifer of Calaris offers almost no material for the seeker after
pneumatological doctrine. He can declare that Father, Son and Holy
SPIrIt ellJoy a smgle eternIty and that they are 'a perfect Trinity and a
single Godhead', but that is all. 43 In a crude and abbreviated way he
has transposed the legacy ofTertuliian into the terms of the theology
of the fourth century .. Phoebadius of Agen is a more discerning
theologIan who stands m much the same tradition as that of Lucifer.
He. is faithful to Tertullian in describing the Holy Spirit whose
dlvmlty he does not doubt, as the 'body' of the Word, invisible and
incomprehensible spirit, but still a body.44 These two were pursuing
a theologIcal traIl qUIte dIfferent from that of either anti-Nicenes or
pro-Nicenes in the East, and one which brought with it its own
difficulties. Gregory of Elvira, a better-informed writer than either of
the othert~o, is one of the earliest to state the consubstantiality of the
Holy SPIrIt, and he ends his Rule of Faith with the words 'three
Persons of one substance' (tres personae unius substantiae). He is here of
course reading into the creed of Nicea the theology of Tertullian
suitably adjusted for his times; the 'corporeal' concept of substance ha;
not been exorcized: 45 This applies even more strongly to the
arguments of Herachanus against Germinius. 46 The Council of Paris
which was held in the year 360, whose Acts have not survived'
insisted that the test of orthodoxy should be the acceptance ofN bu;
said nothing about the divinity of the Holy Spirit. 47 That this tenet
was becoming a crucial one in the search for the Christian doctrine of
God, and that the words ofN alone did not guarantee its acceptance,
was therefore perhaps becoming plain to several minds in the East by
the year 360, but this point was not yet appreciated in the West.
One striking exception to this generalization is Marius Victorinus,
as he is an exception in several other respects. He has no difficulty in
recogmzmg the full dlvmity and the consubstantiality of the Holy
42De Trinitate II.I (50-I).
43S ce above. p. 513.
44SCC above. p. 518.
4SSee above, p. 526. For Zeno of Verona, see above, pp. 529-30.
46See the Altercatio Heracliani cum Germinio, and ahove, pp. 528--9. The Latin
Commentary Otl tire !"jce~e c.reed printed in Turner EOMIA I 330-47 (and PL Supp. I
22~2IO) has. nothmg slgmfi~ant to say about the Holy Spirit (see above, p. 528).
AthanaslU' Ep. ad Rufinlonum (PG 26:II80-1); Hilary Coll. Antiar. Al (43).
747
 The Controversy Resolved
Spirit. He goes farther, indeed, than Basil of Caesarea ever went,
more than a decade before Basil wrote his great work on the Holy
Spirit. Characteristically he fails to make a satisfactory distinction
between the Son and the Spirit and characteristically he has some
I date of these Letters is to be placed certainly between 356 and 362,5'
original ideas on the subject, such as the Spirit as 'the voice of a voice',
perhaps anticipating the Cappadocian's concept of the Spirit as 'the
image of an image'. He comes closer than perhaps any other fourth-
century writer to conceiving of the Holy Spirit as, so to speak, the
return movement of God to himselfin response to his movement out
from himselfin the Son. 48 But the work of Marius Victorinus had no
immediate impact upon the debate concerning the doctrine of God.
Few in the West were capable of understanding it,and as far as..we
know it was never translated into Greek. Even had it been available to
Eastern theologians it is doubtful if they would have troubled to read
a treatise by a Western writer, so steadily had the Eastern theologians
made the running for more than a century past.
2. The Holy Spirit in the thought of Athanasius and his
Followers
It was Athanasius of Alexandria who first faced squarely the subject
of the Holy Spirit, first, not merely among those who were involved
in the great debate about the Christian doctrine of God which
preoccupied the minds of the men of the fourth century, but first in
the history of Christianity. And he apparently did so, not because he
saw this subject as the next essential item on the agenda of those who
were developing the doctrine of God or endeavouring to cope with
the intellectual problems which it raised, but because one of his close
friends and suffragans, bishop Serapion ofThmuis situated on one of
the branches of the river in the Nile delta, wrote to him asking his
advice about how to counter the arguments of a group of Christians
with whom he had come in contact, who were satisfied as to the
divinity of the Son but denied that of the Holy Spirit. 49 Athanasius
wrote in reply several letters on the subject of the Holy Spirit50 The
48See above, 'pp. 550-2.
.4~The identity of thi$ group is discussed below.
50Epistulae ad Serapion; PC 26: 52g--676. They have been translated into English
by C. R. B. Shapland Leiters of Saint Athanas;us concerning the Holy Spirit (London
1951), with an intr<?duction and commentary. Letters.2 and 3 really form a single
\ The Doctrine of the.Spirit
and the area of uncertainty can with some probability be reduced to
359 or 360,52 while the archbishop was enduring his third exile in the
hinterland of his see.
Athanasius begins his argument for the divinity of the Holy Spirit
from the point which was peculiarly his own, the existence of God as
Trinity. The word 'Trinity' (tPIII.) had long been in use (first by
Theophilus of Antioch in the second half of the second century) and
had been used to cover a multitude of conceptions. Even Palladius'
scheme of a high God, a lesser god and a created spirit could be called
a Trinity. But Athanasius refuses such an idea: the concept of the
group against which he is writing is 'not a Trinity but a Dyad.and
then a creature'. 53 Now, as Athanasius has abandoned the desire to
see any mediating element within the. Godhead nor any mediating
supernatural instrument used to come between God and men, except
the human nature ofJesus Christ, he cannot allow the createdness of
the Holy Spirit. He has early in the work to tackle the two proof texts
upon which his opponents relied to establish their case. The first is
one which would strike all modem students of the Bible as
grotesquely irrelevant, Amos 4:13. In the RSV it runs:
'For 10, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind, and
declares to man what is his thought, who makes the morning darkness
and treads on the heights of the earth, the Lord, the God of hosts is his
name',
In the Septuagint version, however, the passage began:
6.6tt 160" tyro ""cperov ~pOvt1)v Kul KtI~roV ltveu~u KUt UltUyyEA.A.roV cl<;
uv9proltou<; TOV XPlcrTOV ulhou
which can be rendered in English:
'Therefore. behold, I am establishing the thunder and creating Spirit
and announcing to men his Christ'.
In fact under the magical wand of mistranslation it became a
~etter, and 4.8-23. ~houg? probably by Athanasius, is a quite separate fragment not
mtegrally connected WIth the letters. Letter 3 is in fact little 'more than an
abridgement of Letter I .
:~So Swete Tile Early History of the Doctrine of~he Holy Spirit 47.
. So, Quasten Patrology I1I.S?-9; Shapland (op. CIt. 16-18) suggests between the
begmnmg of 358 and before the end of 360.
53Epp. ad Serap. 1:2.
749
 The Controversy Resolved
Trinitarian formula which ineluded a created Holy Spirit. Had
Athanasius been capable of appealing to the original Hebrew, he
could have blown this proof sky-high in a sentence. But as he has not
the resources to do this, he has to go a more roundabout way; he
claims that pneuma here means 'wind' and not 'Spirit' (this is why he
calls his opponents Tropici because they insist on taking literal
passages such as this metaphorically, using allegories or 'tropes'); or
the reference to Christ means the Incarnation and the pneuma meant
the spirit of man renewed by the Incarnation. 54 The other proof text
used by these tropic; is I Tim 5:21, 'In the presence of God and of
Christ Jesus and of the elect angels, I charge you to keep these rules
without favour'. The holy angels here are apparently equivalent to
the Holy Spirit. Athanasius labours to show from various texts in the
Bible that the Holy Spirit cannot possibly be on a level with angels. 55
He appeals characteristically to the mutual indwelling of the three
Persons:
'For the holy and blessed Trinity is inseparable and united in itself, and
when the Father is mentioned his Logos is there too and the Holy Spirit
who is in the Son and if the Son is named, the Father is in the Son and
the Holy Spirit is not parted from the Logos. For there is one grace
completed from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit'. s.
Ne~t he has to meet the argument of the Tropic; that if the Spirit
proceeds from the Father the Father has two Sons, and ifhe proceeds
from the Father and the Son then he is the Father's grandson. Here,
far from being too allegorical they are too literal, and A thanasius
protests against pressing the analogy of Fatherhood too far. 57
'It is enough to know that the Spirit is not a creature and is not listed
along with created things, for nothing alien is associated with the
Trinity, but it is inseparable and consistent in itself. This doctrine is
enough for the believers. Beyond that the cherubim cover with their
wings',58
He now turns to a description of the function of the Holy Spirit as
witnessed in the New Testament,59 and in the course of this defines
54Ibid. 1.3-10; Gregory of Nyssa was later to take the same line.
551.10-14.
561.14.
571.15-18.
581.1 I.
591.19.20.
750
The Doctrine of the Spirit
the Spirit's relationship within the Trinity as correlation and unity.6.
He means, as he goes on to explain, that what the Son is to the Father
so the Spirit is to the Son;just as the Son abides in the Spirit in his ow~
image, so the Father abides in the Son in his own image. The Spirit is
indeed an image of an image.
'Since the Son is one as the living Logos, then must his perfect and full
sanctifying and illuminating living activity (energeia) and gift be one
and it is said to proceed from the Father because it shines and is sen;
and is given from (napa) the Son who confessedly is from (tIC) the
Father'.
The Son is sent from the Father, the Son sends the Spirit, the Son
glorifies the Father and the Spirit glorifies the Son; the Son deelar.es
what he has heard from the Father and the Spirit receives from the
Son; the Son came in the name of the Father, and sends the Spirit in
his own name. 61 Athanasius, in spite of some appearances, is not here
speaking of the position of the Spirit within the Trinity. He never
tries to determine this. He is speaking of what in formal theological
language is called the Spirit's mission, not his procession; he never
uses the noun 'procession' (ekporeusis) of the Spirit. 62
The final objection of the tropic; mentioned in this work is a
repetition of an earlier one; if the Spirit is 'from God', why is he not
called a Son? Athanasius cannot answer this, because he has almost no
concept of the Spirit's function except to be a kind of understudy of
the Son. All he can do is to adduce texts to show that as the Son is
W!sdom and Truth and Power so the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of
WISdom, Truth, Power and Sonship.63 At various points in these
Letters Athanasiu~ describes the characteristic activities of the Spirit.
They . are saTo'ctlficatIOn, perfecting, illuminating, quickening,
anomtmg,.'ealmg64 and finally conferring apotheosis, or divinizing,
human bemgs who have reached their glorious destiny.65 But we
miss in Athanasius' account any serious understanding of the distinct
6~Patristic. L,exico~ (~ith a wrong reference; it should be 1.20 not 1.10) 'co-
or~lnate ~en~s (~hlCh IS nonsense)); Shapland, 'co-ordination', which introduces
Wlt~ou~ Justification the concept of the nexus amoris. The Migne ed's Latin tr. is
comuncllO. .
611.20.
62Shapland points this out. op. cit. 117, 18 3.
631.25.
64 1.9 , 19. 20,23.29: 2.7.
651.24. 25; 2.4.
75 1
 The Controversy Resolved
function of the Holy Spirit in salvation. This is partly because
Athanasius, like all Christian writers from the third century onwards
at least, has lost the eschatological note which the New Testament
witness to the Spirit contains, so that it never occurs to him to relate
the Holy Spirit to time, and partly because his christology has to
some extent absorbed his soteriology 66
A few more points must be noted about Athanasius'
pneumatology. He invokes the practice of baptism and the
traditional faith of the Church more than once m argulllg for the
divinity of the Spirit.67 Curiously, he declares that 'we must receive
knowledge about the Spirit from the Son',6. whereas one would
have expected him to say 'about the Son from the Spirit'; this
suggests again that there is something lacking in his conception of the
Spirit's function. This is partly at least because he does not want to
give the slightest foothold for anyone to place the Son m a
subordinate position in relation to the other Persons of the Godhead.
At Or. con. Or. 1II.24 he says openly that the Son does not share in the
Spirit in such a way that this sharing ensures his abiding in the Father,
nor does he receive the Spirit but rather supplies him to everybody;
and the Son does not unite the Logos to the Father, but rather he
receives the Spirit from the Father. There is certainly no doctrine of
nexusamoris (bond oflove) here!6. In two places Athanasius is ready
to apply the term 'homoousi.on' to the Spirit.70 He never directly calls
the Holy Spirit 'God' but contends strongly for his uncreatedness and
eternity.71
The Tomus ad Antiochenos of 362 insisted that those people must be
66See above, pp. 450-1.
67 1.28,29.30, 33; 3.6; 4.5. He was not the first to use this argument in theological
debate; Eusebius of Caesa rea had preceded him, Adv. Marcellum I.I.8 (PG 24:728)
and Origen before him Peri Archon PC 1.146.3.2. In De Syn. 3 (363) Athanasius
appealed to the practice of baptism as an argument for the divinity of the Son, and
he had used it thus earlier in Or. con. Ar. 11.41. The same appeal is made by George of
Laodicea (Epiphanius Panarion 73.16.6 (289», by Epiphanius himself ibid. 76.50.7
(4 0 5), by the anonymous Ps.-Athanasius Or. con. Ar. IV.2I. The Arians appealed to
baptism to prove the inferiority of ch<l! Spirit (because he came last in the triple
Name), see Gryson Scripta A"iana Latina Fr. V (XV) and Ps.-Didymus De Trin.
111.2) (928, 929).
68 3. .
4
69Simonetti has noted this passage Crisi 277.
7°Epp. ad Serap. 1.27 and 2.6; he is not known to do this elsewhere.
71The nearest he comes is when at 1.31 he speaks of the Spirit as 9EOWyOUJ.l6VOV
J.l6't~ 'tOD oioD, i.e. 'reckoned in the Godhead' or,less strongly 'ranked in theology
with the Son'.
752
The Doctrine of the Spirit
condemned who say that the Holy Spirit is a creature and separated
from the ousia of Christ. 72 And Athanasius' Letter to Jovian, sent in
36 3 mentioned heretics who regard the Holy Spirit as 'a creature and
an artefact (7t61'lflU) deriving from the Son','3 and defmed the
orthodox doctrine of the Spirit in these terms:
(the compilers ofN) 'did not divorce the Holy Spirit from the father
and the Son, but rather glorified him along with the father and the
Son in the single faith of the Holy Trinity, because the Godhead in the
Holy Trinity is one'.74
The disingenuous statement that the fathers of Nicaea had endorsed
the d~ctrine of the Spirit's deity is repeated in the Letter to the Bishops
of AfrICa (3 69). When they wrote the words 'and in the Holy Spirit'
the. Nlcene Fathers, he says, were refuting those who blaspheme
agamst the Holy Spirit,
'in order that when they should confess perfect and full faith in the
Holy Trinity they should make known thereby the nature of faith in
Christ and the teaching of the Catholic Church'.75
Owing to the work of Athanasius, then, the Eastern Church had been
notified by at the latest 360 that the pro-Nicene cause involved
defending not only the divinity of the Son, but also that of the Holy
Splm, and AthanaslUs had laId a foundation for a new theology of the
SPirit whIch others were to contmue and. amplify.'6
We have already had a glimpse of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit of
Eplphamus of Salamis. 77 The creed of Ancoratus II 8 cannot be
original, but that of 1 19 is. The Spirit is here described as uncreated
and as proceeding from the Father and receiving from the Son. Thi;
Idea of the Spirit receiving from the Son occurs again and again in
both the Ancoratus and the Panarion.'· It is often combined with the
statement that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son,
72See above, p. 640 .
73Theodoret HE IV.3.7.
74Ibid. 14.
75Ep. ad Afros Episcopos I I (PG 26:1048). Theodoret HE quotes this letter in two
fragm~nts. one at 1.8·7-16 and the other at 2.23.1""'9, neither of which includes this
quotatIOn.
76Ha~ack (History IV, 114) remarks that Athanasius' Letters to Serapion mark th
first takIn!? o~a pOsition o.n the.subject of the Holy Spirit by the ·orthodox'. On:
would be inclined to modIfy thIS by reference to Hilary and to Marius Victorinus.
77See above, p. 661.
78Ancoratus 11.3 (19); 73.1, 2 (91); Panarion 62.4.12 (392); 69.18.4 ( 167).
753
 The Controversy Resolved
the famous (or notorious) Filioque Clause. 79 At one point Epiphanius
attacks a number of negative epithets to the Spirit, in this concise
formula
'not second brother, not uncle. not grandfather nor progeny, but the
Holy Spirit from the same ousia of the Father and the Son'. 8.
The sentence is of course rejecting the malicious suggestions of the
Macedonian criticism of the pro-Nicene doctrine of the Spirit.
Epiphanius does not directly apply the term homoousion to the Spirit
in the Ancoratus, but he can here call him 'incomprehensible'
(aKa<clATJlt<O<;) and add:
'but the Trinity is always of the same ousia; there is not a separate ousia
from the Godhead nor a separate Godhead from the ousia, but the
same Godhead and the Son and the Holy Spirit from the same
Godhead.'''
And in the later Panarion he directly applies the term homoousion to
the Spirit. 82 His vocabulary has by no means set into the
conventional meanings suggested by the Tomus ad Antiochenos and
later stereotyped by the Cappadocians. He can say of the Trinity
'there are three, one harmony and one Godhead of the same ousia, of
the same Godhead, of the same hypostases', 83 and (the Lord)
'manifesting to us three Persons «pia ltp6(J"'lta) of the holy worship
from a threefold hypostasis', where hypostasis could mean 'Person' but
in this context may mean 'substance'. 8. He can assemble a vast list of
proof texts to show the divinity of the Holy Spirit,85 but does not
attempt to explain how or where the Bible witnesses to his existence
as a distinct hypostasis.
At one point in the Ancoratus Epiphanius produces an interesting
account of gradual revelation, echoes of which we shall encounter
later. One Godhead, he says, is announced in Moses (i.e. the
Pentateuch), a Dyad is strongly preached in the prophetic books, and
79S ee below, pp. 787"""'90 for an account of the Filioque in the fourth century.
80 An" 7.8 (14). ou auva.&).CPOy au 1ta'tpaSsMpov, ou npo1tatopOv OUK Ihcyovov. tU).'
&K tij~ amt;<; oOO"i«<; xatpo<; Kat lilaC RVeU!!" aY10V.
81 6.10 (13).
82Panarion 74.1 1.2 (33 J). In the Anc. 64.2 (77) he calls the Trinity 'correlative and
co"nsubstantial' (OIl6<n:01XOC; Kai O).lOOU<J10C;).
83 Anc. 67.4 (82).
"Ibid. 7 (82).
"Ibid. 68.1-18 (82-8j).
754
The Doctrine of the Spirit
a Trinity (i.e. the Holy Spirit here joining the Father of the Law and
the Father and Son of the prophets) is manifested in the Gospels.80
And at one point he calls the Holy Spirit 'the bond (mivOt(Jl1o<;) of the
Trinity'.87 In some ways Epiphanius is the most Western of the
Eastern. theologians, or perhaps one should say the theologian least
influenced by the Cappadocians. He can appeal to the Triple Name of
Matt 28:20,88 but he does not produce the argument from the
practice of baptism.
The treatise on the Holy Spirit which we have· in Jerome's
translation and which we can with confidence ascribe to Didymus the
Blind (as distinct from the anonymous author of the De Trinitate
sometimes attributed to Didymus) is not a full-blooded polemical
work, but rather a considered. treatise, in spite of meeting some of the
arguments of the Macedonians. 89 The author has no doubt that the
Holy Spirit is divine. He is not merely 'activity' (operatio) but
'substance' (substantia),90 and he exhibits both 'a share in the nature'
of the Godhead, and also 'the peculiar property belonging
respectively to the Persons'.91 He is uncreated and consubstantial.92
The Spirit comes from God the Father, but both Father and Son send
the Spirit (an interesting and significant distinction).93 The author
recognizes that all our language about God is spoken analogically or
eqUl)focally.9' He deals more successfully with the proof texts of the
Macedonians than Athanasius, partly because he can apparently
appeal to the Hebrew. 95 Finally he deals summarily with the
8·Anc. 7).j. 6 (92).
87Panarion 64.4.2 (392).
"Ibid. 69.j6.1 (20)).
89P,G 39:1033-85. See above, pp. 655-6. There is no reason to think that Jerome
?3Smisrepresented the original, as has been suggested by some who find the work's
mc.onsi:tencies with t.h~ ~e T~initate of P~eudo-Didymus puzzling. See A. I. C.
Heron The Holy Spmt tn Qngen and Dldymus the Blind' 299-300.
9°23 (1053).
91 12 (1044) naturae consortium and personarum proprietas.
92 14 (1046). Ij (1047).
932 6 (1056, 1057).
94~8 (1066) Jerome gives the Greek and then translates, lCa'faxpllcrt"lKro~ id est
abustve. He translates h),postasis by substantia and ousia by essenna. .
"14, 15 (1046, (047) where he realizes that rhe LXX is wrong in its renderingTOV
Xp.u:n6v at AmOS4:12. 12. See also 30 (1060) where the Macedonians are revealed as
us~g a conflated text ofJn IS:2~and I~:26 (,But when the Paraclete the Holy Spirit
wI.ll co~e ,,:,hon: th~ Father wll~ send ~n my name, ?e will teach you everything')
eVidenCing In their view the servlle and mferlor function ofthe Spirit's nature: 1 Cor
2:1 I was also one of these texts, see 54, 55 (1079, 1080), and Zechariah 12:1, which
755
 The Controversy Resolved
Macedonian argument which sarcastically suggested the various
relations. brother. uncle. grandson. implied. in their view. by the
pro-Nicene doctrine of the Spirit's divinity. Names. he says. are only
names of human beings and inadequate expressions necessitated by
human weakness. The Trinity transcends all this nomenclature;
names do not express the nature of the things named:
'Since therefore the holy Scripture does not say more about the
Trinity. except that God is the Father of the Saviour and that the Son
is begotten by the Father, we should believe no more than what is
written',96
This was one way of avoiding the difficulty which faced everybody
who wrote at any length about the Holy Spirit in the second half of
the fourth century. that of determining the place of the Spirit within
the Trinity.
It is not necessary here to enter in detail into Ambrose's work De
Spiri/u Sancto completed during the opening months of 381 and
finished before Easter in that year. 97 It was written at the request of
the Emperor Gratian and as a reward for his measures against the
Arians. It is little more than a re-hash of Athanasius' Epp. ad Serap.,
Basil's DSS and Adv. Eunomium III and of Didymus' De Spiritu
Sanclo. Jerome when he translated this last work made a very
disparaging remark about Ambrose's treatise. 98 Ambrose endorses
the doctrine of the Pilioque;99 he makes no strong appeal to the
practice of baptism nor the tradition of the church; he is not aware of
the deficiency of Scripture in its witness to the Spirit in any way. He
does not use the word persona in a Trinitarian context. The book
might justly be described as a pot-boiler.
they thought, like Amos 4:13. to witness to the Spirit's createdness (58, S9 (1081,
1082». Once more, one is puzzled at the phenomenon of someone who was blind
from about five years old learning Hebrew.
9662 (1084. 108S. quotation from 108S).
97S0 O. FaUer, who edited it for CSEL, calculated.
98NihU ibi dialect;eum, nihil virile atque distinctuffl, quod lectorem vel ingratis in
. adsensum tTailet, sed toJumjlaccidum, molle, nitidum atqueformosum et exquisitis huc inde
odoribus pigmentatum (op. cit. 39:1032-34); in other words, no originality, no
distinction, no meat hut much rhetorical waffle: beta minus. This was an unpleasant
but not unjust verdict. Jerome may have renounced the world and the flesh, but he
certainly had not done with the devil. L. Doutre1eau (Le Prologue deJerome au De
Spiritu Sanclo de Didyme' in Alexandrina 297-3 12) has recently produced a properly
edited text of this Preface to Jerome's translation, with comments upon it.
99See below, p. 789.
756
The Doctrine of the Spirit
Damasus bishop of Rome was not a great writer. All that survives
of anything that he may have written himself are some letters and
some verses carved over the traditional resting-places of saints in
Rome which can be compared to Queen Victoria's Leaves from a
Journal of our Life in the Highlands in that their fame derives from the
position of the author rather than from their intrinsic literary merit.
But he presided over and left his impression upon at least two
councils which made important pronouncements about the Holy
Spirit, and made some significant doctrinal statements in his letters.
Part of a Decree made by a. Roman council presided over by
Damasus in 371 or 372 survives.!OO The Council was part of a
campaign led by Damasus to drive Arianism out of the Western
Church. It was only partly successful. because though this council
could condemn Auxentius of Milan it was powerless to depose him.
The Letter of Damas us which contains what we know of this council
was carried first to Athanasius by the Milanese deacon, Sabinus, and
then despatched to Basil of Caesarea by Athanasius. The letter is
addressed, not as Theodoret and Sozomenus say, to the Illyrian
bishops but to the bishops of the Eastern Church generally. The
Decree is full oflaudatory references to the authority of the bishop of
Rome, which cannot have been to the liking of many Eastern
bishops, but it defines the correct doctrine as
'the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit of one Godhead, of one
power, and of one manner of existence. of one substance.'101
Another, later. letter of Damasus to Basil of Caesarea contains a
careful Trinitarian statement which runs thus:!02
lOOThere are at least two different editions of this. The first, and worse, is in PG
13:347-349. included in a Letter of Damas us entitled Confidimus quidem; the other is
to be found in Schwa'rtz 'Ober die Sammlung des Cod. Veronensis LX', 19, 20,
taken from the Collection at Verona ofTheodosius the Deacon. In the preface to the
text Schwartz, building on the work ofC. H. Turner, unravels the tangled history
of this Collection. A Greek version of this Letter is to be found in Sozomenus HE
V1.236-15 and Theodoret HE 11.22.1-12. Schwartz's text is used here.
1011.24, 25 (19). unius deitatis unius virtutis unius figurae. unius substantiae .
102Schwartz op. cit. 2.1-14 (20, 21); the Letter's tide is Ea gratia. Damasus in a
letter sent a little later to Basil of Caesa rea (known as Non nobis quidquam) refers to
'the Holy S_pirit ... perfect in everything, power, honour, majesty, Godhead'
(Schwartz 'Ober die Sammlung' 4.1-3 (22, 23»). For a careful discussion of the
fragments of Damasus' letter, see Bardy 'Ie Concile d'Antioche' (379). We must
conclude that the letter Ea gratia represents the result of a council held in Rome in
37 6 .
757
 The Controversy Resolved
'we all unanimously say that there is a Trinity of one .power, of one
majesty, of one divinity, of one usia, so that·we confess that there is an
indivisible power (potestatem) but three Persons (personas) and they do
not telescope into themselves, nor are they reduced, as some (hold),
but always remain and there are no grades of sovereignty of any sort
nor differing times nor is the Word (merely) put forth so that we
should deprive him of generation nor imperfect so that his Person or
the Father's nature or the fullness of Godhead should be lacking to
rum, and the Son is not diverse in activity nor diverse in power nor
dissimilar in any way at all nor is his existence derived from any other
source, but he is born from God nor is false but true God generated
from true God, true Light from true Light. so that he is not to be
thought reduced or diverse.'
Finally we must notice the document which is known as the
'Tome of Damasus' (Tomus Damasi).1t is a list of canons drawn up at
a council held in Rome no later than the year 378, for Peter of
Alexandria (who returned to his see in that year) was still an exile in
'Rome when it took place. The canons as we have them in the
Collection of Theodosius the Deacon were included in a letter of
Damasus to Paulinus whom he recognised as legitimate bishop of
Antioch. '03 These canons appear in a Greek version in Theodoret'o,
(described (wrongly) as sent to a Paulinus of Thessalonica), and,
without context, in some· Greek collections of canons.
After a Latin version ofN, this document goes on to set out a list of
anathemas, or condemnation of various false opinions, beginning
with the idea that the Holy Spirit was made through the Son, and
then damning Sabellius, Arius and Eunomius ('who in different
words bnt equal blasphemy hold that the Son and Holy Spirit are
creatures'), and the Macedonians ('who derive from Arius' line and
have changed their name but not their treason').'05 and then the
Apollinarians and followers of Marcellus of Ancyra (without naming
either of these two heresiarchs) .'06 The form of the work now
I03For the circumstances in which these canons were made and were later sent to
Antioch; see Schwartz Gesamm. Schrift. 111.2 (SO-51). The text of the Tomus Damasi
can be found in Turner EOMIA 1.283-93 and PG 16:357--61 as Epistola IV of
Damasus. I have followed Turner's text. OUf present text of the Tomus probably
represents two versions or recensions of it. For a thorough discussion of the date of
the Tomus, finally placing it in 377-8, see Dossetti. 11 Simbolo 102-11; see also P.
Galtier 'Le· "Tome de Damasus", date et origine' and Simonetti; Crisi 432-3·
I04HE V.ILI-IS.
I05Turner ,op. cit. 284, 285.
106 206, 207·
75 8
The Doctrine of the Spirit
changes, and becomes a list of propositions beginning 'If anyone will
not have said' (si quis non dixerit) ' ... they are to be condemned'.
These propositions comprise the eternal existence of the Three, their
consubstantiality, the existence of the Son in heaven while he was
incarnate on earth, the susceptibility of his flesh to pain but not of his
Godhead, his session at the right hand of the Father and his future
return, the consubstantiality, omniscience and omnipresence of the
Holy Spirit.'07
Next, a short reversion to the affirmative form, 'If anybody says' .,.
(he is a heretic), 108 rejecting the propositions that the Holy Spirit is an
artefact (facturam) or was made through the Son, and a statement that
all things were made through the Spirit by the Son. Next, a reversion
to the negative form of anathema asserts the view that 'there is one
Godhead, power, majesty, sovereignty (potentiam), one glory, rule,
one reign and one will and truth of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; that
the three Persons (personas) of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three,
equal, ever-living, including all things visible and invisible, exercising
control over all things, judging all things'.109 Last of all, some general
propositions are enunciated: the Holy Spirit is to be adored by every
creature. Orthodoxy about the Father and the Son is established, but
heterodoxy about the Holy Spirit is equally heresy, like that ofJews
and pagans. The three Persons are only one God, not three gods, !
because we are baptized into their Names, not into the names of
archangels or angels, as the Jews and heretics believe. 110
This repetitive but emphatic statement does not derive from the
theology of the Cappadocians. It exillbits no subtlety, no awareness
of any difficulty in enunciating doctrine so profound; it has as much
delicacy and intellectual refinement as an auctioneer's catalogue. We
do not hear in it of how the Holy Spirit subsists nor of his relation to
the other Two. Its material has been supplied by Tertullian, by
Novatian, by Hilary, probably at secondhand by Athanasius. It is the
product of a legalist mind and a despotic disposition. It is conceived
wholly in the Latin rather than the Greek tradition. But in its own
downright way it has come to much the same conclusions as had the
Eastern pro-Nicene theologians in their subtler, more percipient,
107Ibid. 288-290.
108 Si quis dixerit ... hereticus est, 290.
109290,291. Perhaps Palladiusat Aquileia had some of these propositions in mind
when he condemned pro-Nicene doctrines.
110 2 91-3.
759
 The Controversy Resolved
more sophisticated manner. They had been educated in philosophy
and rhetoric and could see the difficulties. Damasus knew. no
philosophy, and like a modem Fundamentalist interpreting the BIble
could not appreciate the difficulties. But undoubtedly a doctrInal
consensus of East and West had been achieved. Incidentally, thIS IS
probably the first mention of Macedonians as a distinct school of
thought. To them we must now turn.
3. The Macedonians'"
We have already seen something of the career of Macedonius, as
deacon and then bishop of Constantinople.' 12 Though he had been
made bishop by the intellectual heirs of Eusebius of
Nicomedia/Constantinople and of Eusebius of Caesarea, by the year
35 8, alarmed no doubt, as others were, by the Second Sirmian Creed
of 357 and the emergence of the school of thought led by Aetius, he
had joined the party of Basil of Ancyra who favoured the formula
homoios kat'ousian ('like in respect of substance'). A,:,"ong ~he many
uncertainties which surround the name of Macedomus, thiS much IS
certain."3 He arrived a little late at the Council of Seieucia, along
with Basil of Ancyra, alleging illness as his excuse."· He was deposed
in 360 at the Council of Constantinople, sharing the fate of Basil of
Ancyra and such of his followers as had not renounced theIr
'Homoiousian' doctrine. There is no evidence whatever that he ever
attempted to regain his see ofConstantin?ple. Sozome~us informs us
that after his deposition he went to live m a place m B.thyma call~d
lIspi lI6Aa<; and soon cJied .."' This is all that we can say for certam
about Macedonius' career after 35 8.
III As will be become evident below 'Macedonians' is a complete misnomer for
this sect. The were known to their opponents as Pneumatomachi (Assailants of the
Spirit). But this was an invidious name, like, Se":li-'Arian' or :Exucontian' and
invidious names have been used toO long by historians of the Anan controversy: I
will therefore continue to call them 'Macedonians'. incorrect though the name IS.
112See above, pp. 280--3. 373. 381. . . .
113S ocra tes HE Il.38 (he placed Eleusius in the see ofCyzlcus and Marathonlus m
that of Nicomedia): Sozomenus HE IV.22, 8-11.
114Sozomenus HE IV.22.8-II, 24.3; Socrates HE 11.45·
t15IV.26.1. Swete, Early History of the Doctrine of the Holy. Spir~t 53., quotes
Nicephorus Callistus, (Historia X.46) a thirte~nth-century ~yzantmehlstoflan, who
says that M went to live at Pylae, but survived a long time to found the heresy.
Swctc is inclincd to accept this, but it is far more likely to represent an attempt by
The Doctrine of the Spirit
But at some point several years after 360 Macedonius was credited
with being the originator of a doctrine which accepted the full
divinity of the Son yet refused to make the further step by ascribing
divinity to the Holy Spirit. When precisely he was first saddled with
this role it is not easy to say. It may be that the Historia Akephala" 6 is
our earliest known source for this identification, or perhaps the
Tomus Damasi.' 17 But neither Epiphanius nor the Cappadocians,
who are well aware of this type of heterodoxy, associate it with
Macedonius nor did Amphilochius' Council oficonium in 376. The
canons of Constantinople 381 do not describe the adherents of this
doctrine as Macedonians; though a decree of Theodosius
condemning them issued in 383 or 384 does." s Thereafter almost all
the sources call the holders of this doctrine about the Spirit
'Macedonians', The earliest sources, however, refer to them as
Pneumatomachians a derogatory word meaning 'Assailants of the
Spirit': it occurs first in Athanasius' letters to Serapion." 9 This is how
Epiphanius and the Cappadocians (who are not responsible for the
titles or sub-titles given to their works by others) describe them. Both
Socrates· 20 and Sozomenus· 2• say that some people allege that the
heresy was started not by Macedonius but by Marathonius, a rich ex~
soldier turned priest who founded at least one monastery in the
capital city, and who is probably the Marathonius who was made
bishop of Nicomedia by Macedonius.'22 It is interesting to observe
Nicephorus to reconcile the report of So zornen us with the fact that the heresy was
called after M. The information which Theodoret givcs us about Macedonius and
the Macedonians is of the barest description, except for his reproduction of the Tome
of Damasus (HE II.6.I, 2; V.40' 8; 9.19 and 11.3). Philostorgius consistently
associates M with Basil of Ancyra and regards him as a supporter of the homoousion
(HE IV .5. 9~ VIII.17), but to Philostorgius a 'homoousian' and a 'homoiousian' were
pretty much the same.
116 1 .6 (140); 4.5 (154); the attribution of the heresy to M in the first reference is a
complete non-sequitur.
117Tumer EOMIA p. 285 col. I, the preface to this set of anathemas mentions
'some who dared with sacrilegiOUS mouth to say that the Holy Spirit was made
through the Son', (p. 284. col. I), and it seems to regard Macedonians as a separate
sub-variety of Arians. Probably Damasus was not well-informed on the subject of
an heresy which had not appeared in the West. Jerome (Chronicle sub. ann. 342 and
342 and 359) so designates them.
118Cod. Theod. XVI.5,- 11,12,13.
119Ep. Serap. 1.32 7tV€UllatOJluxoGVt€<;.
'2°HE 11.45.
121HE IV.27.
122Schwartz ('Zur Kirchengeschichte' 156 n 36 and Ober die Sammlung' 7)
 The Controversy Resolved
if, as is virtually certain, we assume that Macedonius was associated
with the party ofBasil of Ancyra, that though the statement of Basil's
Council of Ancyra of 358 has only the most conventional reference to
the Holy Spirit, the Letter of George of Laodicea, which certainly
emanated from the same theological circle, stated that his party
recognize the Holy Spirit as existing from the Father through the Son
in 'one Godhead embracing all things through the Son in the Holy
Spirit' .123 We are not therefore entitled to assume that everybody
whose thought stemmed from this tradition necessarily decried the
status of the Spirit. It is best to assume, with Loofs and Bardy and
several recent scholars, that the connection of Macedonius with the
'Assailants of the Spirit' is not proved, even though we may for
convenience sak,e call them 'Macedonians' .124
Once we have freed ourselves of the need to associate the
Macedonians with Macedonius, we. can recognize that the people
against whom Athanasius wrote his letters to Serapion were no
different from the later Macedonians. He calls them
Pneumatomachountes; at least two of the proof-texts used by them
(Amos 4:12, 13 and I Tim 5:21) occur again and again in later
Macedonian literature; they use the same argument as the later
Macedonians about the danger of in effect regarding the Spirit as a
second Son of the-Father.'25 Further, Serapion had informed
Athanasius that these heterodox people 'had left the Arians because of
blasphemy against the Son'.'2. These coincidences cannot be
explained away. The earliest appearance of the Macedonian school of
is prepared to believe that Macedonius may have taken some steps to spread
. Macedonianism' before he died. The only piece of evidence that might make
one opt for this view, against the" absence of early testimony to M's authorship
of the heresy, is two references to him, as if the author was addressing him directly,
in Pseudo-Didymus De Trinitate PG 39;613 (De Trjn. 11.8.1) and 633 (11.10); he is
reproached for having begun as an orthodox deacon and then become an Arian
bishop, and in the second reference Marathonius is associated with him. But this
testimony, written probably after 381, can scarcely outweigh the earlier silence.
. 123S ee above, p. 368.
I
124The accuracy of Sozomenus in identifying the Pneumatomachi as
Macedonian can be gauged when he describes Cyril ofJerusalem as arriving at the
Council of Constantinople of 381 'having then changed his mind about his former
Macedonian views'. Cyril is the last person to have decried the Holy Spirit: this is
one more sign that Homoiousians (among whom Cyril was certainly at one time
numbered) were not necessarily Pneumatomachians.
125See above, pp. 7S0, 7SI.
126Epp. ad Serap. 1.2, Swete (Early History 47) calls attention to this. He is
convinced that Athanasius' opponents were Macedonians.
The Doctrine of the Spirit
thought is in the Letters of Athanasius to Serapion in 359 and 360; and
this type of thought was fostered by some (but by no means all) of
those who, alarmed by the radicalism of the Second Sirmian Creed in
357, were gathering round Basil of Ancyra in order to m~ke a protest
and produce an alternative. In the hurly-burly of the years 359 and
360 their peculiar doctrines about the Holy Spirit were noted only by
the watchful eyes of the Egyptian theologians. But later they became
more widely evident.
We can to some extent reconstruct the history and to some extent
reach fuller understanding of the opinion of these Macedonians.'27
Some time after the death of Constantius in November 361, when
the bishops deposed and exiled by the late Emperor had had time to
return to their sees, establish themselves and renew contacts with
their friends, a council of those who had supported the views of Basil
of Ancyra (Basil himself presumably being dead or incapacitated)
took place at Lampsacus.'28 This council decided to send a
deputation to Valentinian, the Western Emperor, and to Liberius
bishop of Rome intimating their acceptance of N. The deputation
consisted of three bishops, Eustathius of Sebaste, Silvanus of Tarsus
127The chief sources of our knowledge of Macedonianism are the works of
Epiphanius, the Cappadocians and Pseudo-Didymus De Trinitate, the church
historians (who are useful for history but tell us little about doctrine), and two
Dialogues concerned to oppose the Macedonians' doctrine to be found in PG 2~
(Ps.-Athanasius) I2.91-1337 (which Loafs dated to the penultimate or ultimate
decade of the IVth century) and 1202-12S0 (dated by Loofs sometime between 400
and 428). For literature on the Macedonians see the three books of Swete already
listed above p. 738 n. r; H. Dorrie De Spiritu Sancto 8ff;Jaeger Gregor von Nyssa's
Lehre vom dem Heiligen Geist 20-21; Moller 'Macedonius. Macedonianer'; Bardy
'Macedonius, Macedoniens' and Ritter Das Konzil von Konstantinopel68 n sand 69,
73--'78; Simonetti Crisi 366-7, 470-1, 480-86.
128Considerable diversity exists among scholars as to the date of that Council. It
cannot be later than 366 (death ofLiberius) nor earlier than the accession of Val ens
(364). Loofs 'Arianismus' 40 and Eustathius von Sebaste 77-8 and May ('Zur
Datierung' 49-S0) opt for 364, Schwartz ('Zur Kirchengeschichte' IS6) for 36S. and
Ritter (Das Konzil70) agrees with this. The evidence for it comes from Socrates HE
IV.I2, and Sozomenus HE XI. 10.3-1 I.4· Socrates is here relying on the fourth-
century historian of councils, Sabinus of Heraclea. Incidentally both Socrates (HE
II.I S and IV.22) and Sozomenus (HE II.3.3 ot MUKelioviou£n:uive'tul = Sabin us) call
Sabinus a Macedonian, by which they apparently mean an Homoiousian. Socrates
HE IlI.25 gives an account of a council of'Macedonians' meeting (he does not say
where) on the accession ofJovian and sending a petition to the Emperor that the
Anhomoians should be thrown out of their sees and their own party introduced, and
this petition is signed by Basil of Ancyra and Silvanus of Tarsus. So Basil must have
been alive in 363.
 The Controversy Resolved
and Theophilus of Castabala. They failed to gain access to
Valentinian, but they were welcomed by Liberius. He accepted their
letter professing allegiance to N gladly and in return armed them
with a letter accepting their group into communion and encouraging
them to spread their doctrine. Some scholars have expressed surprise
and incredulity that Liberius should have so readily welcomed
bishops who either then or later (in the case ofEustathius and Silvanus
at least) were unsound on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and who
represented a considerable number of other bishops who were
equally unsound. But we must remember that in the first place not all
'Homoiousians' refused divinity to the Spirit, and in the second that
the subject of pneumatology had not yet gained prominence in the
West. There was no reason why Liberius should have made scrutiny
into the views on the Holy Spirit of these bishops. N had said almost
nothing on the subject, and anything we know ofLiberius does not
lead us to think that he was likely to attach great importance to the
niceties of doctrine. The three bishops went on to Sicily where at a
council they expressed their adherence to N and were welcomed, and
then returned to the East. A meeting at Tyana planned a much larger
council, to meet in Tarsus, designed to bring most of the Eastern
Church into agreement with N, but Eudoxius, now of
Constantinople, persuaded the Emperor Valens to veto this council.
Sozomenus, who gives an account of these proceedings, in an earlier
passage l2 • says the party of Macedonius, Eleusius, Eustathius and
Sophronius (of Pompeiopolis), emboldened by the death of
Constantius, called together those who at Seleucia had agreed with
them and held several councils. These condemned the (Homoian
Arian) doctrines of Akakius and the Creed of Nice and affirmed that
of Antioch which had been endorsed by their party at Seleucia, i.e.
the 'Dedication' Creed, the second of the Council of Antioch of341,
and by the mouth of Sophronius committed themselves to this
statement:
'The Westerners glorified the homoousion. and Aetius in the East the
anhomoion, and both were off the rails; the former confusedly
amalgamated the distinct hypostases of the Father and Son under the
heading of homoousios, while the latter violently split the affinity
(ObC£l6't1]tu) of the Son's nature to the Father'. But they (Sophronius
and his party) believed that it was orthodox to say that the Son is like
the Father in respect of hypostasis.
129V.I4.
The Doctrine of the Spirit
This is an odd report, because it is difficult to imagine that Eustathius
at least could have altered his doctrine within a year or so to accept, as
far as the theology of the Son went, a full Nicene position; and
'Homoiousians' believed that the Son was like the Father in ousia, not
in hypostasis. Theological vocabulary was still then fairly fluid, how-
ever; and it is possible that Sozomenus has wrongly moved this utter-
ance, with its interesting appeal to Antioch 34', Creed II, from a later
period to an earlier. This story could be the doublet of a later council
held according to Sozomenus '30 at Antioch in Caria, and dated by
Ritter to 376, l3J attended by 304 bishops from the diocese of Asia,
drawn from those who had earlier planned to attend the council of
Tarsus. This gathering rejected the homoousion and chose instead 'the
creed of Lucian the martyr', i.e. the second (,Dedication') creed of the
Council of Antioch of341. It is hard to believe that the group which
gathered at Tyana to hear the message from Liberius brought by
Eustathius and the other two should have held together for so long,
and, having formerly accepted the homoousion, should now renounce
it. But that there was a persistent strain of thought among the Eastern
bishops which hankered after abandoning the controversial mazes of
homoousios and homoiousios and heterousios and, without making
concessions to open Arianism, returning to the 'Dedication' Creed
whose association with Lucian the martyr might give it as much
kudos as N had by now acquired, there can be no doubt. After all, this
'Dedication' creed was virtually 'Homoiousian', for it declared that
the Son was the 'image of the ousia of the Father', and it made no
disturbing advance in what it said about the Holy Spirit. Sozomenus
tells us that in 378, relying on the Edict of Toleration which Gratian,
now sole Emperor, had. issued in the crisis brought about by the battle
of Hadriano pie and the death of Valens, several Macedonian bishops,
restored to their sees, met at Antioch in Caria and opted for the
homoiousion rather than the homoousion.'32 And we know from a
letter of Basil that a council met in Cyzicus in 376 which was silent
about the homoousion but adopted the formula 'like in respect of ousia'
for the Son and 'put their signatures to blasphemies about the Holy
Spirit, in the company of Eunomius','33 i.e. they refused, like
IJOVI.I2.4.
131 Das Konzil7I.
132HE VII.2.2-3. Ps.-Didymus classifies the Macedonians as 'Homoiousians' De
Trin. 1.35 (PC 39:233).
133Epp. 244.9. This letter also gives us information about Eustathius' activity at
 The Controversy Resolved
Eunomius to recognize the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
These I~st were clearly Macedonians, and by now the chief
Macedonian figure was Eustathius ofSebaste, permanently alienated
from Basil because Basil had accepted, and he refused, the necessIty of
elaborating the theology of the Holy Spirit. To Eustathius, Basil's
teaching looked like Sabellianism, and to Basil Eustathius eventual! y
appeared to hold a thinly-disgnised form of :"ri~nism.I34 But it
would be a mistake to imagine that Macedomamsm ever was a neatly
defmed doctrinal system, nor even that at any point it could be
determined who was Macedonian and who not. It was more hke a
diverse series of protests by people who did not know what was
happening in the field of developing doctrine, w~o. had no mtegrated
position to maintain but had a confused SUsp,cIon that the pro-
Nicenes were going beyond Scripture. Sozomenus says that at the
time of the Second Council at Antioch in Caria (378 or 379) many of
the Macedonians were not greatly divided from the 'Homoousians'
and when some among their number fell back at this council on the
'Dedication' Creed some of the others joined the pro-Nlcene
party.135 This was, too, a period when many Homoiousians
untouched by Macedonianism, such as Cyril of Jerusalem and
Theophilus of Castabala, were joining the pro-Nicenes. Gregory of
Nazianzus, preaching his Fifth Theological Oration at just this
period, on the eve of the Council of Constantinople of381, sald, of
those who regarded the Holy Spirit as inferior:
'Some assume that he is a power (energeia), some a creature, some that
he is God, some cannot decide which of these (is true), out of respect
for the Bible, as they allege. since it reveals clearly none of those
positions .. , I have heard of other wiseacres who measure out
Godhead and admit that there are Three perceived by us, but that they
so differ from each other that they postulate One infinite in ousja and
power. Another infinite in power but not ousia, and a Third finite in
Rome and at Tyana. Loafs, Eustathius von Sebaste 77-8 placed the Council of
Cyzicus in 375. May, 'Datierung der Rede' 51, following Schwartz ('Zur
Kirchengeschichte' 157. n 39) places it in 376. . 140IV.27 also, His expressions ot MmCE()Oviou exaivetm (Vii.73 by which he
. 1341n Ep. 244 Basil attacked Eustathius' doctrinal inconsistency; but BaSil may
have appeared just as inconsistent to'Eusta~hius. See Loofs ~ustathius von Sebaste
69-76 and 96-7. Athanasius classed Eustathius among the Anans (HA 4 (186) and
Ep. ad Eg. Epp. 7 (112)), though his testimony may not be worth much ..See a~so
Pruche Introd. to DSS P.73 and Dorrie De Spiritu Sancto 101-20. Eplphamus
Panarion 73.23 and 27 places him among the 'Semi-Arians',
'''HI! VII.2.2-4.
The Doctrine of the Spirit
both'. Still others give them the titles 'Creator', 'Fellow-worker'
(crUVEPYO,) and 'Ministrant' (A.e1<oDpy6,), and think that this dignity
or order or rank corresponds to a gradation of realities which they
represent. 136
The Macedonians certainly played a part in the Council of
Constantinople of 381.'37 And for some decades after that event
defenders of the newly-established orthodoxy found it necessary to
write against Macedonian doctrine, and the church historians
occasionally refer to Macedonian church buildings and bishops,
presbyters and monks, and even a deaconess. But Sozomenus
describes one group at least as, at the time of the death of the Emperor
Arcadius (May ISt 408), almost extinct,I38 and by the time he was
writing (some time after 425) he says that though the sect was at one
time widespread in parts of the East it is now qnite insignificant; it is
not, he says, completely extinguished in the capital. 13 • They never
amalgamated with the Arians, who regarded them as their
enemies. "o It is probably significant that Theodoret, the latest of the
four pre-eminent fifth-century church historians (with Socrates,
Sozomenus and Philostorgius) pays almost no attention to the
Macedonians.
Sozomenus summarizes Macedonian doctrine by saying that they
agreed to 'like in respect of ousia' but subordinated the Holy Spirit so
drastically as to reduce him to being little more than an angel. '" As a
very general statement this is well enough, but we can learn a good
deal more about Macedonian doctrine than that. All Macedonians, in
different ways, agree that the Holy Spirit is not God. He does not
share the divine nature, Or he is neither God nor homoousion, or he is
not theos (God) but theion (divine), or he is eternal (aeonian), but not
God, or he is lord (Kyrios) but not God.'42 He is in various ways
1360,at. XXXl.s·s (137).
137This subject is considered in the next chapter, no. 23. pp. 807. 809. 817-18
below.
138Sozomenus HE IX.2; this is where the deaconess is mentioned.
139HE IV.27.
probably means Sabinus _the historian) and ro~ AtYOUGlV o{ 'to. MaKE50v{ou
fPPOVOUVtE~ (VII.2I.6) do not necessarily imply that the sources of his information
were stin alive when he wrote. It is interesting to find a hostile reference to the
Macedonians in an Arian document Mai/Gryson Frag. VII.241 (VI.222).
141HE IV.27, A much more competent short summary can be found in Gregory
of Nyssa Adv. Macedonianos (Leiden) 90.
142Basil Epp. 225.3; Gregory of Nazianzus Drat. XXXI. I I (145); Gregory of
 The Controversy Resolved
inferior to the other Two. The 'spirit' which God is must be
distinguished from the (lesser) Holy Spirit; he speaks in the Bible not
as God but as an angel or even an inspired prophet: the fact that he
was sent or instructed by the Father or the Son shows him to ~e
inferior the Gift is not on an equality with the Giver; we worship
God in' the Spirit but not the Spirit with God; he is not of equal
honour (!cr6tl)10<;); he is a ministrant (ultl1petl1<;) not a fellow-worker
(crov£pYO<;).'43 Eustathius in ~iscussion with ~asil had .probably
argued that the Spirit must be classified below (ultapI9)l&tcr9at) the
Father .144 The Macedonians insist that the Spmt IS not to be
worshipped, and if glorified not glorified as the Father and the. Son
are.14S Sometimes they say that the Holy Spmt occupies a middle
position between God and angels. 14• They dislike the statement that
the Spirit is 'of the substance' (tl< tii<; OIlcrla<;) of the Father .'47 They
believe in three hypostases and two Godheads (9£6tl1t£<;).I48 They
vary on the subject of whether the Holy Spirit is or is not created. '49
There are certain things which the Spirit cannot do: he cannot
participate in creation, he does not sit or reign with the Father and the
Son, he is not omnipresent, he can convert but not raIse ~ro~ the
dead. 150 They counter their opponents' appeal to the practice of
Nyssa Adv. Macedon. 9Q-91 (Leiden); 1St Ma~e~onian Dialogue 15 (P~ 28:13 16): ,cf.
2nd Mac, Dial. 19 (1232); Ps.-Didymus De Trlnltate 116·4 (PG 39.I18).1~t Mac. Dial.
3 (1293). The evidence from Ps.-Did. De Trin. is sometimes .o~ partlcula~ value
because it is probably quoting a contemporary document conSiStmg of a dialogue
between an Orthodox and a Macedonian.
143Gregory of Nyssa Adv. Maced. 90 (Leiden) (cf. 1St Mac, Dial. 2 (1292-3», Ps,,-
Didymus De Trin.ll.2 (24); 8 (608--<); I I (657,660); 1II.J8 (972, 97J, 977, 980); BasIl
DSS 24.57,58 (I7J) [452]; cf. 27.65 (185) [478]; lSt Mac.D.al. 7 (IJOO); 17 (IJI6,
1320). In' Ps.-Didymus De Trin. 11.41 (52) the M~cedon1ans say that the SpIne IS
'good' and 'holy', but not in the sense that God IS; cr. 6 (160, 162 and 168).
144Basil DSS 17 passim. . '
I45Gregory of Nazianz us Drat. XXXI. 12 (145); Ps.-Dtdymus De Tnn. n.lo (640,
644); Basil DSS cap.I9 passim; 1St Mac. Dial. 4 (1293. 129 6).
'46Ps.-Didymus De Trin. 11.6 (166), 7 (214), 8 (617). It is. probably the same
thought which lies behind the statement that the Sptne (Basil DSS 20 passIm) IS
neither slave nor master, but free.
147 2n d Mac. Dial. 4 (1208); 16 (1228); for the significance of this, see below pp.
81'r-IS .
. "'2nd Mac. Dial. 5 (1209),7,8 (1212-IJ), 8 (1216). . .
149Ps._Didymus De Trin. Il.2 (.28) - he is create~ through the Son; he IS e~ther
created or begotten (1St Mac. Dial. 20 (1325); he IS not created (lSt Mac. DIal. 8
(IJOO) 20 (IJ28), 2nd Mac. Dial. 1l.4 (1208--<).
150Gregory of Nyssa Adv, Maced, 97-98 (Leiden), 2nd !"fac, Dial. 17 and 18
( 122 9), Ps .• Didymus De Trin. II.8 (605); 12 (685), 1st Mac. D.al. I I (IJ05, IJ08) (cf.
12 (1308-9», he is a mere 'escort', Mll'Yll'ttK6v); 2nd Mac, DIal, 20 ( 12 33),
768
The Dodrine of the Spirit
baptism in the Triple Name by pointing out that people were
baptised into Moses (I Cor 10:2) without his being thought
divine. I 5I They more than once ask to be told the difference between
generation (of the Son) and procession (of the Spirit), and always
receive the answer from their opponents that they do not know, and
nobody can know. "2 In the same area of debate Macedonians
constantly argued that if the Holy Spirit is divine he must be either
another Son of the Father, a brother of the Son, or a grandson, a line
of reasoning which they justly regarded as a reductio ad absurdum. ,s3
This is probably their most frequently presented argument.
The Macedonians constantly appeal to Scripture and demand from
their opponents Scriptural support for their doctrine of the Holy
Spirit: 'They never end chattering left and right about lack of
evidence and "not in Scripture" and that sort of argument' , says Basil
of them.'S4 There is no Scriptural warrant for worshipping the
Spirit, ISS and the command to worship God alone (Dt 6:13) shows
this.,s6 The two Macedonian Dialogues ring with the demand of the
Macedonian speaker, 'Where does Scripture say that the Holy Spirit
is God'.'57 And, in spite of Athanasius' nickname for his opponents
in the Letters to Serapion (Tropici, 'Metaphoricals') they do not like
allegory: 'things which are spoken allegorically or as personification
(ltpocrlJyopIKiii<;) or metaphorically or as synonyms should not be used
for serious doctrine' (el<; MY)1ato<; al<p{~etav).'S8 A list of proof texts
used by the Macedonians to prove the inferiority of the Holy Spirit
can be compiled: we have already seen Amos 4: 12, 13 and 1 Tim
5:21. 159 To these can be added Lk 10:22 andJn 6:46 (where the Spirit
15tBasii DSS Cap. 14 passim .
t Mac. Dial. 14 (1313); 2nd Mac. Dial. 4 (1208-9).
. 152 JS
I 53Epiphanius Ancoratus 71.1 (88). Panarion 69.18.5 (167); Gregory of Nazianzus
Orat. XXXI.7 (140) (he is either aY£VYlltOY, in which case there are 3\>0 livapxa, or
y£.vVllt6v. and then .. ~); Basil Hom. XXIV.6 (612); 1St Mac. Dial. 14 (1313); 2nd Mac.
Dial. II.S (1209); Ps.-Didymus De Trin. 11.5 (74) (where the Macedonians also deny
that the Spirit is from the hypostasis (= substance) of the Father,s (78».
·S4DSS 27.68 (I9J. 196) [490].
tSS 1St Mac. Dial. 4 (1293, 1296).
"·Ibid. IS (IJIJ. IJI6).
.57E.g. IS (IJIJ, IJI6), 18 (1]20), and 2nd Mac. Dial. II.J (1208), 5 (1209), 9
(1216), IJ (1221).
IS8Ps._Didymus De Trin. ILIO (645).
159See above, pp. 749, 750, also Ps.-Didymus De Trin. IIl·31 (949.951) (Amos)
and 11.6 (168) (I Tim.), and Basil DSS 13 passim (see Dorrie De Spiritu Sancto 8Itf.
also I Tim.).
 The Controversy Resolved
is omitted from knowledge and from vision), 160 John 1:3 (the Spirit
included in what was brought into existence by the Son),'6' 3:5 (the
Spirit regarded as equal in glory and power with water!), 162 7 : 39 (he
is not yet given).'63 14:26 and 15:26 (the Spirit's essentially servile
and inferior function).'6' Beyond the Gospels they cite Acts 10:22
(the angel appearing to Cornelius identified with the Holy Spirit), 165
1 Cor 2:10 (the Spirit searches the deep things of God- but he has to
search, he does not understand immediately), 166 Gal 4:6 (the Spirit is
sent), 167 and finally Zech 4:1-5 (the angel who spoke to the prophet
was the Holy Spirit).168 The Macedonians also display an interesting
tendency to accept (or possibly on occasion to manufacture) variant
readings in the text of the Bible which favour their cause. At Phil 3:2,
3 they want to read o! llVeUJ.lUn get\> 1..utpeuovte<; ('who serve God in
the Spirit') instead of ot llVeUJ.lUn geou 1..utpeuovte<; ('who serve in the
Spirit of God'), and at Rom B:I1 lila to tVOIKOUV UOtou llveUJ.lU tv uJ.liv
('because of his Spirit dwelling in you') instead of ola tou tVOIKOUVto<;
UOtoii llVeUJ.lUto<; ('by means of his indwelling Spirit'), in order to
remove creative or revivifying activity from the Spirit, and at Amos
4: 13 they want to remove the pronoun 'I' so that the Spirit shall not
appear to be speaking through the prophet (and claiming to
create).'6'
Macedonians of the earlier period were content to appeal to N.
Epiphanius represents them as saying 'We too believe in the creed put
forth at Nicaea: but demonstrate to us from it that the Holy Spirit is
classified (cruvupI9J.1eitUl) within the Godhead'. Epiphanius, unlike
Damasus, has the honesty to admit that at that period doctrine
concerning the Holy Spirit was not called for.170 But later
160PS._Didymus De T,in. m.3? (968, 969). A similar argument about the
omission of mention of the SpiIjt is to be found in 111.36 (965).
161Epiphanius AncoTl:uus 75.1 (94).
162Ps._Didymus De Trin. 11.13 (688,689).
'''Ibid. 1ll.34 (960).
164Didymus De Spiritu Sancto 30 (PG 39:1060).
165Ps._Didymus De Trin. II.? (224).
166Epiphanius Ancoratus 15.1 (23).
"7Ps.-Didymus 1ll·39 (977, 980).
"'Ibid. U.8 (628).
169Ibid. II. I I (664.666). There is quite a lot of MS support for the alternatives in
both the N.T. examples. Exacdy the same three texts are suggested by the
Macedonian in 2nd Mac. Dial. 20 (1233) and 26 (1244). The alteration at Rom 8:11
turns on the two different meanings of dia with the acc. and with the gen. case.
170Panarion 74. 14·4,5 (332). The question ofwhether the creed C was a deliberate
770
The Doctrine of the Spirit
Macedonians showed a decided tendency to reject N (and,
presumably, even more decisively, C) in favour of the 'Dedication'
Creed, the Second Creed of the Council of Antioch of 341, a
preference for which we have already noticed manifesting itself
among some Homoiousians in the years between 360 and 381. '71 At
the beginning of the 2nd Macedonian Dialogue the following
interchange takes place:
Macedonian: 'We believe as the blessed Lucian did', and he asks
Orthodox "Do you then subscribe to the creed of Lucian?'
Orthodox replies that he pins his faith to N, and when Macedonian
presses him he says that he objects to Macedonian adding to N (i.e.
adding Lucian's creed to it).
Macedonian: 'Have you not added to N?'
Orthodox: 'Yes, but nothing which contradicts it.'
And they continue to argue about creeds; Macedonian defends the
statement of the 'Dedication' Creed that the Son is 'the exact image
of the ousia and will and power and glory of the Father', and
continues to maintain this position stoutly, championing homoiousion
against homoousion. Orthodox is careful not to disparage the
'Dedication' Creed, but tries to show that it is consistent with N.'72
The Macedonian party in the 1st Macedonian Dialogue also defends the
statement about the Son taken from the 'Dedication' Creed!73 He
echoes this creed when he later agrees that between the Father and the
Son there is 'one agreement' (J.liu cruJ.lCjlOlviu), but refuses to add 'one
nature'!74 There is in the Migne text appended to the First
concession to or rejection of the Macedonians is discussed in the next chapter, see
below pp. 817-8. For a similar argument to that ofEpiphanius here, see Basil Epp.
125·3·
171See above, p. 765.
1722n d Mac. Dial. 1.2 (204, 205). It is surely significant that Orthodox admits
(almost certainly weJl before 451) that his party has added to N, thereby showing
that he is aware of the existence ofC. Later in this dialogue Macedonian returns to the
defence of 'Lucian's' Creed, 13 (1225) and 16 (1228).
1731$t Mac. Dial. 9 (1304), 10, II (1304), 12 (1309). Some have thought that the
Macedonians interpolated this clause into Lucian's original creed (ifit was Lucian's).
See Bardy 'Macedonius, Macedoniens' 1476. But the expression occurs in the
fragments of Asterius (though Bardy does not observe this); see above, p. 36.
1741$t Mac. Dial. 18 (1320); see above, p. 286. The Macedonian in the 2nd Mac.
Dial. refers to this 'one agreement' while rejecting 'one ousia' or 'one Godhead'
(6(12.12»; he also (8(1213» accuses the pro-Nicenes of teaching that the Godhead is
'begotten-un begotten' (yeVVll"tUyt:VVTl'roC;). echoing Arius' travesty of the teaching
of Alexander. ayevVllToyeV1j (see Opitz Urk. III No. 1.2 (2)). .
771
 The Controversy Resolved
Macedonian Dialogue another short dialogue '75 which does not
discuss ·the doctrine of the Holy Spirit at all but is entirely devoted to
the theology of the Son. The participants (called, as before Orthodox
and Macedonian) wrangle about whether the incarnate Son has a
human psyche, Macedonian denying that he has, and then about
whether homoousios can be applied to him, the Macedonian
maintaining that the proper term is homoiousios. The 'Dedication'
Creed is not mentioned, nor is Lucian, but the denial of a human soul
to Jesus Christ was the one doctrine which we have already identified
as certainly emanating from Lucian. '7 • It looks as if some of the
Macedonians at least, rebuffed at the Council of Constantinople of
381, no longer felt obliged to maintain the full pro-Nicene position
on the subject of the divinity of the Son and fell back on that Creed of
the 'Dedication' which was legendarily associated with Lucian and at
the same time, in order to be consistent, adopted the doctrine which
was known to be his, even if there is no hint of it in the so-called
'Lucianic' creed, and proceeded to deny a human soul to the incarnate
Word.
4. The Holy Spirit in the Cappadocian Theologians
We have already seen that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit became a
major subject for debate in the lifetime of Basil of Caesarea and the
two Gregories, as it had not been in that of Athanasius or Hilary. The
rupture of Basil's long friendship with Eustathius of Sebaste was
brought about by their difference on the subject of the Spirit, and
from this resulted what is perhaps Basil's most important work, his
De Spiritu Sancto. '77 Basil reached his final position only gradually;
his Adversus Eunomium, and the brief De Spiritu found at the end of
Adv. Eunomium V, represent stages in his understanding during which
17SPG 28:13 29-37; Migne ed. calls it Contra Macedonianos Dialogus II.
176S ee above, pp. 80, 83. Macedonian in this little dialogue is aware that-he shares
this doctrine with Arians, but he stilJ maintains it, without committing himself to
the whole Arian position.
177 00 Basil's pneumatology, see Gwatk~n AC 125. Prestige CPT 80--86, Holl
Ampl!ilochius von lkonium 129-30, 137-42. Le traile sur Ie Saint~Esprjt de Saint Basile
ed. L. Vischer, Dehnhard Das Problem des Abhiingigkeit des Basilius von Plotin and
Simonetti Crisi 490-4. For the history of Basil's rupture with Eustathius, see Loofs
Eustathius von Sebaste 6--7s and Dorrie De Spiritu Sancto; the last two are also very
informative about the development of Basil's thought on the Holy Spirit.
77 2
The Doctrine of the Spirit
. he did not express himself fully. But if we are to accept his own
statement that when he celebrated the eucharist his custom was to add
to the traditional formnla 'Glory to the Father through the Son in the
Holy Spirit' his own version 'Glory to the Father with (l1&ta) the Son
with (cruv) the Holy Spirit' he must have had high concepts of the
Spirit at least since he was consecrated bishop.'7. He bases his
doctrine on the Bible, on what he calls 'general concepts' (KOtval
gWOtUl), which include a contribution from Greek philosophy! 79
and secret tradition not to be found in Scripture but preserved
continuously in the church.180 Early in DSS he gives a magnificent
account of his doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which runs thUS: ' • '
'When we speak of the Holy Spirit it is not possible to conceive in
one's mind of a fmite nature nor one subject to changes nor alterations
nor in any way.like the creation; but rather, ascending to the highest
point in one's thoughts, one must imagine an intelligent substance
(vo8pav ouo-iav) infinite in power, unbounded in greatness, not to be
measured by times nor ages, prodigal in the benefits which it
commands. To this everything in need of sanctification inclines. This
everything which lives in accordance with virtue desires, so as to be
refreshed by its breath and assisted towards the destiny which is proper
to it and in accordance with its nature. It confers fulfilment on others
but in itself needs nothing at all. Its life needs no adventitious support.
but it is a supplier of life. It is not increased by additions but is
automatically full. abiding in itself and yet omnipresent. Source of
sanctification, intellectual light, it assists every rational power towards
the discovery of truth in the form of self-manifestation. 182
178DSS 1.3.72 (68) [256-81 where the fact that B. has been criticized for this
practice forms the starting-point for the whole book, and 25 passim.
179See Dehnhard Das ProMem des Abhiingigkeit 85-6, and DSS 9.22 [108'"'9]
[J22-6J and Epp 2)6.1.
180The word which Basil usually applies to this tradition is a:ypacpo~. Amand de
Mendieta has made it quite dear that this does not mean 'unwritten', 'oral', but 'not
found in Scripture'; this does not imply that it is 'non-Scriptural' far less anti-
Scriptural (Pruche DSS 479 'non ecrites', wrongly). On the contrary, B thinks that
it is consonant with Scripture. For the subject of Basil's appeal to this tradition see
Hanson Tradition in the Early Church 181-6, to be modified by Amand de Mendieta
'The "Unwritten" and "Secret" Apostolic Traditions in the theological thought of
St. Basil of Caesa rea', Hanson 'Basil's Doctrine ofTradition in Relation to the Holy
Spirit' (Fr. tr. in Le TraUe sur Ie Saini-Esprit de Saint Basile 56--71) and Pruche DSS
Introd. 136-54.
'" DSS 9.22 (108-9) [)22-6J.
t 82016v tt va KatacpaV&tav at eulltou; Pruche's 'il foumit par lui-meme comme une
sorte de c1arte' will not do for in that case Basil must have written either tlVO~
Katacpav£ia~ or n~ KUtacpaV&lu.
773
 The Controversy Resolved
Inaccessible by nature it can be reached through (its own) goodness; it
fills everything by its power, but can be shared only by those who are
worthy ofit, not participated in uniformly, but distributing his po~er
according to the proportion offaith. Simple in its being (ousia) , vaned
in its energies, present wholly to everybody and present whole
everywhere. It is distributed without process (a1tu900,) and shared as
(still) whole, according to the model of the sun's rays whose benefit is
present to him who feels it as to him alone and yet illuminates the
earth and the sea and mingles with the air. So the Spirit is present to
each of those who receive him as to him alone, but produces
sufficiently to everyone unimpaired grace, and its recipients enjoy it as
far as their nature allows. but not as far as its power extends'.
This remarkable fusion of biblical doctrine, Origen and Plotinus
certainly does not confme the activity of the Holy Spirit to the elect,
nor does it do full justice to the eschatological nature of the Spirit in
the New Testament, but it makes it plain that the Spirit cannot be less
than God without ever directly saying so. Later in the DSS he
describes the Holy Spirit as 'One uniquely', in contrast to 'one of the
mass' (§v ~ovuoIKOO" §v tmv 1to)"A,mv), as the Father and Son are each
also 'One' in this sense and the Spirit is united with them.'83 His
community of nature with the Father is shown by the fact that he
'proceeds from the Father, not in a generated way (YEVV'1tIKm,) like
the Son, but as the breath (pneuma) of his mouth'. (not to be taken
corporeally) ... 'and the Spirit is a living substance (ousia), Lord of
sanctification; his affinity (oIKEI6t% [i.e. affinity to the Father]) is
showu in this way, but the manner of his subsistence (~p01tO, tii,
"mIPSEco,) is preserved in ineffability' (apPtltoll <jIIlAaaao~tvoll).184
This apophatic attitude to the method of subsistence ofthe.Spirit is
repeated again and again. We can have some idea of, can form some
analogies for, the way the Father subsists as Father and the Son as Son,
but as to how the Spirit subsists as Spirit we are wholly in the dark. 185
The Spirit is of course the Spirit of Christ and the glory which he
accords is neither external nor that of a slave given to his master, but
'ifI may put it this way, it is expressed from the Spirit as domestic'·
(oIKEluKt;, Pruche 'familiale'); and he himself derives glory from his
association with the Father and the Son.'86 In a precise statement of
"'18.45 (408) [I49-I52J.
184 18.46 (408) [I5 2J.
185S ee Adv. Eunom. 111.6 (668), Hom. XXIV. 6 (612).
186DSS 18.46 (410) [I53J.
774
The Doctrine of the Spirit
his pneumatology produced to vindicate himself in his quarrel with
Eustathius he writes: 187
'Therefore we never divorce the Paraclete from his unity (cruva.:peiat;)
with the Father and the Son; for our mind when it is lit by the Spirit
looks up to the Son and in him as in an image beholds the Father'.
He prefers the doxology which uses 'with' (auv) for the Spirit because
it preserves both the propriety of the Persons (tTJV ~&v ,,1tOcrtUcrEcov
10101'1ta) and the inseparable unity of the Trinit y188 But the most
that he can say about this 'propriety' is' that he is recognized after the
Son and with him and that he ·derives his existence from the
Father.'189 The Three are SO closely united that it is as if when you
pull one end of a chain you are bound to puJl the other. 190
The functions of the Holy Spirit, as distinct from his being, Basil
can describe abundantly: separation of the soul from the passions
which have grown by accretion through its intimacy with the flesh,
assistance in its assimilation to God, so that it achieves its highest
desire, to become God (9EOV YEvtcr9ul).'91 fulfilment or completion
(1EAEicoCJI,) and sanctifying; 192 ilIumination of our minds so that we
can recognize God's activity in Christ, having purged them of
earthly thoughts by contemplation (9Ecopia).'93 granting human
beings sonship and immortality.'94 In his earlier work De Fide he
defmed the work of the Holy Spirit as distributing to each the gifts
given by God for their welfare and teaching and bringing to mind
whatever he hears from the Son - an account much less influenced by
philosophy.'95 He can also express this function in terms of
strengthening or making solid (atEpEm, atEpEcoal" 'affirmi' Pruche),
accomplishing a santification which is firm and unshakeable,196 and
187Epp. 226.3.
'88DSS 25.59 (460) [I77J.
""Epp. 38.4 (Bud< 85).
I 90 Ibid. (Bude 86). For the order (taxis) of the Spirit in the Trinity see above,
p.693·
I9'DSS 9.23 (]26-8) [109J.
"'Ibid. 16.39 (384, 386) [I40J.
19322.53 (440,442) [168]. Pruche in loco points out how subtly here Basil has fused
Christian with Plotinian ideas.
194Epp. 105 (Bude 7).
195De Fide 4 (pC 31:685). Here too (688) he says 'the Father sends the Son and the
Son sends the Holy Spirit'.
'96DSS 16.38 (380) [I36J.
775
 The Controversy Resolved
leading to an understanding of God by imparting goodness and
holiness. 197
But in spite of his unmistakably placing the Holy Spirit within the
Godhead, Basil carefully refrains from ever directly calling him God
(8&6<;) or directly applying to him the epithet homoousion. In the Rule
of Faith which he gives to a group of deaconesses, he calls the Father
and the Son 'God', but not the Spirit.' 9 • He is neither begotten nor
unbegotten but 'from God uncreatedly'.' 99 is 'not alien from the
divine nature',200 He must not be called a creature. 201 We can speak
of both general and particular, he says, when we say 'I believe in God
the Father and God the Son and the divine (8&lov) Holy Spirit';202 the
difference is significant. But he can say in De Fide that 'we are
baptized into the consubstantial (homoousion) Trinity?03 and can
approve the statement that Father, Son ancl Holy Spirit are 'one in the
essence' (l:v tiP ,;ltOK&'JltVQl) where he appears to be deliberately
avoiding the word 'substance?o, and, a little later in the same
passage he says 'that the principle of the homoousios may be preserved
in the unity of the Godhead and the recognition of the worship of
Father, Son and Holy Spirit may be proclaimed in the perfect and
intact Person of each of Those who have been named.'2.s Here he
seems to be walking round the application of ' consubstantial' to the
Spirit without ever reaching it. He can say that the Holy Spirit is
'sharer of (the Father's) nature, not created by his command but
continuously radiating from the substance' (ousia).206 The word
which he prefers to use to express the status of the Holy Spirit is 'of
"'Ibid. 18.47 (412)[153].
198Ep. 105.
t
9 9Ep.
125.)·
2ooEp. 159. 2.
201 Ad". EunQm. 111.2 (660); proof-texts for his possession of the divine nature are
Pss 33:6, 139:7;]ob 33:4; lsa 48:16; Mtt 23:10; John 10:27. 14:26; Acts I:II; Rom
8:1 I. I S; I Cor 2:10 and 1 Tim 6: 13 (ibid. 4 (661-5». For his uncreatedness see also
DSS cap. 22 passim, and Ep. 231.3; Hom XV.3 (469).
202Ep. 236.6.
203 4 (688) - unless 'consubstantial is a later interpolation (but see the next
references),
204Ep. 214 232 (Deferrari, who completely mistranslates the sentence by
illegitimately introducing the word 'confusing', cf. above- p. ·688 n 34).
205lbid. 234 (Deferrari); see Courtonne Saint Basile et son temps 161. For Basil's
restraint in applying terms to the Spirit see Pruche's Introd. to DSS 80-1 I2 and
Simonetti Crisi 1141-2.
206Hom. XV.2 (468).
776
The Doctrine of the Spirit
equal honour' (!cr6nJlo<; with its cognate IcronJlia)?·7 In his fifty-
e.ghth Letter Gregory of Nazianzus tried to meet the criticism of
somebody who could not see why Basil should exercise this restraint
and blamed him for it. Gregory, who himself never felt so
constrained and may in fact have regretted Basil's caution on the
subject, defends him by pointing out that had Basil expressed himself
more openly he might have risked being deposed from his see and
thereby losing the influence which he could exert in favour of the
orthodox doctrine, declaring that Basil had often in private expressed
his Own opinion to Gregory that the Spirit was both God and
consubstantial and showing that Basil had in his writings expressed
the equivalent doctrine in different words; it is the meaning that
matters, not the syllables, said Gregory?o. One of Basil's best
accounts of the Spirit is when he says, in DSS:209
'the process of knowledge of God is from one Spirit through one Son
to one Father: And conversely essential goodness and essential
sanctification and regal dignity travel from the Father through the
Only-begotten to the Spirit'.
B~sil is, h0:-vever, troubled by his realization that it is impossible to
find m the Btble fuJI and wholly adequate support for the doctrine
that the Holy Spirit is a separate hypostasis within the Godhead
comparable to the hypostasis of the Son. The Cappadocians had
enough understanding of the Bible to realize that even the very loose
and subJect.ve methods of interpretation employed by almost
everybody in the fourth century could not derive any and every
doctrme from the pages of Scripture. Origen was by now almost
everywhere thought to have gone too far in the use of allegory, to
have used this tool till it was blunt. They recognised, not that the
Bible witnessed to a created and inferior Holy Spirit, but that taken
alone its evidence was not sufficient to support what they realised was
the logical outcome of acknowledging the full divinity of the Spirit
as a distinct reality within the being of God - that is the full divinity of
207S ee DSS caps. 6 and 8, and Pruche Introd. 104-110.
~08I?p. 58.9. 10, II. See Hanson Studies 314-5. For a repetition of Gregory's
behtt~mg words. as compared with the meaning which they convey see his
valedictory OratIOn at Constantinople (XLII. 16 (477»: 'and the Three in the
hypostases or prosopa, or what you will, for the hair-splitters should not make fools of
themselves over this, as if orthodoxy consisted of words and not of realities'.
209 18.47 (412) [153].
777
 The Controversy Resolved
the Spirit as a third hypostasis. 21 0 One means of meeting this difficulty
was to appeal to the church's practice of baptism, and this Basil
frequently uses. He attached great importance to the use of the
correct formula in baptism.""
'He who redeemed our life from corruption', he says, 'granted to us
the power of renewal which has an indescribable origin hid in mystery
but one which conveys the great salvation to our souls, so that to add
or subtract anything is manifesdy a falling away from etemallife'. 212
Now, worship and sacramental practice must always be in
accordance with belief, and vice versa:
'We must be baptised as we have received, and believe as we have been
baptized, and worship as we have believed, the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit'. 213
Baptism is the seal of our faith and faith is the recognition of
Godhead, therefore all three Names into which we are baptised must
be divine. 214 This is not only how he countered Eunomius'
arguments which lowered the status of the Holy Spirit, but how he
met Eustathius' Macedonianism. 215
This was a sound argument, which Athanasius had als6 used in his
day."'· But in the DSS, and in this work alone, Basil took a further
and more perilous step along this line of argument. In chapters 27 to
30 he exerts all his reasoning powers in an attempt to demonstrate
that certain doctrines and practices have been preserved in the church
ever since the time of the apostles even though they do not appear in
Scripture. He instances several practices such as that of crossing
oneself, turning to the East for prayer and the words of the prayer of
consecration (t1tiJel.llcrt<;) at the eucharist. In these he includes his
particular doxology, which uses 'with the Son' and 'with the Holy
Spirit' instead of ' through the Son in the Holy Spirit'. And he does
210ln Adv. Eunom. III.7 (669) he is reduced to saying that it is the mark of an
orthodox mind to interpret the silences of Scripture as acclaiming the Holy Spirit
and that we shall learn more about the Spirit in the next life.
"'See DSS 10.26 (336, 338) (113).
"'Ibid. 12.28 (346) (117).
21JEp. 125.3; repeated Ep. 159.1.
214Adv. Eunom. I1l.S (665); cf. DSS 7.16 (3000) [93], caps. 10 and II passim.
215Ep. 159.1,251.2, the old formula (see n211); cf. Epp. 105; De Fide 4 (688).
216See above, p. 752, also Simonetti Crisi 487 n 79. The formula is echoed by
Amphilochius' Council oflconium in 376 (PC 39.96) and by Gregory of Nyssa (see
below, p. 787 n 261).
778
The Doctrine of the Spirit
not c~nfine this claim to practices and ceremonies. It certainly covers
doctrme, because he makes a distinction between kerygma which is
the public and common teaching of the church especially in the
hturgy and dogma which is the more esoteric doctrine of the church
involving deeper truths. This startling claim of Basil has attracted the
attention of scholars, naturally, some hailing it with pleasure as a
licence to claim that secret doctrine not to be found in the Bible has
always existed in the church, others frowning on it as a transgression
of the rule sola Scriptura. It is beyond the scope of this work to enlarge
upon thi~ subje.ct.~17 .It .is enough to say that Basil is mingling
together 10 one mdlscnmmate mass the obvious fact that the church
has been teaching the faith from the very beginning, well before the
New Testament was written, the disciplina arcani whereby the church
(especially in the fourth century) tried to veil or conceal some of its
rites and practices from an increasingly curious pagan world anxious
to join it now that it had imperial Support, the habit of reserve in
communicating the more advanced doctrines of Christianity to the
unmstructed masses advocated by Clement of Alexandria and
Origen, and the undoubted fact that Christian worship and prayer
~nd the religious experie~ce of the church in general necessarily
mfluenced ChrISttan doctnne. Here the relevance of this claim made
byBasii in DSS is that it demonstrated that the doctrine of the Holy
SPlrlt put forward by Basil and his friends as orthodox necessarily
depended upon an appeal to the practice and experience of the
church. It IS mterestmg to note that in a letter to the bishops in the
West Basil referred to the Nicene Creed as 'kerygma of the
Fath ers,' 2,.an d·10 anoth er E · h amus
to pIp . of Salamis he says that he
does not want to add anything at all to N,
'except the doxology addressed to the Holy Spirit because this point
shpped the memory of our fathers since the debate on this subject had
not yet been stirred'.219
217See the authorities cited in n 179 above for a discussion of the matter. He
m~k.es much the same app~al in Epp. 54. On the question of the hypostasis of the
~pmt gene~ally, se~ Gw~~km SA 20~IO, Shapland op. cit. 142-3, Crillmeier CCT
198-201, SimonettI C~fSI 309 (on HIlary), May 'Einige Bermerkungen' 5 1 3- 14.
When Swete Early HIstory 29 says that Christians in the early centuries 'were
accu~tomed to regard the Holy Ghost as hypostatically distinct from the Father' he is
makmg a .Iarg~ unproved assertion, and the same unfounded assumption runs
through hIS HIstory oj the Doctrine of the Procession.
218Ep.90.2.
~19Ep. 258.2.
779
 The Controversy Resolved
A little more than two years after Basil's death the Council of
Constantinople met Basil's wish, and in a form of which he would
have heartily approved.
The Fifth Theological Oration of Gregory of Nazianzus was
delivered at Constantinople when the debate about the status of the
Holy Spirit was at its height and is the finest and fullest account of his
views on the subject. Early in this work he gives what he calls 'a
concise and bare account of the Trinity', which consists of the
following formula: we gain, he says
'the Son as light from the Father who is light io the Holy Spirit who is
light'.220
If the Father and the Son are eternal the Spirit must be also, or else the
Godhead is deficient. If the Spirit is on a level with me (a human
being), how does he attach me to the Godhead?221 If the Holy Spirit
is a creature, how can we believe in him or be perfected by him?222
To the Macedonian objection that the Spirit must be either generate
or ingenerate, Gregory replies:
'Because the Son is a Son by some higher relationship (than our
relationship of sonship), even though we cannot demonstrate his
being from God and his consubstantiality by any other method (than
by analogy from our sonship), we must not therefore thiok it
necessary to transfer to the Deity all lower names connected with our
human kinship'.223
The proper definition of the Holy Spirit's relationship to the
Godhead has been defined by the Saviour himself: 'the Holy Spirit
who proceeds (tK1l0PEUEtat) from the Father' On 15:26). This
procession means that he is not a creature. and, as not begotten, not a
Son; inasmuch as he is between begottenness and unbegottenness, he
is God. What is procession? Nobody can say. We simply must
acknowledge the depth of God's mystery?2' That the Spirit is not
the Son nor the Son the Father does not affect the ousia of any of the
Persons, but these words express the eternal relationships of each
Person to the others, and they exclude confusion of the hypostases?25
2200,al. XXX!.3 ([36).
221lbid. 4 (137).
2226 ([40).
223 7 (140).
224
8 (141).
2259 ([4[. [44).
The Doctrine of the Spirit
'Very well, then is the Spirit God? Certainly. Well, is he
consubst~ntial? Yes: ifhe is God'?2. To worship God in the Spirit is
to worshIp the SPirit, and anyway worship addressed to One Person
in the Trinity is worship addressed to all. It is no use saying that if all
thmgs were made through the Son then the Spirit was so made
because on this argument the Father must have been made through
the Son. 227 To charge Gregory with tritheism is to revive a long-
dead controversy, activated by obsolete Arians and recent
Macedonians. 228 And in the next chapter he gives a concise statement
of umty and distinction in the Trinity:22'
'So when we look towards the Godhead and the first cause and the
monarchy One appears to us, but when towards those in which the
Godhead subsists and which derive timelessly and with equal honour
from the first cause~ there 3re Three to be worshipped',
It is perfectly clear from this account of the Holy Spirit that
Gregory had no objection to calling the Spirit either 'God' or
'consubstantial'. He is as incapable as was Basil of defining how the
Spmt subSISts as Spirit and as open in admitting this. In another
Theological Or~tion he says that the names of God are: 'the property
of the. Unon~mate, Father; of Him who is begotten without
begmmng (avapxcoc; YEVVll9tv:oC;), Son; of Him who proceeds or
comes forth WIthout generatIOn (tOO 0& aYEvv1jtCOc; npoEA.96vtoc; ii
1lpoiovtOc;), the Holy Spirit' .2 30 In another place he defines the
propnety of the Spirit as that 'of procession (1lp6000C;) and not
sonshlp', and of ,mission' (EKnEII""c;).23' The incarnate Son promised
that the Spirit woul~ consist of 'One other, so that you should
conceIve of an equahty of honour, other than 1'.232 There is 'one
Spirit who has his existence from God, who yields to the Father as far
as ingenerateness is concerned, and to the Son in generation, but in
226 1°,(144): in II (145) Gregory argues against those who deny that the Spirit is
homoouslOn.
22712 (145. 148).
2281
3 (14 8).
229 14 ([49).
2300,al. XXX.I9 (128).
231~rat. XXV,I6 (1221), And he manages to say nothing about the Spirit in a
profeSSIOnal style when he declares (Drat. XXXIX. 12 (348» of the Spirit 'he comes
forth ~rom . the Father, n,?t ~o.n:vise (u.h::~r;;) nor generately ("(£VVT(t"c'iX;) but
proces~lonwise (~ICn:OP£Utu,rot;;), If It IS permissible to coin nomenclature for the sake
of clanty,' (Clanty?).
2320ral. XLI. J2 (444. 445).
 \ The Doctrine of the Spirit
The Controversy Resolved
other respects is of the same nature, shares the same throne,. and
enjoys the same glory and honour'. 233 Gregory, then, has established
a distinct vocabulary for the peculiar property or propnety of the
Holy Spirit (though he does not use only one word to express It):
proceeding or going forth.234 But he is as much in the d~rk as BasI!
when he asks himself what this means, how precISely ~t. IS
distinguished, except in purely negative ter~s, from the proprIeties
of the other Two. His conception of the SpIrIt s functIOn IS, of course,
much the same as that of Basil. . So, even in the New. Testament, the Holy Spirit reveals himself only
In one interesting respect, however, he differs from BaSIl. He
acknowledges, as Basil did, the necessity of supplementmg the
orthodox doctrine of the Holy Spirit from some othe.r source than
that of Scripture. He can on occasion appeal to the practIce of baptism
into the Triple Name.235 But he makes the further step, which BasI!
made in the form of claiming the existence of a secret tr~dlt1on not
found in Scripture, in a much more satisfactory form. It IS m hIS FIfth
Theological Oration that he does this.236 I:Ie argues that we are
bound by the logical consequences of ScrIptural do~trme, even
though they are not stated in Scripture: ifhis opponent SaId tWIce five
or twice seven Gregory would be justified in concludmg that he
meant ten or fourteen; these would be virtually the man's words
though he had not uttered them. 23 ' From this base Gre~ory laun~hes
into a fine expression of the gradualness of God s revelatIOn,
borrowed largely from Origen, but here put to use to explam our
gradual understanding of the Holy Spirit. The reason for ~hlS gradual
unfolding was because, according to one of Gregory s favounte
principles, God would coerce nobody. He sketches an impreSSlve
scheme whereby God under the old dispensation gradually WIthdrew
the supports upon which the Jews leaned in order to understand hIm,
such as sacrifIces.
the Law and circumcision, and then under the new
, . ' If: 238
dispensation he gradually added new revelatIOns of hlmse .
2330rat. XXXII.s (180); cr. XXXIV. I I (2j2), homotiniia of the ~piri~: In the first
passage referred to here the words 'having his existence from G,od ~re 10 Gree~ SIC
9&06 tTJv i51tap~lV fxov. Hen is inaccurate when he says (AmphllochJUs von IkOn/urn
242) that Gregory never uses {)rtU,x;l<; in a Trinitarian context.
234e1C1to ptu&a6al (middle voice), 1tPOltvUl and cognates at?-d 1tp6ooor;. Some
information about Gregory's doctrine of the Spirit can be gleaned from Harnack
History IV 1I6 note and 117. and Holl Amphilochius von lkonium 161-4·
23'E.g. Orat. XXXI.28 (165); Orat. XXXIV.!1, 12 (25 2).
23'Ora t. XXXI.24-25 (161)-165).
237
24
(r60). 23825 (160, 161).
782
'The Old (Testament) openly proclaimed the Father, but the Son
mistily (ullu8p6tBpov). The New manifested the Son, but sketched
(ont8Bl~B) the Godhead of the Spirit. The Spirit is now resident and
active among us [Mason's admirable translation of tJ.UtOA1.t6uC:'t"alj
supplYing a clearer manifestation of himself. For it was not safe to
announce the Son openly as long as the Father's Godhead was not yet
acknowledged, nor when the Son's Godhead was not yet accepted
that we should be - if! may speak a little wildly - burdened with the
Holy Spirit'.
gradually.23' 'You perceive', Gregory says, 'periods of illumination
gradually enlightening us and an order of revelation (OBo1..oyia,)
which it is better for us to preserve, neither appearing in a single burst
(dOparo,) nor maintaining secrecy to the very end'. And he suggests
that the divinity of the Holy Spirit was perhaps one of those things
which the disciples could not bear 'now' Oohu 16:12), but which
were to be revealed later. 240 This Oration had begun with a
quotation of the troubled words of Gregory's interrogators, 'Where
are you leading us, towards a new unbegotten God who is not in
Scripture?'241 Gregory by the end of the Oration had given them a
serious and honest answer, much more in accordance with the
historical facts than Basil's attempt to answer the same question: for
the divinity of the Holy Spirit the witness of Scripture must be
supplemented by, or interpreted in the context of, the religious
experience of the church and of the Christian individual. One can see
how Jerome could say that he had learnt to expound the Bible from
Gregory of Nazianzus, even though as far as we know Gregory never
wrote a biblical commentary.
In a large exposition of his pneumatology written probably at the
period when debate about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was most
239 2 6 (161).
24°27 (164).
2411 (133). MoHer, 'Macedonius, Macedonier' lIS. notes this. Gregory of
Nazianzus can also of course give Scriptural proofs for his pneumatology, and
especially for the distinct existence of the Spirit's hypostasis, e.g.:]n 14:18 (the Spirit
distinct from the Son);]n 14:23 (the hypostasis of the Son and of the Spirit distinct);
Mtt 28:19 (three distinct proprieties); Acts S:ltf(Ananias and Sapphira); 10:44 and
19:2 (Cornelius and Paw's converts at Corinth);]n 3:8 (the Spirit blows where it
wm)~ and the fact that Paul mentions the Persons of the Trinity in indiscriminate
order (Orat. XXXIV. 13-1 5 (253, 256), cf. Orat. XL!.12 (444, 445)). He virtually
repeats his argument about the dHiiculty of finding doctrine concerning the Holy
Spirit in verse from Poemata Dogmatjea 1.1 lines 10--24. 2S-36 (37:409).
 The Controversy Resolved
rife, Gregory of Nyssa tries to show that the Spirit must be treated in
exactly the same way as are the Father and the Son m such respects as
holiness, eternity, wisdom, sovereignty (1'iVt~oVL"6v) and power:
'All the names and concepts which are appropriate to God have the
same relation of equal honour to each other by reason of their not
differing at all in the significance of their substance (tOU \m01cEt)JtvOU).
Even the word theos (God) Gregory remarks, can be applied to things
very far inferior to God himself, and he gives as examples from
Scripture]er 1O:I1; Pss 95 (96):5; I Sam 2S·.13; Num 22·.?if. It would
242
therefore be illogical to deny the name 'God' to the Holy Spirit.
His opponents (Macedonians) argue that the word theos can only
refer to the nature (Physis) of anything bearing that name. Gregory
argues that we cannot directly know the nature of God. 'We make
guesses by analogy based on the evidence of things which escape our
understanding.' We are compelled to infer the nature fro~ the effects
(energeia), and indeed in an our experience effects are a reliable gwde
to the nature (of the thing effecting), fire, for instance, is not cold nor
ice hot. But the effect (energeia) of the Spirit we know to be the
identical effect of both the Father and the Son; an together sanctify,
quicken, exhort, and so on. We must therefore conclude tha: the
nature of all three is identica!.243 Even if we take name to mdIcate
rank(a~iu), then the Holy Spirit must be regarded as God, because
the Spirit is the royal chrism with which Christ the Kmg ~s
anointed.244 Elsewhere he argues that the Hoi y Spirit is uncreated; It
is he who confers goodness, freedom, wisdom, incorruption,
blessedness etc. on creatures, and does not receive them with or from
creatures, and in short the Spirit has every attribute possessed by the
Father and the Son except those which apply to the distinction of the
hypostases.245 He meets the Macedonians' proof text Amos 4: 1 3 by
saying that pneuma here does not mean the Holy Spirit, but refers to
the fact that when people become Christians they cease to be flesh and
become spirit an 3:6, 1 Cor 12:3), and he allegorizes the whole
passage.z46 As we have already seen,z47 the Holy Spirit, though
242Ad Eustatl,ium, de Sancta Trinitate 75-77 (']'-10 Leiden).
243Ibid. 77 (10, II Leiden), 80 (13 Leiden).
24481_2 (14- 16 Leiden). For a recapitulation of this argument. see Gregory's
discourse De Deitate Filii et Spiritus Sancti. PG 46:573. 576 .
245 Ad Simplicium de Fide 65. 66 (Leiden): Gregory writes 'as the Scripture says'.
but gives only one reference. I Cor 12:11.
24667. 247See above, p. 729.
The Doctrine of the Spirit
mentioned third, is in Gregory's view equal in nature. Ifhe is divine
(theion, not theos in this passage), all the other attributes-fonow. 24 • He
is like to and equal with the other two persons, except that
'we say that he is reckoned third in order after the Father and the Son,
and third in the order of reception'. 249
As well as expressing the Holy Spirit's union with the Son in terms of
anointing, Gregory can use the image of kingship for this idea: the
Son is the king, the Spirit is the kingdom,
'the Spirit is a living and substantial (00",,;'8'1<;) and distinctly
subsisting (EvU1'Omuto<;) kingdom with which the only-begotten
Christ is anointed and is king of all that is.'250
The two are as closely united as a body and the oil with which it is
anointed, 'so that anyone who intends to be joined to him (Christ)
must first encounter him through the touch of the chrism' (tOU
~UpOU).z51 In the same work he says that the Father is the source of
power, the Son is the power of the Father and the Holy Spirit is the
spirit (pneuma) of the power. 252 And in Vita Gregorii Thamaturgi
Gregory quotes with approval a Creed attributed to Gregory
Theodorus or the Wonderworker, the Cappadocian bishop who
lived in the second half ofthe third century. Its third article runs thus:
'And one Holy Spirit possessing his existence (fi"UP~L<;) from God, and
manifested through the Son, that is to men, perfect image of the
perfect Son, Life as cause of those who have life, holy Source, minister
of the holiness of sanctity; in whom is manifested God the Father who
is above all and in all: and God the Son who is through all; perfect
Trinity in glory and eternity and sovereignty neither divided nor
differentiated' .253
The advanced theological vocabulary of this creed makes it very
difficult for us to suppose that it really did emanate from Gregory
248Adv. Macedonianos 92--94 (Leiden).
. 249Ibid. 100; 'third in order of reception' (1tapa~6(J"EroC;), however, is an odd term;
It certainly cannot imply that we first receive the Father and then the Son and then
th~ Spirit. It could be translated 'tradition', meaning either that tradition places him
thIrd or that he is mentioned or dealt with third in the Scriptures.
250 Ibid. J02.
251 103 . It is not likely that Gregory is here claiming that the ceremonial of
anointing with chrism at baptism is a necessary part of the rite.
252 100: cf. Holl Amphilochius 210.
253PG 46:9 12--913.
 The Controversy Resolved
Theodorus, but it is significant that Gregory of Nyssa should have
endorsed it. May's remark 2s4 that Gregory rarely apphes the word
theos to the Holy Spirit can just be accepted, and perhaps we may
agree with Jaeger that it was logically inherent in G:regory's thought
that the homoousion should be extended to the Splnt, but Gregory
seldom if ever actually so applied it.>55
We have already seen something of the functions which Gregory
ascribes to the Holy Spirit. In a passage in which he describes the
Spirit as analogous to the breath which comes from us whe~ we utter
a word (though we must not conceive ofit anthropomorphlc~lly), h.e
says that the Spirit 'witnesses along with ~heWord, and mamfests ~s
activity', and then Gregory emphasises his dlStmct subSIstence wlt~m
the Godhead. 2'. In a letter he describes the Spirit as a 'perfectmg
(t&A.&IOUlll;vljv) power', a term which when it occur~ in the
Cappadocian theologians is their flattened and reduced verSIon of the
eschatological nature of the Spirit to which the ~ew Testame~t
witnesses.>57 And Jaeger points out that Gregory gIves to the Spmt
the task of ordering and distributing and directing the affairs of the
world.>s. But when he tries to tell in what the peculiar subsistence of
Spirit within the Trinity consists he is as helplessly negative as the
other Cappadocians. He can attribute ingenerateness to the Father
and gener.teness to the Son, but this is his account of the Spmt:
'His peculiar identification and mark is to be neither of those
(proprieties) which reason has observed in respectively the Father and
254'Datierung' 56. .
25SGregor von Nyssa's Lehre 22~ but how Jaeger C3? ~o on to say that the CouncIl
of Constantinople did apply homoousion to the Spirit, I cannot understand. ~he
council most pointedly refrained from doing so. In fact Gregory ~ever apphed
homoousion to the Spirit, and rarely to anything else. Gonzalez (op. Clt. 16 n 73 ~nd
17) collected all Gregory's uses of the epithet: there are only four pas~ages. two ~stng
it in a reductio ad absurdum (Con. Eunom. 1.539 (PG 1092, ~84 Lelden),.111 (11).69
Vol. II 75 Leiden (644»; one describes how the imperial offi,?al urged BaSil to reject
simply the word homoousion (Con. Eunom. 1.136 (293, 68 Lelden», and one us~s th~
fact that N had declared the Son homoousios, a doctrine accepted by both Apollmans
and Gregory, to reduce a christological statement of Apol1inaris to absurdity (Adv.
Apoll. p. Ij7 Leiden (1161)). . • .
2560r. Cat. 1l.1-3. quotation from. 3; 'witnesses together With IS
ouJ.L1tapa lJ.ClptUpouv a word for which Lampe Patr!stic Lexicon gives. Theodore
Studita (VIIIth-IXth cent.); but here is a much earlier occurrence of It.
257Ep. 24.lj (79 Leiden).
258Cregor von Nyssa's Lehre 23-24, the terms are 61ata'Yil. o\ob:'l1o"l'i and l)lata~l'i
and are (significantly) Stoic.
The Doctrine oj the Spirit
the Son. For he exists neither ingenerately nor as only-begotten
(JlOVOYEVro<;) but simply to exist represents his propriety compared
with the other (proprieties) which have been mentioned. 2s •
.Gregory does not attempt to exalt 'procession' into an account of the
distinct subsistence of the Spirit, as Gregory of Nazianzus does. Holl
pleasingly and usefully gives a schematic account of the doctrine of
the Cappadocian theologians on this subject: 2 • o
Basil: Fatherhood, Sonship, - (i.e. nothing much).
Gregory of Nazianzus: Ingenerateness. Generateness,' Procession
Gregory of Nyssa: Ingenerateness, Only-begotten, 'through the Son'.
On the subject of Scriptural support for the existence of the Holy
Spirit within the Godhead as a distinct hypostasis, Gregory of Nyssa
neither takes refuge in a doctrine of secret tradition as Basil does
nor faces the question and solves it honestly as does Gregory of
Nazianzus. He has one brief reference to gradual revelation in the
style of his namesake of Nazianzus, but though Dani610u and Balas
make much of it, the passage does not have great significance'>·! On
several occasions he appeals to the practice of baptism into the Triple
Name to support his doctrine of the Holy Spirit.>·2 In one or two
passages he argues in favour of custom in the church as
convincing.>·3 But passages can also be found where he rejects
custom and prefers Scripture.>·4 On this point we must pronounce
him to have been less percipient than either of the other two
Cappadocian theologians.
Finally the subject ofthe Pilioque, that is to say the doctrine that the
259Con. Eunom. 1.279'-80 (336). Holl remarks on this negative conclusion
Amphilochius 212, and gives one or two other examples. For further light on
Gregory's technical vocabulary, see HoIl op. cit. 239'-43.
2600p. cit. 216.
2610ral. de Spiritu Sancto sive in Pentecosten PG 46:697. See Danielou L''ttre et Ie
temps 187 and Balas Metousia 86' n 82. But there is a longer and better
acknowledgement of the same principle in Ref. Can. Eunom. 2. 3. (4.68). though it
extends no further than seeing the teaching of the O.T. as dim and sketchy
compared with that of the N.T.
. 262Con. Eunom. 1.288-9 (340)~ Adv. Maced. 103. 105-'7 (Leiden); Ep. 24.8 (Leiden)
- as we are baptised. so we believe etc. See May 'Datierung 55--6' and 'Einige
Bemerkungen' 514-5.
26JCon. Eunom. III (ix) 55--60 (880,881) - especially use of the Triple Name in
baptism; Adv. Maced. 107-115 (Leiden) - usage in prayer.
264BasiJ Epp. 139.3 (usually attributed to his brother Gregory); De Deitate Filii et
Sp. Si. PG 46.6j.
 The Controversy Resolved
Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, not just from the
Father nor any other way, must, as far as it concerns the writers of the
fourth century, be treated as briefly as possible. This later became and
still remains a highly controversial topic, but we must recall as we
consider it that nobody in the period under review regarded it as a
particularly important point. Until the Cappadocian theologians
(and not always even in this case) nobody distinguished between the
procession and the mission of the Spirit, that is to say his position in
the inner life of the Godhead as distinct from his activity among
believers or in the world, and nobody in the fourth century would
have thought of contrasting the two in any way. H. B. Swete's dassic
work2.' will give the student all the information he needs for the
development of thought on this subject up to the time of Athanasius'
Letters to Serapion, as long as he allows for Swete's tendency to read
into earlier periods nuances and emphases which only appeared at a
later time. All that we need note is that a fragment of Asterius speaks
of the Holy Spirit as proceeding 'from the Father' without further
modification;2 •• that Germinius later says 'the Paradete has been
given to us from God the Father through the Son';2.' and that Basil
of Ancyra speaks of the Spirit as 'given to the faithful from the Father
through the Son', and as 'the Holy Spirit whom the divine Scripture
calls a Paradete subsisting from the Father through the Son'.2.'
Athanasius throws less light on the subject than we might expect.
He says of the Spirit 'who proceeds from (napa) the Father?· and
'he is said to proceed from the Father since he shines and is sent and is
given from (napa) the Logos, from (tIC) the Father confessedly' .2'0
And elsewhere we hear from him a doctrine which is often repeated
later in the century, viz that the Spirit receives from the Father all that
he has. 271 Epiphanius has several statements on the subject and if any
ancient writer can be thought to support the Pilioque it is he. The
Spirit, he says, 'is believed (to be) from Christ or from both' (Father
and Son)2'2 and he speaks of'the Holy Spirit from both, out of spirit
265 History oj the Doctrine oj the Procession of the Holy Spirit: see also Prestige CPT
249-54·
'''Frag. XXXI (67), Bardy, Lucien 352.
267Hilary Coli. Antiar. AlII (48).
268Epiphanius Panarion 73.16.
269Epp. ad Serap. 1.2; Shapland is wrong (op. cit. 64-5) in seeing this as necessarily
a reference to the inter-Trinitarian position of the Spirit.
270 Ibid. 1.20.
2710r. (on. Ar. I1I.24 (93). 272Ancoratus 67.1 (8).
The Doctrine of the Spiril
(i.e. what God is),2'3 and of 'the Son from whom he (the Spirit)
receives, and the Father for whom he proceeds ... (the Spirit) who is
from (napa) the Father, who is from (tIC) the Son?" and of the Spirit
'proceeding from the Father and the Son ... from Father and Son,
with (Guv) Father and Son' .2" Even so it will be observed that this is
not a completely uniform acceptance of the Pilioque. There is,
however, in Ambrose's De Spirilu Sancia one passage where there can
be no ambiguity:
'And when he (the Son) comes out from the Father he does not move
from a place nor is he as ifhe were a body separating from a body. nor
when he is in the Father is he as ifhe were a body contained in a body.
The Holy Spirit too, when he proceeds from the Father and from the
Son is not separated. He is not separated from the Father, he is not
separated from the Son' .2'.
Basil of Caesarea can be interpreted as favouring the Pilioque, but
the case is an uncertain one. In Adversus Eunomium at one point277 his
words could be taken to mean that the Spirit proceeds from the
Father and the Son, but in another place in the same worP" he
speaks of the Spirit as 'sent by the Father, ministered by the Son'.
There is another passage in DSS where one could read the doctrine
into his remarks, but Pruche in loco is cautious. 2'. And May2'O calls
attention to a passage in the same chapter of DSS where Basil
describes how knowledge of God is sent from the Father through the
Son to the Spirit, and then a counter-movement takes place from the
Spirit through the Son to the Father.28l Gregory of Nazianzus, who
has a firm doctrine of the Spirit's procession, is quite clear on this
point. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, and he never
describes him as proceeding through the Son. 2'2 The nearest he
'73lbid. 70.7 (88), and again 71.1 (88).
274Ibid. 73.1.2 (91).
27SPanarion 62.4.1, 2 (392).
276De Spiritu Sancto 1.11.120 (67).
27711.34 (652).
278II1.6 (668).
"9DSS [8.46 (410) 1152].
280'Einige Bemerkungen' 513-14.
281
47 (4 12 ) [153]. May thinks that Gregory of Nyssa was influenced by this
passage.
28'See Oral. XXXI.8 (141); XXXIX.I2 ()48); XXV.I5 (1220) and 17 (1221,
122 4).
 The Controversy Resolved
reaches to the Pilioque is to say that the Spirit proceeds from the
Father and has 'affinity' (o!Ket6ni';) with the Son}·3 But this is not an
acceptance of the Pilioque. Gregory of Nyssa is almost as consistent,
but in a different way. He usually teaches that the Holy SPlrlt
proceeds from the Father through the Son, though he can
occasionall y speak of the Spirit as proceeding from the Father and
receiving from the Son.2.' Holl sums up his doctrine by saying that
the Spirit is caused by the Father and expressed and ministered by the
Son,2.5 and Gonzalez, more cautiously and accurately 'the Son also
plays some part in the procession of the Holy Spirit'.2.6
It is a sterile exercise to attempt to trace in an early period the
lineaments of a doctrine which only came to be developed in a much
later one. The Cappadocian Fathers made great and crucial
contributions to the development of the full doctrine of the Holy
Spirit, and in the process impressed upon the whole church the
necessity of accepting an integrated and properly considered doctrine
of God as the Holy Trinity. Their conviction that the Father was the
fount and cause of the other two co-equal Persons would not have a
priori inclined them to formulate a concept agreeable to the Pilioque.
Whatever the merits of this doctrine (and this work does not pretend
to assess them),2.7 no firm nor clear support for it can be found in the
three great Cappadocian theologians.
28JHom. XXIV.6 (6[2. 6[3).
284E.g. Adv. Maced. 97. [08 (Leiden); Epp. XXIV·4 (76). Swete (History of
Doctrine oJProcession 102-05) notes one doubtful passage. Gonzalez, op. CIt. 129-30
lists a1l the statements of Gregory affecting the procession of the Holy Spirit. There
is not one passage where the Son is not mentioned along with the Father, though the
formula is not always 'from the Father through the Son'; he never says simply 'from
the Father', and never simply 'from the Father and the Son'.
28SAmphiiochius 214-15.
2860p. cit. 130.
287 1 have attempted to do so in Studies in Christian Antiquity cap. 12.
790
23
The Council of Constantinople of 3 81
I. Imperial Policy before the Council
The attitude towards Christianity and its divisions of the Emperors
both in the East and the West between the reigns of Valentinian
(364-375) and Valens (364-378) and that of Theodosius (379-395)
varied considerably. Valens, as we have already seen, was a convinced
Homoian Arian, and when he thought it feasible he used his power to
promote his favourite doctrine and suppress others. He did not
dislodge Basil in Caesarea nor Athanasius in Alexandria. But he
banished Gregory from Nyssa and Eusebius from Samosata and
when Athanasius died in 373 Valens made sure that the Arian Lucius
was installed as archbishop of Alexandria and Peter, Athanasius' pro-
Nicene successor, chased out of that city and compelled to take refuge
in Rome. At the same time he sent a number of pro-Nicene clergy
and monks of the see of Alexandria to work in the mines at Phaeno in
Palestine and Proconnessus, an island in the Propontis, and also in
Diocaesarea in Palestine.' As soon as Eudoxius died the pro-Nicenes
in Constantinople in 369 elected a successor, Evagrius, but Valens
immediately exiled him and welcomed the Arian choice,
Demophilus, for that see. A delegation of clergy from the capit,al of
the 'Homoousian' or 'Homoiousian' persuasion sent to Valens at
Nicomedia was rebuffed by the Emperor, and he is alleged to have
put them on board a ship to transport them across the strait. The ship
caught fire and they all perished. Whether the fire was accidental or
deliberate we cannot telJ.2 He was single-minded in promoting his
chosen brand of doctrine, for he banished Eunomius as well; and his
chosen ecclesiastical advisers, Demophilus, and later Dorotheus when
t Historia Akaphela S. 14 (168); Basil Ep. 139; Theodoret HE IV.2 I ,22; Socrates HE
IV.2I,22; Sozomenus HE VI.I9·
2Socrates HE IV.J4-I6, Sozomenus VI.I3,14; Theodoret HE IV.24.
791
 The Controversy Resolved
he succeeded Euzoius at Antioch, were no friends to Neo-Arianism. 3
One of Valens' favourite devices for discouraging" clergy whose
views he disliked was to enrol them among the curiales, thus making
them liable to considerable expenses from which clergy of the
favoured persuasion were exempt. 4 But his efforts at persecution
were sporadic and unpredictable, and when he was facing especial
danger, such as during the rebellion of Pro cop ius (365-6) and before
the battle of Adrianople (378), he would issue orders to recall those
whom he had banished, suggesting that all should now rally to
support the Emperor irrespective of theological allegiance. 5
A particular target of Valens' harassment was Meletius, that
Benedict Arnold of the Homoian party. Gregory of Nyssa in his
Funeral Oration on Meletius tells us that he was exiled three times. 6
The first exile was of course in 360 when he disappointed his
Homoian sponsors by dissenting from their views about the status of
the Son.7 He returned, no doubt, on the death of Constantius. But in
the spring of365 Valens decided that all those bishops who had been
driven out of their sees by Constantius should again leave them, and
return to exile, and this included Meletius (but, by a legal quibble, not
Athanasius).8 Meletius returned from exile at some point thereafter,
whether legally (as a result of mild measures induced by the panic
caused by Procopius' usurpation, perhaps) or illicitly. 9 Then in 370 or
371, under pressure from .. renewed policy of enforcing theological
uniformity on the part of Valens, Meletius again retired from
Antioch to his estate in Armenia, where we have met him already
conferring with Basil and Theodotus.'o As if the enmity of Valens
was not enough, Meletius had incurred that of Eustathius, whom
Meletius, under the protection of the Arian emperor and church, had
attempted unsuccessfully to extrude from Sebaste in 358, and whose
rancour against Basil was no doubt sharpened by Basil's friendship
3Philostorgius HE IX.8.IO,I4.
'Basil Epp 2J5,2)7,247,248.
5This is hinted at in Socrates HE IV.3: 'this news threw the emperor into a great
panic. which arrested his action for a short time against the objects of his
persecution', . which should place it between 367 and 375, and it makes no mention of the divinity
60 ra tio Funebris in Meletium Episcopum 450 (Leiden (857 PG)).
7See above, PP.382-4.
8Socra tes'HE VI.I2.j.
950 Schwartz, 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 171, who places his third exile in 371
(Courtonne St. Basile JOO n I, puts it in 370).
IOSee above, pp.682-3.
792
The Council of Constantinople
with Meletius. Meletius also was regarded with suspicion by Peter of
Alexandria, who inherited this from his predecessor Athanasius and
cbmmunicated it to his protector Damasus." Meletius returned
from his last exile in 378, either just before the miserable end of
Valens, or just after. Peter had arrived in his see of Alexandria armed
with commendatory letters from Damasus, and Lucius had been
summarily ejected, just before the disaster of Adrianople.' 2 This
suggests that Valens, faced with imminent danger to the Empire
from the Goths, had relaxed his pressure against theological non-
conformists in the interest of imperial solidarity.
Valentinian, the brother and co-emperor of Valens, tried not to
involve himself either in disputes between Christians (though he was
a sincere Christian) and pagans, nor in quarrels among the Christians
themselves. We have already seen him refusing to give in to an
attempt by Hilary to attack Auxentius of Milan on doctrinal
grounds.' 3 He offered no opposition to the choice of Ambrosius as·
bishop of Milan in 374. 14 But if we are to trust Theodoret,
Valentinian committed himself strenuously to the pro-Nicene cause
when he presided over a church council somewhere in IIIyricum
(perhaps in Sirmium) which produced a resoundingly pro-
Homoousian statement and sent it to the bishops of the diocese of
Asia" (comprising, among others, the provinces of Phrygia,
Karophrygia and Pacatiana).15 But can we trust Theodoret in this
case? There are many difficulties and obscurities in the account.' 6 It
t 1 For the antagonism between Eustathius and Meletius, see Loafs Eustathius von
Sebaste 66--7.
t 2S ocra tes VJ.39. I; Socrates said that Valens would have resented this had he been
given time, but this may be a mere guess; at IV.32,3S he had said explicitly that
Valens called offhis persecution before Adrianople; Socrates echoes this HE V1.37. I
cr, Rufinus HE 11.13 and Jerome Chronicle sub ann. 378.
t3See above, pp. 466---].
14Theodoret HE IV.7, whose account seems a little too good to be true; the
attitude of Ambrose to the CUrrent debate was then unknown and was only publicly
declared when he supported Anemius for the see of Sirmium (375).
15Theodoret HE IV.B,9.
16The imperial message is sent in the names of Valentinian, Gratian and Valens
of the Holy Spirit, which suggests that it cannot be very late. But it would have been
quit~ out of character for Valentinian to support so enthusiastically a distinctly
parnsan document~ the imperial letter is in an unimperial style, with several
references to the Bible. And there is in the message attributed to the Emperor a
careful distinction between ousia and hypostasis which is consonant neither with
Valentinian's predilections nor with contemporary Western theology. The names
793
 The Controversy Resolved
seems preferable either to assume that we are here dealing with a
council which took place in 378 or 379, after Valentinian's death, or
dismiss the whole passage as wholly untrustworthy.17
Gratian was formally made Augustus when he was eight years old,
in 367, but he only exercised power from 375 onwards, on the death
of his father Valentinian, when he was sixteen. Gratian was murdered
by the agents of the usurper Magnus M~ximus in 383: U?til 379 he
followed the policy of non-intervention In ecclesIastIcal affaIrs
practised by his father. In 378 he met Ambrose of Milan for the first
time in Sirmium. When the news of the disaster of Adrianople
reached him in the same year, Gratian (perhaps following Valens'
example), issued an Edict declaring toleration for all the diverse views
of Christian parties except Manichees, Photiuians and Eunomians. '8
In the same year a council, already referred to, took place in Rome
which not only produced some strongly pro-Nicene opinions,
but also enacted some legislation granting ecclesiastical authority to
the bishop of Rome: if he summoned a bishop to him that bishop
should be compelled to attend; if he or his council condemned a
bishop the Emperor must exile him; and the Pope himsdf should be
immune from the judgment of any tribunal save the Emperor's
court. Gratian replied by issuing a decree Ordinariorum sententias
allowing the Pope's authority over bishops within his jurisdiction but
refusing him immunity from ecclesiastical law .19 In the autumn of
the same year an influx of people professing the Arian faith arrived in
Milan, refugees from Gothic invasion, and Gratian forcibly took
over a Catholic church building and gave it to the Arians to use for
of the bishops sending it are unknown; no other authority mentions this council. If
we take the 'Valentinian' as being Valentinian I's small son, then a mere infant, we
have to ask ourselves whether his strong~y Arian mother ,Justina, would ever have
allowed such an anti-Arian document to be sent out in her son's name.
17S we te (Early History 57-9). ZeiIler (Origines chret;ennes, 3 10-27) and Simonetti
(Crisi 435--6. 438-9) try to make sense of it. Meslin (Les Ariens 86--9) gives it up. It
has been suggested that Palladius' reference to the (pro-Nicene) 'Blasphemy of
Sirmium' refers to this council. Its doctrinal statement is well consistent with
this.
lliThe Edict is not extant, but it is evidenced in Socrates HEV.2 and Sozomenus
HE VII.J.3. The Manichees were always suspect to Emperors, partly no doubt
because they originated in the Persian Empire; Photinians and Eunomians
represented two comparatively insignificant extremes. For Gratian's actions and
policy see Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 196-8.
'9Collectio Avellana 54ff; EOMIA 1.28df. See King The Emperor Theodosius 23·
See above PP.758-60.
794
The Council of Constantinople
their worship. He was clearly anxious to accommodate the views of
Justina, widow of Valentini an I, and her son (she was a second wife)
the boy-Emperor Valentinian II, who were Arians and were at the
time residing in Aquileia. But next year at the beginning of summer
when Gratian was travelling from the Balkans to the Rhine front to
cope with invading Allemanni and Franks he returned this building
to the Catholics; he was perhaps influenced by the series of sermons
which Ambrose was at the time delivering against those who deny
the divinity of the Holy Spirit (a number which certainly included
Justina and her entourage). Later, at the very end of July, he met
Ambrose at Aquileia and spent some days with him there. By now
Gratian had come to regard Ambrose as his guide, philosopher and
friend. It is usually alleged that at this point Gratian withdrew his
Edict of Toleration of the year before, but this is by no means certain.
On the whole it is more likely that, despite his admiration for
Ambrose, he continued broadly his policy of tolerating within wide
limits differences within Christianity at this period. 20 Later, when
Justina and Valentinian II moved from Aquileia to live in Milan, the
tension between Arians and Catholics took another turn, but these
events lie outside the scope of our narrative. 21 If Gratian had been
free to attend to ecclesiastical affairs undistracted by the necessity of
dealing with barbarian disturbances in the Gallic provinces, or had he
survived the murderous usurpation of Magnus Maximus, it seems
very unlikely that he could have withstood the persuasion of those
two strong-minded individuals, Ambrose and Damasus, and proved
himself an apostle of toleration.
2. Abortive Attempts at Agreement
Liberius, bishop of Rome, on returning to his see after his
humiliating, experiences in exile. remained quiescent. as far as we
know, until Constantius was dead and the Homoian Arian party no
longer securely in control of ecclesiastical affairs, before he made any
2°The Edict of August 379 (Cod. Theod. XVI.5.5) certainly cancelled an earlier
Rescript, but it is doubtful whether the 'Edict of Toleration' (whose text we do not
possess) was the measure meant. See A. Birley 'Magnus 'Maximus and the
Persecution of Heresy' 16 and n 19; K.-L. Noetlichs Die Gesetzgeberischen
MassIJaiJmen des ciJrist/icher Kaisar 104-08 and G. 'Gottlieb Ambrosius von Mailand und
Kaisar Gratian 71-80.
21Sec Mcslin, Les Ariens 44-48; also 33 n 26.
795
 The Controversy Resolved
important move. He did nothing either to further, to prevent or to
protest against the proceedings of the Council of Ariminum until the
year 362 or 363, when he issued a Letter to the Bishops of Italy
(Imperitiae culpam) excusing those who had recendy fallen into error
on the ground of their ignorance and inviting them to return to the
true faith and accept N. It regarded the Council of Ariminum as a
disastrous lapse into heresy, but (naturally enough) said nothing
about Liberius' own recent deviation in that direction. 22 A Letter of
the Bishops of Italy to the Bishops of Illyricum issued a litde later
(363), no doubt also inspired by Liberius (it is entided Divini muneris),
exhorted its recipients to accept the Nicene faith and to renounce the
creed promulgated at Ariminum.23 It describes Ursacius and Valens
as 'instigators of the heresy of Arius or Aecius' (i.e. Aetius). We have
already seen24 how Liberius welcomed the delegation sent from the
Council of Lamp sacus and sent them back with letters favouring the
cause of doctrinal unity, and how this move towards reconciliation
between the Eastern and the Western church was unsuccessful.
Liberius died in 366. He was succeeded by Damasus, an adherent of
the party of Felix, not ofLiberius, and he only succeeded after fierce
fighting between the two factions. He reached the see of Rome by
walking over the corpses of the faction-fighters. 25 Damasus, as we
have already had occasion to see, was a convin'ced, indeed an
aggressive, supporter ofNicene doctrine. He quickly began to devote
his energies to suppressing Arianism and promoting the cause of the
proponents of N. Sozomenus and Theodoret describe 2 • a council
held in Rome under Damasus whose encyclical letter is devoted to
stating the pro-Nicene doctrine of the Son in uncompromising terms
and to condemning Auxentius of Milan for heresy. Its date is
uncertain. Some (e.g. Bardy, Courtonne and Zeiller) place it as early
as 368, others (e.g. Cavallera, Lietzmann, Schwartz, Piganiol and
Amand de Mendieta) as late as 372.27 If this council is that referred to
22Hilary Coli. Anliar. IV.I (156-7).
"Ibid. BIV.2 (158, 159).
24See above, PP.763-4. Reconciliation was temporarily in the air just then; see
the account of the council held at Antioch in 363 where apparently Meletius and
Akakius signed together. above pp. 581-2.
25The piece in the Collection Avellana «I) 1-14 (1-4» called Quae Gesta Sum Inter
Liberium el FeUcem episcopos gives a vivid description of this faction-fighting. The
authors are strongly anti-Damasus and regard him as nothing less than a murderer.
26Sozomenus HE VI.23.S-rS; Theodoret HE 11.22.
27See Meslin, Les Ariens 41-44; Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 79-80."It is the
encyclical referred to in Damasus' Letter Confidimus quidem. See above, PP.757-8 .
796
The Council of Constantinople
by Athanasius in Ad Afros2 8 as held recendy by Damasus and
condemning Auxentius, Ursacius and Valens then we must opt for
the earlier date, or follow the conjecture, originally made by
Duchesne, that Damasus held two councils in Rome condemning
these three bishops. However many councils he held, however,
Damasus never succeeded in deposing these three bishops who
continued to hold their sees serenely until their deaths. We have
already glanced at the efforts, in the end doomed to failure, made by
the Macedonians and/or 'Homoiousians', led ultimately by
Eustathius, to achieve a stable doctrinal formula. 2 '
Determined, but sadly ineffectual efforts were made by Basil of
Caesarea to bring about reconciliation and consensus in the East and
between the East and the West between the years 37 I and 377. They
can be reconstructed from the correspondence of Basil and of
Damasus. Basil had early in his career as bishop made strenuous
efforts to influence the imperial court on behalf of the pro-Nicene
party. When these failed, mainly owing to the intransigence of the
Emperor Valens, he turned to the West. 30
The negotiations with the West can be divided (as Amand de
Mendieta divides them) into four stages. First, Basil writes lettersto
Athanasius asking him to approach Damasus and assist Basil's
overtures. 3I None of them was answered and nothing came of them.
Basil would not desert Meletius and Athanasius would not recognize
him as bishop of Antioch; further, Basil was never sure in his own
mind that Athanasius had abandoned Marcellus of Ancyra and his
followers. The second stage began when a letter from a Roman
council headed by Damasus, entitled Confidimus quidem, was brought
to Alexandria by a deacon from Milan (not of the persuasion of
Auxentius) called Sabinus. This council Amand de Mendieta dates to
Swetc (Early History 56--7) opted for 37I. It also appears in the Verona Codex and
was edited by Schwartz in ZNW 1935, 179, and 1936, 19.
28 10 ( 1045).
29See above, PP.762--6.
30See May 'Die Grossen Kappadokier' 328. Many scholars have described the
course of negotiations between Basil and Damasus. See Harnack History IV.90, 92
n I and 93; Courtonnc, St. Basile 255-80; Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 166-95;
MesIin us Ariens 41-44; Simonetti Crisi 418-20, 427-34; May 'Die Grossen
Kappadokier' 327""9; Fedwick, Church and Charisma 107-13. I here follow E.
Arnand de Mendieta 'Basile de Cesaree et Damase de Rome'.
31Epp. 61, 66, 67. 69, 80 and 82. The date is 371 to 372.
797
 The Controversy Resolved
372.'2 Sabinus was sent on, with a copy of the letter, to Basil. Basil, in
concert with Meletius (now in exile in Armenia) sent a letter to the
bishops of Italy and Gaul (not directly to Damasus) lamenting the
state of the Eastern church and asking for the despatch of a large
Western delegation to the East in order to bring about agreement on
N. Basil approved of the terms of Conjidimus quidem. 33 At Easter 373
Sabinus returned with Basil's letters. In May 373 Athanasius died,
Peter his successor was driven out, fled to Rome, and proceeded to
poison the mind of Damasus against Basil and Meletius. In the same
year a presbyter of Antioch, Evagrius, arrived at Caesarea from
Rome with a message from Damasus. The message was that Basil's
letters addressed to the West were returned as unacceptable and no
official reply was to be given to them. But Evagrius brought a
confession of faith from Damasus which Basil was to sign without
altering a single word, and it was then to be brought to Rome by a
large delegation of Eastern bishops. Basil replied to this demand in a
polite but biting letter,34 putting an end to this phase of the
negOtiatIOn. Evagrius, moving on to Antioch, refused to
communicate with Dorotheus, a confidential friend of Basil and
deacon of Meletius.
The third stage of negotiations began when Basil, stung into action
by the arrest and banishment ofEusebius of Sam os ata in 374, wrote a
letter to the bishops of Gaul and Italy describing the distress of the
churches of the East and asking them to approach Valentinian I with a
request that he should intervene, and failing that to send
representatives to Antioch capable of handling the situation."
Dorotheus, now a presbyter, brought this letter to Damasus.
Damasus sent a very cool reply (of which the fragment Ea gratia is a
part)36 making little reference to the demand for aid but conveying a
considerable theological statement on the "usia and the personae
which deliberately avoided making any statement about the three
"YPMtas".'. It was the adhesion of Basil, Meletius and their followers
to this doctrine of the" ypc,sta.'es which caused Damasus, ignorant
alike of the thought of Athanasius and of Basil, to suspect them of
heresy.
,I2S CC n 27 above.
.lJ Epp. 92 and 90.
~4Ep. 156, addressed to Evagrius, not to Damasus.
'5Ep. 243.
J6Sl'C above, Pp.757-8.
The Council of Constantinople
The fourth and fmal stage of this mournful interchange began
when in 375 Vitalis, formerly a continuing Eustathian, but now
Apollinarian bishop of Antioch, paid a visit to Rome and returned to
the East furnished with a letter of approval from Damasus. The Pope,
however, quickly realised how dangerously he had compromised
himself in backing this rank heretic and he wrote a letter to Paulinus
warning him about the views of Vitalis on the Incarnation (Per
jilium)." Thislastletter was sent in 376 and constituted also an official
recognition of Paulinus, not Meletius, as bishop of Antioch. This act
roused Basil's wrath, and drastic action followed. Dorotheus went to
Rome, against Basil's advice, as an emissary from Eusebius of
Samosata in exile in Danubian territory. Dorotheus was
accompanied by a deacon, Sanctissimus, who had on occasion served
as one of Basil's messengers. A fierce discussion took place in Rome
between Dorotheus, Peter and Damasus during which Dorotheus let
loose some far from complimentary remarks about Peter. 38 Peter
had treated Eusebius of Samosata as an Arian along with Meletius.
Dorotheus and Sanctissimus eventually returned to Basil carrying a
letter from Damasus which Basil affected to regard as encouraging;
we have only a fragment of it (Illud sane miramur),9 which contains a
disparaging remark about the Eastern churches' toleration of
Apollinarianism. The year was by now 377, and in the summer of
that year Basil sent a synodailetter40 to the Western bishops (in effect
to Damasus) which was no longer conciliatory but defiant. He asked
these bishops, if they could not come in person, to send a letter in
which they would list by name the disturbers of the peace of the
Eastern Church: he meant not only the Arians but Eustathius of
Sebaste (Macedonian), Apollinaris (Apollinarian) and Paulinus
(Marcellan/Sabellian). The letter contained some shafts directed at
Damasus because of his toleration of Eustathius and the Marcellans.
The fragment Non nobis quidquam from Damasus is probably part of
the reply of the bishop of Rome to this. He could, he said, in effect do
nothing. Amand de Mendieta4l thinks that the Tomus Damas;42 was
sent with this letter to Basil, emanating from a council of Rome
J7See above, pp.658-g.
38Basil Ep. 266 .
391n fact there was very little encouragement in it for Eastern pro-Nicenes.
4°Ep. 263.
410p. cit. 140-1.
42See above, PP.758-60.
799
 The Controversy Resolved
which Dossetti dates to 377 or 378, with some plausibility.43 Its
doctrine certainly is entirely compatible with that of Basil and
though it names plenty of heretics it does not acc~~e ofheres.y :u>yone
the disparagement of whom would offend Basil s SUSCeptIblhtles.
So ended this apparently fruitless interchange between these two
eminent men. We have already had occasion to remark upon at once
44
the resemblance and the incompatibility of their temperaments.
Basil only addressed one letter directly to Damasus, early in the affair,
and it probably never reached him.45 Basil certai~ly found Dam~sus
exasperating. In one letter, written in 375, he apphes a couple ofhnes
of Homer to him:
'I wish you had never besought him, because he is a haughty man'. 46
Simonetti says of Damasus, 'Authoritarian and superficial, he was
convinced that he knew the affairs of the East well and that he had the
authority to bring about their solution.'47 It no doubt irked hi~ that
neither Basil nor Eusebius seemed aware of the necesSIty of
recognizing his apostolic authority.48 But it would not be correct to
conclude that the correspondence between Basil and Damasus was
wholly without good result. The Tomus Damasi which the Pope
eventually sent to Basil (among others) must have convmced many
pro-Nicenes that the Western church was, whatever the
unacceptable claims and arrogant attitude of Damasus mig.ht be,
sound on the essential points of doctrine. And though Basil dIed
without any apparent success in obtaining agreement on doctrine, the
Eastern Church was about to achieve a lasting consensus expressed
very much in the words which Basil had taught it to regard as
orthodox.
One obstacle to the achievement of reconciliation and unity at this
period was, of course, the presence of Paulinus of A~tioch, clai~ing
to be the rightful, Catholic, bishop of that see, derlvmg hIS tradItion
in continuity from Eustathius who had been bishop about forty years
43S ee above. P.758 n 103.
445ee above. p.686. . '
45$0 Arnand de Mendieta, op. cit. 154. The letter IS no. 70, sent m 371.
46Ep. 239: Diomedes is speaking about Achilles to Agamemnon (Iliad IX.69 8-9)
IlTjO' OI.pEM:<; A.io0'80'8ul 6.,.UJIlOVa "T1A.&irova
!lupiu owpa OISOUe; . 6 o'u:yTtVWP terti Kai li).).roC;.
Basil's letter is addressed to Eusehius of Samosata.
4'Cris; 430. Ambrose. he adds (097), suffered from the same delusion.
48 50 Arnand de Mendieta 159-160.
800
The Council of Constantinople
before, and commanding the allegiance of a certain number (though
certainly not the majority) of non-Arian Christians in the city. We
have already seen49 how he came to be consecrated bishop in 362 by
the hasty Lucifer, how he acknowledged that a doctrine of three
hypostases was compatible with orthodoxy, and how he was.
recognized as legitimate bishop of Antioch by Athanasius. Later,
Athanasius' successor Peter extended the same recognition to him
and persuaded Damasus to do the same. There was no love lost
between Paulinus and Meletius, and we have interpreted the evidence
to suggest that in his actions in 362 and 363 Athanasius was
attempting, unsuccessfully, to appeal to the followers of Meletius
over his head. The ecclesiastical historians retail a story that the
followers of these two rivals (and Socrates explicitly includes among
the supporters of Paulinus Flavian who had long been a prominent
Eustathian layman and then cleric) induced them to agree that
whichever of the two should die first should be succeeded by the
other. Modem historians almost unanimously dismiss this account as
a pious fable. 51 Basil was always an opponent of Paulin us not only
because Paulinus was a rival of Basil's friend and ally Meletius, but
because Basil suspected that Paulinus was at heart a Sabellian,.
believing in only one Person (hypostasis) in the Godhead. 52 Paulin us'
association with the remaining followers of Marcellus and his
continuing to favour the expression 'one hypostasis' (for he had only
promised to recognise that 'three hypostases' need not be heretical, but
he had not undertaken to use the expression) rendered him suspect. 53
We have already had occasion to note that about the year 371
adherents of Marcellus approached· Athanasius, presenting to him a
statement offaith or Bethesis, and that he accepted it and gave them a
document expressing his agreement with their doctrine; and we have
looked favourably on the suggestion ofTetz that about this time the
Marcellans had more or less coalesced with the continuing
49S ce above, pp.639-44. 651-3.
50S ocrates HE V.S; Sozomenus HE VII.3.1-4; Theodoret HE V.3.IS.
S 1 E.g. C~urtonne St. Basile 79 and Ritter Das Konzil6 I. The fact that Gregory of
Nazianzus argued strongly both during the Council of Constantinople and after it
that Paulinus should succeed on the death ofMeletius (De Vita Sua 159! (130) - 1679
(136» docs not necessarily imply that a pact to that effect had been made.
52See Basil Ep. 263. and Homily XXIV (601) where he is probably hitting at the
doctrine of Paulinus,
53Paulinus certainly c,ommunicated with Marcellans. See Courtonne St. Basile
306.
801
 The Controversy Resolved
Eustathians in Antioch and were producing propaganda to forward
their cause. 54 And we have observed one example of this activity in
the malicious little piece called Refutatio Hypocrisis Meletii et Busehii
Samosatemis 55 which was probably designed by this group to counter
the efforts of those who had formerly belonged to the school of Basil
of Ancyra to come to terms with the homoousion, about the year 364.
These MarceIlans when Valens had incarcerated or put to forced
labour several Egyptian pro-Nicene clergy in Diocaesarea about the
year 371 wrote a letter of sympathy to them conveying to them the
statement of faith, informing them of Athanasius' approval ofit, and
expecting to be accepted by them as orthodox. 56 Their expectation
was fulfiIled. The presence of these disciples of MarceIlus whose
watch-word had always been 'only one hypostasis in the Godhead'
inevitably added to Basil's suspicions. In a letter written to Athanasius
he complains that the Westerners have never brought any accusation
against MarceIlus 57 and in others taxed the pro-Nicene leaders in
Egypt with supporting those who continue to maintain the doctrines
of Mar ceIlus. 5. But by 377 he was taking a milder line and suggesting
to the Westerners that an attempt at reconciliation with the
MarceIlans should be made. 59 And he finaIly accepted them as
orthodox, his suspicion apparently laid at rest. 60
3. The Beginning of a Consensus
Damasus had held several councils in Rome in the decade 370-380,
one in 371 or 372, and one in 376, and finaIly that which produced the
Tomus Damasi in 377 or 378.61 Though he never lost an oppor-
tunity in his official utterances to make a hit at Meletius,62 Damasus'
54See above, pp. 222-3. The Ecthesis, edited by Tetz, in ZNW 64 (1973) 76-84·
sSPG 28:85-90; See above, p. 652 n 45.
56Epiphanius Panarion 72.11.1--6 (265. 266), 1.2.1-12 (266). See Schwartz 'Zur
Kirchengeschichte' 187-8; Gericke Marcell von Ancyra 22-23.
57Ep. 69 (written in 371).
58Epp. 165. 166; he refers to Marcellus also in Epp. 125 and 207.
59Ep. 263.
6°Ep. 266. See Courtonne St. Basile 16sr74.
61S ee Courtonnc St. Basile 272--6 and King The Emperor rIJeodosius 23.
62 Ea .,!ratia contains onc such shaft. and the T omus Damasi. though it refrains from
The Council of Constantinople
doctrine in fact was far from uncongenial to the minds of pro-Nicene
bishops in the East. It seems likely, as we have seen, that the council
which Meletius convened at Antioch in 379, as soon as he had
returned from his final exile, had been rid of the threat of a
persecuting Emperor, and had established himself in his see, adopted
explicitly some doctrinal statement of Damasus, though not in any
shape which recognized Paulinus as legitimate bishop of Antioch. 63
Our sources for this council, which must have been of great
significance, are curiously meagre. None of the ecclesiastical
historians mentions it, unless we are to take Theodoret's story of a
council in IIlyria 64 as a very much garbled version of it. But it
certainly took place. Gregory of Nyssa teIls us that just before he
attended the death-bed of his sister Macrina, he had attended a
council in Antioch,65 and a council which assembled in
Constantinople in 382 mentioned 'the statement produced by the
synod which met there [Le. Antioch] and that put out recently, in
Constantinople, by the ecumenical synod' (ltapa 'iis OiKouJ.1Evl1<iis
cruv600U).66 There is also the list of signatures at the end of the
document in the Verona Codex edited by Schwartz, all of them of
Eastern bishops, including Meletius and Eusebius of Sarno sat a, with.a
note that 146 other Eastern bishops signed. 67 We do not know what
branding Meletius as an heretic, made a pointed reference to him (though not by
name) when it came to deal with translations of bishops.
63The document in the Verona Codex LX edited by Schwartz in 'Ober die
Sammlung' 19-23 has as its final part a collection of signatures of bishops, under a
short statement saying that this 'Letter' came from a Roman synod under Damasus
and was sent to the East and that a synod held in Antioch accepted it unanimously.
Six bishops sign, representing apparently the rest, beginning with Meletius of
Antioch and Eusebius ofSamosata. The synod of Antioch under Meletius attended
by Eusebius of Sam osat a cannot be other than the council held in the autumn of 379,
but it is impossible that the whole of this document came to Antioch in this year,
because the first part was the result of a council dealing with Auxentius during his
lifetime, and he died in 374. Further, another part of this document comes from a
letter of Damasus to Basil (ob 379,Jan. 1St). The document is certainly composite.
We cannot tell precisely what utterance of Damasus the bishops at Antioch
welcomed in 379. It might even have been a version of the Tomus Damasi, if with
Dossetti we place it in 377, though the version of the Tomus D. in EOMIA does not
have these bishops' signatures at the end of it.
64HE IV.8""'9; see above, PP.793-4. But this seems most unlikely.
65 Vita Macrinae 386 (Leiden) (973).
66Theodoret HE V.9.13.
67See above, n 63. Bardy 'Le Concile d'Antioche' is much the fullest discussion of
this council, but see also Harnack History IV.91""93, Schwartz 'Zur
 The Controversy Resolved
statement this council promulgated, but it must have been one
favouring the cause of the Council of Nicaea and indicating that the
Western bishops were in agreement with this policy. It certainly was
intended to indicate to the newly-created Eastern Emperor
Theodosius the way in which many influential people in the East
hoped that he would move if he wished to bring unity to the Church
and- the Empire. And the council could hardly have taken place
without his permisison.
When this council of Antioch took place Theodosius had not yet
openly declared his hand. His father, also called Theodosius, had been
a general in the imperial army who had given distinguished service in
suppressing rebellions and restoring order in Britain and in Africa,
but who had been executed by the order of Valentini an I for reasons
that are unknown. Theodosius himselfhad been born and brought up
in Spain and was living there on his estates in retirement when,
during the acute crisis which followed the disaster of Adrianople,
Gratian called him to share the burden of imperial rule with him. He
was declared Emperor and Augustus (i.e. equal with, not subordinate
to, Gratian) on January 19th 379. He spent all that year and most of
the next in Thessalonica, which was his base for dealing with the large
numbers of marauding Goths who were infesting the Balkan
provinces, and during the course of his operations he won a decided
victory against them and persuaded many either to return over the
Danube or to settle peacefully (or relatively so) within the borders of
the Empire. In February 380, when he was residing in Thessalonica,
he issued an edict known as Cunetos Populos which declared the pro-
Nicene doctrine of the Trinity to be the official doctrine of the
Roman Empire, and named Damasus of Rome and Peter of Alex-
andria as the two episcopal norms of doctrine. 68 His subjects were
ordered to believe 'the single divinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit
within (sub) an equal majesty and an orthodox (pia) Trinity'. Heretics
would be punished. Soon after this Theodosius fell dangerously ill,
and during this illness was baptised by Acholius bishop of
Thessalonica. 69 On November 24th 380 he entered Constantinople
and instantly faced the Arian bishop of that city with the choice of
Kirchcngcschichte' 198-200, Ritter Das Konzil 31-32 and King The Emperor
Theodosius 25;
68Cod. TlieQd. XVLI-2. The Latin text of the decree is reproduced by King
Theodosius the Great 28 n I and Ritter Dos Konzil 29 n I.
69S ocratcs HE V.6; Sozomenus HE VII.4·2. 3.
The Council of Constantinople
either accepting the Nicene faith or being ejected from his see.
Demophilus chose exile rather than recantation and was driven out of
the city. At about the same time the Arian Lucius was chased out of
Alexandria. 70 In January 381 Meletius, leaving his see of Antioch,
entered Constantinople. It seems likely that he had already concerted
a plan with Theodosius to hold a council in order to settle the
ecclesiastical affairs of the Eastern Church. On January 10th
Theodosius issued an edict addressed to the Praetorian Prefect of the
diocese ofOriens, known as Nullis haereticis.71 No church was to be
occupied for worship by any heretics, no heretics were to gather
together for worship within the walls of any town. Eunomians,
Photinians and Adans were mentioned by name (but not
Macedonians or Pneumatomachians). The correct Nicene faith was
described (we can hardly call it defined) as:
'He who professes the Nicene faith is to be thought of as the genuine
worshipper in the Catholic religion, who confesses God Almighty
and Christ his Son in one Name, God from God, Light from Light,
who does not blaspheme the Holy Spirit, whom we hope for and
accept from the highest Author (parente) of the world (rerum) by
denying him, in whose bosom the undivided substance (which -is .
called by those who believe rightly by the use of the Greek word ousia)
of the pure Trinity flourishes in the apprehension of an undeftled
creed',
Perhaps the most remarkable point about this statement is that it does
not require, at least on the surface, an acceptance of a belief in the
divinity of the Holy Spirit. A Macedonian would not have been
troubled by it. The Emperor next summoned a council of the Eastern
Church (not including Egypt) to meet in May in Constantinople. 72
4. The Council of Constantinople
The Council of Constantinople met during May, June and July
381. 73 No acts nor ordered accounts of its proceedings survive. The
70Sozomcnus HE VII.S; Socrates HE V.7; Philostorgius HE"IX.I.9.
7leod. Theod. XVI.S.6, Latin text in King Theodosius the Great 34 n I.
72Socrates HE V.8. Opposite p. 98 of King's book is a useful map showing the
comparatively restricted area from which bishops summoned to the Council came.
73Sourccs for the Council are Socrates HE V.8, 9; Sozomenus HE VII.7-1I;
805
 The Controversy Resolved
ecclesiastical historians seem to be aware of its importance but are not
well informed about what precisely happened there. Only about
1 So bishops attended and they appear to have been carefnlly chosen
from areas which would be friendly to Meletius, who was its presi-
dent, that is areas under the influence of the see of Antioch. One
might describe the Council of Antioch two years before as a dress-
rehearsal for this one. Theodosius welcomed the participants in his
magnificent throne-room in the Imperial palace, but the Council did
not meet there, but in various churches in the city, not confining itself
apparently to anyone building. After receiving the bishops
Theodosius did not appear at any session of the Council, but
remained in the wings, as it were, holding a watching brief.74
According to Gregory of Nyssa, the city was buzzing with ill-
informed theological gossip; everybody was talking theology, even
in the outfitters, the bankers and the food stores:
'If you ask for change, the man launches into a theological discussion
about begotten and unbegotten; if you enquire about the price of
bread, the answer is given that the Father is greater and the Son
subordinate; if you remark that the bath is nice the man pronounces
that the Son is from non-existence.'75
We know that the first act of the Council was to affirm that
Gregory of Nazianzus was the Catholic and legitimate bishop of
Constantinople,76 and that the last was to compose an •Address'
(logos prosphiinikos) to the Emperor. We know of many of the events
which occurred during the Council, but we have to conjecture their
order. Maximus was denounced as an impostor and no true bishop. 77
Theodoret V.6.3-8.9; Rulinus HEII.I9; some of the letters of Ambrose and one of
Damasus may throw a litde light on the Council, and also Jerome' De Vir. Ill.
CXXVII, CXXVIII and CXXXIII. Remarks made by Gregory ofNazianzus and
Gregory ofN yssa in their works throw fitful gleams on the subject. Lauchert op. cit.
can be consulted for the canons. For modern author"s Simonetti Crisi 527-41, Ritter
Das Konzil von Konstantinopel and W. D. Hauschild 'Das tril).itarische Dogma von
3 81 als Ergebnis verbindlicher Konsensusbi1dung' are the most informative (for'
sources for the canons see Hauschild p. 15). The statement of Gregory of Nazianz us
DVS '509 (1)6) that 'all the East apart from Egypt' (6<>ov rap ~v troov Aly6mou
ofxa) appears to be a poetical exaggeration.
74See Ritter Das Konzil 41-44.
75 De Deitate Filii el Spiritus Sanet; (PG 46:557).
76See above, P.704.
77Canon IV ofthe Council states this emphatically. The Address is given in Mansi
Concilia UI.SS7, but the Greek text can also be found in Ritter Das Konzilp. Ii4 n 2.
806
The Council of Constantinople
Four canons were drawn up. Negotiations with the Macedonians, led
by Eleusius ofCyzicus and Marcian of Lampsacus, were undertaken
but no agreement could be reached and the Macedonian bishops,
about 30 in number, left the council. At some point a large
contingent of Egyptian bishops arrived, led by Timothy who had
only very recently succeeded his deceased brother Peter,
accompanied by Acholius of Thessalonica and a few other bishops
who were the only tenuous contact which the council might have
been thought to have with the see of Rome. During the council
Meletius suddenly died, and Gregory of Constantinople was chosen
to succeed him as president of the councip8 Gregory wanted the
council to elect Paulinus in place of Meletius as bishop of Antioch,
but it preferred to choose Flavian, who was consecrated after the
council was ended. Exasperated by this, and by the attacks made on
him by the Egyptians, and by the behaviour of the council generally,
Gregory resigned both as president of the council and as bishop of
Constantinople. In his place the bishops of the council chose an
unbaptised catechumen, an imperial civil servant, N ectarius, who
then became president of the council. The council re-affirmed N but
also produced the creed C and a doctrinal statement «01'0<;) which
has not survived. All this lasted three months from May to July 381.
The canons were four in number, for it has been conclusively
proven that canons V and VI which have been handed down as
belonging to this council do not belong there, but belong to the
council which met in the capital next year; canon VII is of even
later date. The first canon re-affirms N and denounces Eunomius
(or Anomoians), Arians (or Eudoxians), 'Semiarians' (or
Pneumatomachi), Sabellians, Marcellans, Photinians arid
Apollinarians. It is quite clear that whatever negotiations had been
undertaken with the Macedonians were now over and all hope of
reconciling this group had been abandoned when this canon was
drawn up. The second canon purports to regulate the bounds within
which each bishop can operate, vaguely forbidding translations of
bishops, according to the precept ofNicaea, and vaguely stating that
the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch and the sees of the dioceses of
Oriens were to remain as they were traditionally fixed, and similarly
for sees beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. The third canon is
much more specific and terse:
78Grcgory of Nazianzus DVS 1739. 1744. 1766-68; Hom. XLII.20.
 The Controversy Resolved
'The bishop of Constantinople is to enjoy precedence in honour next
after the bishop of Rome because it is the New Rome'.
It is very likely that this was intended to reduce the pretensions of the
archbishop of Alexandria; there is no particular reason to think that it
was aimed at Damasus, though he certainly resented it. One part of
the second canon, forbidding an undetached bishop from invading
another bishop's see and carrying out ordinations there, may have
been aimed at Paulinus who had been consecrated by that wandering
star Lucifer of Calaris. The fourth canon denounces Maximus the
pretender to the see of Constantinople and declares null and void his
ordination and any ordinations or acts done by him. On the whole it
is wise to regard the canons as one of the latest productions of the
Council, even though this means assuming that the newly-
consecrated Timothy found it necessary to tolerate what he must
have regarded as an insult to his see. That the archbishops of
Alexandria were riled by this third canon is shown by the conduct of
every holder of the see thereafter right up to Dioscuros in the middle
of the fifth century. The very vagueness of the second canon's
prohibition of translations shows how ineffective the canon ofNicaea
forbidding them had been, and how little effective the ban was likely
to be in the future. This canon could hardly have been passed while
Meletius (who had been translated from Beroea to Sebaste and from
Sebaste to Antioch, if we are to take things au pi~d de la lettrel) was
president of the council, nor while Gregory (who, if formality was
the rule, could be said to have been translated from Sasima to
Nazianzus and from Nazianzus to Constantinople!) was in charge. It
looks hke a sop thrown to the exasperated Egyptians. It .certainly
became a dead letter almost as soon as it was promulgated.'9
On: point seems to have escaped most investigators of the subject,
but It IS one of whIch we can be fairly sure. It is wholly improbable
that the bishop of Alexandria would have attended the council as
long as Meletius was presiding over .it, and if the bishop of
Thessalomca regarded hImself as in any sense representing the bishop
of Rome (and he may have done so), it is not likely that he would
79Grc~ory rcgardc.d the Nicene Canon as obsolete, as no doubt did almost all the
Eas~crn bishops, se~ hiS DVS 1810 'twisting rules which were long dead, by most of
whIch we were qUite clearly unaffected', and, as Ritter points out (Konzil 104 nl),
Rufin~s .H~ XI.~ seem~ to. echo this judgment in his words obniti quidam et
praesc,nptlmllbus mm~s.s~nls utI (oepere ('some people objected and tried to ap'peal to
unsatisfactory prOhibitIons'). .
808
The Council of Constantinople
have been content to attend a council with Meletius at the head of it
either. Indeed, it seems likely that Meletius planned the council as a
gathering of bishops sympathetic to his outlook, and that when he
died unexpectedly Theodosius took the opportunity of inviting
representatives from Egypt and from Illyricum. 8o It is difficult to.
decide when the negotiations with the Macedonians took place, and
when the creed C was drawn up. Some think that the negotiations
took place before the council began, but this does not seem likely. It is
probable that Theodosius was the main instigator of the attempt to
comprehend the Macedonians because,like all Emperors, he wanted
unity as far as was compatible with the main outlines of his policy. A
decision on this point will depend largely on whether, with Ritter,
we think that C was deliberately composed to conciliate the
Macedonians, or not. 81 Certainly neither the Egyptians nor the
representatives of more westerly dioceses were particularly troubled
by Macedonian views; this was a deviation mostly appearing in the
prefecture ofOriens. Canon I, as we have seen, distinguishes carefully
between 'Semi-arians, i.e. Pneumatomachi' and other heresies. The
sole fault of these 'Semi-arians' was refusal to accept the divinity of
the Holy Spirit, they were not accused of unsoundness on the subject.
of the Son. The evidence inclines towards concluding that the
Macedonians were dealt with early in the proceedings, while
Meletius was president, or soon after his death, before the arrival of
Timothy and Acholius and their followers.
Gregory's tenure of the presidency of the council cannot have
endured long, though it was enough to render him disgusted with
such assemblies for the rest of his life. This is how he describes the
response of the council to his arguments on behalf of appointing
Paulinus:
'I finished my speech; but they squawked in every direction, a flock of
jackdaws combining together, a rabble of adolescents, a gang of
youths, a whirlwind raising dust under the pressure of air currents,
people to whom nobody who was mature either in the fear of God or
in years would pay any attention, they splutter confused stuff or like
wasps rush directly at what is in front of their faces' .82
sO.Gratian had t.e~p~ra~i1y handed the dioceses of Macedonia and Dacia (but not
JIIyncu~) to thcJunsdJctlon of Theodosius when he was appointed Emperor, but
Thc?doSlUS had returned them to Gratian by 381.
81S ee below, pp.8I7-I8.
fl2DVS 1680-87_
 The Controversy Resolved
Even this is not one of his most ferocious utterances about councils.
He was certainly president for part of the time during which the
Egyptians were attending, because they occupied some time in
questioning his right to be bishop of Constantinople. In fact it looks
as if as soon as they arrived they tried to open up all the past agenda of
the council over again. This kind of behaviour and its consequences
may account for the peculiar bitterness which Gregory displays in his
autobiographical poems about both councils and bishops. It also
makes it likely that a resolution about Maximus was ajait accompli
when the Egyptians arrived and that the Eastern bishops resisted any
attempt to reopen that business. The choice of a bishop of Antioch to
replace the deceased Meletius also certainly came upon the agenda
when Gregory was president, because he was greatly exasperated at
the Council's choice ofFlavian rather than Paulinus. 83 The choice of
a bishop of Antioch had nothing to do with the Egyptians, and we
have no direct evidence that they took part in the election, though
with Gregory as president, neurasthenic, frequently absent through
sickness and himself personally affected by some of the agenda, they
were quite capable of interfering in the business. We are not certain
that Flavian was elected instead of Paulinus by the gathering at
Constantinople, but Ritter's theory" that some of the bishops went
off to Antioch to elect there seems unlikely. It is possible that he was
elected by the relevant bishops connected with the see while they
were at Constantinople and consecrated shortly after the council
ended. It is usual among church historians to sympathize with
Gregory's anger at the choice of Flavian, but the choice was not
necessarily an unjust nor unwise one. We do not know either the age,
the state of health nor the character, temperament and abilities of the
two candidates, but those who elected Flavian did (certainly Flavian
outlived Paulinus by several years). Paulinus had been for years
steadily supported by Damasus and Peter against Meletius, the leader
of the party of the Easterners at the council. Considerable antagonism
between him and the followers of Meletius must have been aroused.
On the other hand, Flavian, a prominent presbyter of the party of
Paulinus, was prepared to accept the leadership of the party of
Meletius, and in fact the next few years showed that many (probably
a majority) of Paulinus' party were ready to abandon resentments
and join the main body of Catholic Christians under Flavian.
"DVS 1591 (130)-1679 (136).
840p. cit. 102-3.
810
The Council if Constantinople
Having permitted Gregory to depart with polite but suspicious
alacrity,85 the Council found itselfin a quandary over the choice of a
new bishop of the capital city. They could not, on their own high-
principled but impractical views publicly stated against translation,
promote any of the several able bishops present at the council. There
was apparently no obvious candidate among the presbyters of the
city (many of whom anyway may have only just ceased to profess a
. nominal Arianism). They finally picked, as we have seen, an
unbaptised layman, N ectarius, who had been praetor urbanus in
Constantinople. It was as if today the cardinals had chosen as Pope, in
default of any other, the mayor of Rome. The Egyptians and
Westerners could not object because they had acquiesced seven years
ago at the choice for the important see of Milan of an unbaptised
officer in the imperial service, Ambrose. Nectarius was, as
Sozomenus tells US,86 the protege ofDiodore a former companion of
Flavian both as layman and as presbyter in supporting the Eustathian
cause in Antioch, but now bishop of Tarsus. The bishop-elect was
hastily baptised and ordained (whether he went through the
intermediate stage of being priested or was consecrated per saltum we
do not know) and placed in the president's chair at the council. Till
Warren Harding was elected President of the United States in 1920,
few people can have been less qualified for greatness suddenly thrust
upon them.
We do not know when C was compiled, but it seems likely that it
was composed after the departure of Gregory, because (as we shall
see) he probably disapproved of it. A letter expressing in the most
flowery and polite terms a firm refusal of what the recipients wanted
was sent in the next year, 382, from a council of Constantinople to
Damasus, Ambrose, Acholius, Anemius (of Sirmium) and several
other bishops in the West who after a council held in Rome in that
year had invited the Easterners to attend a council, which would be
ecumenical, in Rome. 87 And this letter from Constantinople not
only sets out the doctrine of the Trinity in the most uncompromising
terms, including the Spirit explicitly in theGodhead,88 but also refers
to:
8SS ee above P.705 n 10j.
"HE VII.S.
87Theodoret HE V.9.
88Ibid.9.1I.
8II
 The Controversy Resolved
'the treatise which was produced in Antioch by the synod which took
place there ... and the treatise put forth recently in Constantinople by
the ecumenical synod'.89
The council held in Antioch can only be that of 379, the treatise set
forth recently in Constantinople must be something produced by the
council of 381. The word treatise (tomos) is not a usual word to
employ to describe. creed (even if we grant that the council would
have allowed that a creed had been produced). This is why most of .
those who have studied the subject believe that some expression of
doctrine long enough to be called a tomos was produced by the
Constantinople council of 3 81, even though it has not come down to
us. The Address to Theodosius made at the end of the council cannot
be this tomos because it does not correspond to the description given
in the council's letter of 382. It claims that 'we have uttered brief
definitions and we have confirmed the faith of the Fathers of Nicaea
and have denounced the heresies which have grown up against it ...
in addition to these we have laid down some specific rules (canons)
for the good ordering of the churches'. 90
5. The Creed of Constantinople
The first question to decide about C is whether or not it was
produced by the council which met in the capital city of the Roman
Empire in 38 I. No church historian mentions the production of a
creed at this council nor gives a text of it. No surviving document
reproduces C until it is produced by the archdeacon of
Constantinople and read out at the Council of Chalcedon in the year
451, seventy years after the date at which it was supposed to have
been composed. Almost no authors during those seventy years make
any allusion to it nor quote a line from it. 91 So entire is the absence of
899 . I 3 tip tv' AV'tlo,;(eig.1tupa 'tijt; tKei O'vVEA.806crT)t; O'Uv600l) 'Y6¥EVTJj.l.tVCP ... Kai t@
dpuG\ tv KrovO'tavnvDux6:M:l obcou,u:vl1cijt; tK'te8tvtl cruv68ou. They add that in
these documents they have set out the faith more elaborately and made a written
denunciation of heresies. There are no anathemas attached to C.
90Ritter op. -cit. p. 124 n 2. (translation of Greek text). Ritter argues well (op. cit.
1l6. 127 n I) that 6poC; means a doctrinal decision and lCUVc.OV means a rule about
discipline. ,
91The magisterial authority on the creed of Constantinople is). N. D. Kelly Early
Christian Creeds, caps X and XI (296-367), but there are useful discussions in Ritter
812
The Council of Const~ntinople
reference to this creed until it was produced at the Council of
Chalcedon (rather to the surprise of many of the participants) that a
theory was widely believed that it was not produced at the council of
3 8 1 but originated in some other way, perhaps as the baptismal creed
of the capital city, or of some famous city like Jerusalem, and came to
be regarded by the clergy of Constantinople as that which the council
of 38 I had put forth. 92 In fact, till Kelly produced his Early Christian
Creeds, this was almost the accepted solution. It did indeed explain
wh y the creed was apparently so little known in the period between
the two councils. It raised two serious difficulties, however, which
caused more recent scholarship to look round for another solution.
The first was that one would expect the archdeacon of
Constantinople, who was presumably relying for his text on the
archives of his see, to know what had happened at the council held in
his own city seventy years before. 93 The other difficulty was that
th:re is some evidence, tenuous but not easy to explain away, that the
exIStence of C was known before the year 451. The first piece we
have already seen;94 it comes from what we have called the Second
Macedonian Dialogue. The Macedonian is arguing with the
Orthodox:
'Macedonian: "Have you not added to the creed of Nicaea?"
Orthodox: "Yes, but nothing that contradicts it."
Macedonian: "Still, you have added" (to it),. 9,
It is wholly unlikely that this Dialogue was written after 451, it is
much m?re probable that it pre-dates Chalcedon by several years. It
15 very dIfficult to see this as anything but a reference to C. The other
piece of evidence comes, curiously enough, from Ireland. In his
Das Konzil 132-47 and Hauschild 'Die trinitarianische Dogma', and Dossetti 11
Simbolo di Nicaea e di Constantinopoli, especially pp. 226-84. See also Simonetti Crisi
53 8-4 2 , May 'Datierung' 53-'7, Gwatkin AC 159-6 and SA 270 n l King The
Emperor Theodosius 97.80, Harnack History IV.94-IOI, 118. '
92Hort, Harnack, Seeberg and Gwatkin are among those who embraced this
theory, but there were several others.
. _ 93The acts o.f th~ Council of Chalcedon give two rather different texts of C, the
second of which IS considered by Dossetti to be the more authentic; but the
variations are not significant.
94Above, P.771.
952 8.1 (1204):
- VJ.I-E:r~ yap 00 7tpoas9iJlcu't£ 'tU tv NIKU{~;
- cH.A' 001( Svavnu uv'tij.
- OAc:o~ npoas9tlKu't£.
8 13
 The Controversy Resolved
Confession, chapter 4, Patrick has occasion to recount his Rule of
Faith, which is certainly given in the words of his native British
Church and is not his own invention. 96 It has a triple form, declaring
belief in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The last article runs
thus:
'And he poured upon us richly the Holy Spirit, gift and pledge of
immortality, who makes those who believe and obey to be sons of
God and co-heirs of Christ, whom we confess and adore one God in
the Trinity of holy name.'97
'Whom we confess and adore one God' is distinctly like an echo of
'who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified', more
like this indeed than any expression which we might glean from the
Tomus Damasi, which is the only other source to which we might
attribute this phrase. A Rule of Faith is likely to be more loosely
worded than a formal creed. The suggestion that Patrick is here
reproducing or echoing a Latin translation of some of the words of
the pneumatological article of C is an attractive one. The likelihood
that Patrick received his Rule of Faith (which would be learnt by him
long before he wrote his Confession in Ireland at the end of his life)
after the year 451, or rather after the later point at which the
Chalcedonian Formula must have made its way to Ireland, is very
small indeed. 98 Another piece of evidence that the Council of 381
drew up C comes from the words of Gregory of Nazianzus about the
council. These words are taken from his autobiographical poem De
Vita Sua, and are therefore expressed in vague, obscure and largely
figurative language, but this witness cannot be dismissed easily:99
'And what a situation was that! The sweet and clean stream of the old
96Sec R. P. C. Hanson 'Witness from St. Patrick to the Creed of 381' Analecta
Bollandiana 101 (1983) 297-9.
97 Et ejJudil in nobis habunde Spiritum Sanctum donum et pignus immortalitatis qui Jadl
credentes. et ohoedientes ut sint filii Dei et coheredes Christi quem confitemur et adoramus
unuttl Deum in trinitate sa,,; nominis.
98The rest of his Rule ofFaich shows no sign ofinfluence from the Chalcedonian
Formula. Even if we place Patrick's arrival in Ireland much later than somewhere
between 425 and 435 (which I .think to be a most implausible conjecture) it is
unlikely' that he can have learnt his Rule of Faith later than 4S1 or (or 451 + x). It
looks as if communication between Ireland (and Britain too) and the Continent
became much more difficult after about 457. The fact that the Irish were unaware of
computations to decide an Easter cycle which were made from about 450 onward
suggests this. See R. P. C. Hanson St. Patrick: his Origins and Career 66-69.
99DVS (Jungck) '70)-8 ('0)).
The Council of Constantinople
faith which brought together into one the venerable nature of the
Trinity, whose seminar 100 Nicaea was once. this I was witnessing
being wretchedly muddied by the brackish tribl,ltaries of waverers 101
whose opinions are those which Authority favours.'
'Authority' here clearly means the Emperor Theodosius. Later in the
same poem he returns to the same subject:, 02
'Whoever they were, they came together. under coercion and
reluctantly, but still they came together, any who still had some
tincture of free speech left,103 those whose ignorance was their
assistant in doing wrong, trapped by the ambiguity l04 of the
doctrines. The mediating (tv !1EO"rp) doctrine was indeed orthodox,
but was an offspring quite different from its parents. As for the great
rabble of those who were selling Christ, I would put up with it only
when futh can be mixed with the sweet smell of pure myrrh.'
Gregory is here being deliberately obscure, but we can reasonably
decipher his poetic puzzle enough to conclude that he is complaining
that the majority of the council, motivated by a mixture of
ignorance, cupidity and fear of imperial displeasure, added to the
creed N words which were not unorthodox but were inadequate and
inappropriate. And we can easily see why Gregory thought them
inadequate and inappropriate when we look at the words of C itself.
It is interesting to note incidentally that in the immediately
subsequent lines Gregory describes the arrival of the deputation from
Egypt. This suggests that much, if not all, of C was put together and
accepted while Gregory was president of the Council, though it was
done against his will, and before the arrival of the newcomers from
Egypt and Macedonia, and that the wording of the pneumatological
article owed something to indirect pressure from Theodosius who
saw that a larger number of bishops would accept C if it were
expressed in a cautious way.
But it is time that we looked at the actual words of C, if, as seems
almost certain, C was indeed composed by the council of 381..05
I oOcppoVnatitplov = 'think-tank', 'school of thought'.
101dJ.lq)\S6~CIlV.
102'750-58 (.)8'-'40).
lOlorr;: 't'l P.&Tijv n:appTJoiar;:.
l04S 11tA61J; the word cannot refer to a pair or a couple of doctrines.
1 05 What is given here is my own translation of the Greek text printed by Dossetti
op. cit. 244-5 I. For the Greek text see Appendix 2. Dossetti gives the earliest Latin
text as well as the Greek. ~or the text of N, see above, p. 163, and Appendix I.
81 5
 The Controversy Resolved
'We believe in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and
earth and of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Only-begotten,
begotten by his Father before all ages, Light from Light, true God
from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,
through whom all things came into existence, who for us men and for
our salvation came down from the heavens and became incarnate by
the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became a man, and was
crucified for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried and
rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures and
ascended into the heavens and is seated at the right hand of the Father
and will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, and
there will be no end to his kingdom;
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-giver, who proceeds from
the Father, who is worshipped and glorified together with the Father
and the Son, who spoke by the prophets;
And in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church;
We confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins~
We wait for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the coming
age. Amen.'
There are several differences between C and N; they are these:
(i) (maker) of heaven and earth is added in C
(ii) 'only-begotten' is added after 'Son of God' in C instead
of after 'from the Father' as in N
(Iii) 'that is, from the substance of the Father' ofN is omitted
in C
(iv) 'the things in heaven and the things on earth' after
'through whom all things are made' which stands in N is
omitted in C
(v) 'by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary' is added in C
after 'became incarnate'
(vi) 'was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate' is added in C
(vii) 'and was buried' is added in C
(viii) 'according to the Scriptures' and 'is seated at the right
hand of the Father' is added in C
(ix) 'in glory' is added in C to 'will come again'
(x) 'and there will be no end to his kingdom' is added in C
(xi) Everything in C after 'and in the Holy Spirit' is added
(xii) C omits the anathemas of N
Most of these twelve differences have no significance at all. Nobody
in 381 was inclined to deny that God the Father was the maker of
816
The Council <1 Constantinople
heaven and earth (i), nor that all things in heaven and earth were
made through the Son (ii), nor that Jesus Christ was crucified under
Pontius Pilate (vi), nor that he was buried (vii), nor that he rose
according to the Scriptures (viii), nor that when he comes again he
will come in glory (ix). These meaningless variations make it quite
clear that C is not an amended form of N, but that its original was a
quite different creed. loo Again, it cannot seriously be argued that to
add 'by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary' (v) was an insertion
designed to eliminate Apollinarianism, because what Apollinaris
denied was that the incarnate Son possessed a human soul or mind. If
he could swallow the original 'and was made man' (ICal
£vaV9pC01t1icravTa) of N, there was nothing in C to offend him.
The alterations which may be significant are the omission by C of
'that is, of the substance (ousia) of the Father' (iii), originally in N; the
new clause in C 'and there will be no end of his kingdom' (x); the
considerable addition to the article on the Holy Spirit (xi); and the
omission ofN's anathemas. The inclusion in C of the reference to the
church, baptism and resurrection can only be due to the fact that these
items happened to be in the original creed taken by the council of 381
to express its doctrine. We can be sure that they also figured in all
other creeds of the time whether Arian, Macedonian or ApoIIinarian.
It is easy to account for item x). This was certainly inserted as a
precaution against the doctrine of Marcellus. The fact that Marcellus
himself had recanted this particular doctrine and his followers in 381
disowned it did not deter the Fathers of the Council inserting this
clause, any more than it has deterred millions of Christians repeating
the clause for century after century in spite of the complete
dISappearance of Marcellianism from the face of the earth.
The omission of'that is from the ousia of the Father' (iii) has caused
much heart-searching among scholars. Harnack and those who
supported his view that the Cappadocians and the compilers of C
intended a 'generic' interpretation of the homoousion hailed it as a sign
that supported their view. On the other hand, as we have seen, some
106Thc question of the origin of the original version of C is not discussed here.
N~w th~t it has been genera.IIy agreed that. the version of C which appears in
EplphanlUs, Ancoralu5 118.9-0 (146, 147) is an interpolation substituted for
Epiphanius' original version orN, the question has become entirely open and is yet
unsolved: Perhaps it is worth noting that at An,. 19. I en) Epiphanius reproduces the
exact antl-MarcelJan clause ofC (x), and that at 119.3-12 (148, 149) he gives us his
own creed which is not an anticipation ofC and has both anti-Marcellan and anti-
Apollinarian clauses.
817
 The Controversy Resolved
Macedonians objected to the doctrine that the Spirit was from the
ousia of the Father,'07 and this has caused some modems to claim that
C was a formula especially designed to accommodate th~ view~ of
Macedonians, and they point out too that the pneumatolog,cal article
never directly calls the Holy Spirit God nor applies to him the epithet
homoo.usion.,oB But the difficulty which this theory encounters is that
what C omits is the claim declaring that the Son is from the ousia of
the Father which some Macedonians at least would not wish to deny,
and says n~thing about the relation of the Spirit to the Father's ousia.
Further, the clause in C 'who with (cruv) the Father and the Son 15
worshipped and glorified' (not 'after', J.U'Tt\. + acc., nor 'below') was
precisely the doctrine which the Macedonians denied, was calculated
to exclude them and must be regarded as intentionally anti-
Macedonian. The view that C was originally devised to conciliate the
Macedonians and was later forgotten and laid aside because in fact it
did not conciliate them cannot he sustained. '00 That the bishops in
38 1 should have omitted 'that is from the ousia of the Father'
deliberately assumes that they were prepared to use a creed as a
carefully-designed formula to assert a complicated theological
doctrine and is a proposition which is open to question and will be
discussed a little later. To the mind of modem accurate scholarship it
may be difficult to believe that the Fathers of381 omitted this clause
which had stood in N out of indifference or carelessness, but then
they were not modem accurate scholars.
We can however with confidence recognize one important point
connected with C's article on the Holy Spirit. It summarizes very
nicely the doctrine of Basil of Caesarea; it does not directly call the
Holy Spirit God and it does not apply the word homoousion. to him,
but it does clearly declare that he is an object of equal (not mfenor)
worship with the other two Persons. This is certaiuly the doctrine
which Basil publicly professed, and it may very well be, in spite of
assurances to the contrary by Gregory of Nazianzus, the doctrine
which he actually believed, no more and no less. It is a doctrine with
which his brother Gregory of Nyssa sympathized. There must have
been many who were not Macedonians, who did not follow the
views ofEustathius ofSebaste, yet who believed that the Holy Spirit
above, p.768.
. IP7S ee
lOBE.g. May 'Datierung' 53-4 and Ritter Das Konzil 132-47·
I09Hauschild 'Die trinitarianische Dogma von 381' 20-22, gives further cogent
reasons for rejecting this theory.
818
The Council of Constantinople
was uncreated and was of equal honour with tlIe Father and the Son,
but who did not wish to take the further step which gave Gregory of
Nazianzus no difficulty, of directly calling him God (rather than
divine,theion) and consubstantial. It is to this group (which may have
numbered very many among the bishops of the council of 381) that
the pneumatological article appealed. And this is why Gregory of
Nazianzus objected so strongly to C.: it declared a 'half-way' (tv
IfficrCfl) doctrine which was not unorthodox but which did not go as
far as Gregory wanted it to go. Better, he thought, to leave the bare
statement of N and permit orthodox theologians to read the full
doctrine into it, as Athanasius and Damasus had done."o There is no
difficulty in accounting for the omission in C of the anathemas ofN,
for owing to the change in the meaning of hypostasis and ousia one of
them had become an embarrassment rather than an asset. They were
not repudiated, but they were not emphasised.
We can fmd plenty of passages in pro-Nicene writers in the second
half of the fourth century expressing weariness with creeds and a
desire to be satisfied with N.'" Basil in one of his letters says:
'Let that admirable docttine of the Fathers be repeated among you,
which overturns t:p.e ill-omened heresy of Arius, which edifies the·
church by the wholesome teaching in which the Son is confessed as
consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit is along with him
ranked ilnd worshipped with equal honour' .112
This sounds as ifhe is joining Athanasius and Damasus in reading into
the six words of N about the Spirit the full pneumatology of fifty
years later. But in the next letter he says:
'May the good teaching of our fathers who assembled .at Nicaea shine
out again so that the ascription of glory to the blessed Trinity may be
.completed in a manner harmonious with the saving baptism' .113
t IOHauschild op. cit. 25-38 argues for very much this point of view. Whether we
can reconstruct with any confidence lomoi. doctrinal utterances of the council of
Antioch of 379 as well as that of Constantinople of 38 I, as H. thinks we can, seems to
me very doubtful.
I11The most striking is Hilary's remarks at Uber II ad Constantium 4.5 (200--20I),
cf. Con. Constant. 24, 25 (600, I), De Syn. 63 (522-3). There are several passages in
Gregory of Nyssa expressing satisfaction with N, e.g. Anti"heticus 142 (Leiden) and
157; and of course there is the Latin commentary on N, probably written before 38 I
(Turner EOMIA I 330-47).
I 12Ep. 110.2. Grillmeier CCT 346 gives similar passages in Basil. Epp. 258.2;
244.3; 263·4. and he adds Athanasius De Deeret. 32; Tom. ad Ant. 5.9 (but this is
scarcely necessary). 113Ep. 91.

The Controversy Resolved
This suggests that he would have liked to see an enlargement of the
third article of N to do justice to the Holy Spirit. We can, I believe,
conclude with fair confidence that those who drew up C and those
who knew of its existence and probably taught and used it for the
next fifty years did not think of it as anew, separate, creed, as, for
instance, the 'Dedication' Creed of 341 was a separate creed from N,
but simply as a reaffirmation ofN, an endorsement of what it really
meant by meanS of a little further explanation. We must remind
ourselves once again that the Fathers of the ancient church were not
concerned about the exact wording of formulae, even of official
formulae, so much as with their content. If they were assured that the
content of one statement was virtually or in effect the same as that of
another, they did not mind if the original structure of shape or origin
of one of them was different from that of the other. 'To the ancients',
Prestige said, 'creeds might be compared to accurate sign-posts rather
than to exhaustive charts.'''4 Both Socrates (HE V .8) and
Sozomenus (HE VII.9) writing before the year 451 tell us that the
Council of Constantinople of381 confirmed the Creed ofNicaea. It
is altogether probable that what they mean is that the council not
only endorsed N in a canon but also produced an affirmation ofN in
the form ofC. This was before the days of creeds being recited in the
eucharist. C was not likely to gain much publicity if it was virtually
equated with N and only slowly and reluctantly accepted in Egypt
and in the West. If we take this view we can also rid ourselves of the
illusion that the compilers ofC 'omitted' the clause 'from the ousia of
the Father'. In their view, and in the view of their contemporaries,
this clause was not 'omitted' because it was still in N, of which C was
are-affirmation. C did not in their eyes cancel N, but rather enhanced .
it.
6. The Immediate Sequel of the Council
Immediately after the council ended, at the very end of July 381,
Theodosius issued an Edict confirming its conclusions. This Edict is
known as Episeopis tradi."' The first words are:
114GPT 237.
"SLatin text in King 4S n I. It is to be found in Cod Theod. XVI.I.3. C( Swete,
Early HiJtory 94. King 44-6, Loofs 'Arianismus' 45. Ritter 'Arianismus' 714.
820
The Council of Constantinople
'We now order that all churches are to be handed over to the bishops
who profess Father, Son and Holy Spirit of a single majesty, of the
same glory, of one splendour, who establish no difference by
sacrilegious separation. hut the order of the Trinity by recognizing the
Persons and uniting the Godhead. It will he clear that these are united
in communion with Nectarius bishop of the Church of'
Constantinople. and also Timothy bishop of the city of Alexandria in
Egypt. It would be clear that they will communicate also in the
regions of Oriens with Pelagius bishop of Laodicea and Diodore
bishop of Tarsus; in both pro-consular Asia and the diocese of Asia
with Amphilochius bishop of Iconium and Optimus bishop of
[Pisidian1Antioch; in the diocese of Pontus with Helladius bishop of
Caesarea and Gregorybishop of Nyssa, Terennius bishop of Scythia,
Marmarius bishop of Marcianopolis.'
Anyone who refused to communicate with these is declared to be an
heretic and is to be refused office in the church. By this Edict
Theodosiusfinally and decisively rendered the pro-Nicene version of
the Christian faith the official religion of the Roman Empire. It is to
be noted that his norms of doctrine have changed a little since he
issued Cunetos populos more than a year before. The bishop of Rome
is not mentioned, though there is no reason to think that Theodosius
no longer regarded Damasus as a norm of doctrine. The Emperor is
not here setting up new patriarchates; Nyssa, for instance, could not
possibly be the seat of a patriarch. He is merely mentioning
individuals spread over as wide an area as possible who had attended
the council and who could be depended upon to expound its views.
Theodosius had now adopted the Eastern rather than the Latin point
of view.
We have already looked at the Council of Aquileia. It took place,
probably later than that of Constantinople in the autumn of 38 lo"·
Palladius and Secundianus came expecting it to be an ecumenical
council at which representatives of the Eastern churches, some of
whom might be sympathetic to their point of view, would be
present, and found it was instead a comparatively small and local
affair. The proceedings were well rigged beforehand. Ambrose, who
had no right to be there if the council was not a general one, and
Valerianus carried matters with a high hand. If we are to believe
116S0 Ritter 'Arianismus' 716. For this council see above, pp. 109-10, 124-5.
576--7,667--9 and Zeiller Origines 328-37. Meslin Les Ariens 89-91,333-'7,670--'73;
Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 204-6; Simonetti Crisi 542-8.
821
 The Controversy Resolved The Council of Constantinople

Palladius, Gratian had been tricked into permitting the council to
meet under these circumstances. We do not know by what precise
means Palladius and Secundianus were deprived of their sees of
Ratiaria and Singidunum, perhaps by disturbances contrived in those
towns. A letter survives among those attributed to Ambrose written
on behalf of the council. '17 It protests against the recent holding of a
council in Constantinople, seeing that the Easterners had recently
declined to come to a proposed general council in the West; it
protests against Paulinus not being chosen bishop of Antioch, against
Maximus not being recognised as bishop of Constantinople and
Gregory being placed in that see, against the Roman church not
being consulted in these matters, and against N ectarius being elected
in Gregory's place. A council met in Rome in the year 382 which was
largely concerned with the same points. I I . Three delegates sent from
Constantinople were present at it, and, as well as Damasus, Ambrose,
Anemius, Acholius and Epiphanius of Salamis (as an unrepentant
upholder of Paulinus) were there. Apollinarianism was condemned,
Paulinus once more recognised as bishop of Antioch and the two
Aquileia. The representatives from the East present in Rome who
have just been referred to were sent from this council. It is highly
lIkely that canons V and VI traditionally attributed to Constantinople
38 1 really were passed by Constantinople 382. Canon V runs thus:
'Concerning the treatise (Iomos) of the Westerners. we have accepted'
the people in Antioch because they confess the Godhead of Father,
Son and HolySpirit'.
Canon VI was long and concerned with regulating the trials, the
courts and the appeals to be held when bishops are accused. It makes
no mention whatever of the bishop of Rome. The 'tornos or the
Westerners' of Canon V probably refers to the letter of complaint
from the council of Aquileia. The council uncompromisingly
asserted the consubstanti2!ity of each Person of the Trinity,
condemned the doctrine of ApolIinaris, declared that Nectarius was
bishop of Constantinople, Flavian ofAntioch and Cyril ofJerusalem.
The quarrel between East and West rumbled on a little 10nger.'21 but
In the end the West conceded all the Easterners' points, except that

bishops who consecrated Nectarius, Diodore of Tarsus and Acacius
of Be roea, declared to be deposed. It was probably at this point that
Damasus issued an aggressive statement which was in effect a reply to
the third canon of Consta'!tinople. It claimed a precedence of the see
of Rome over all others based both on the words of the Lord in Matt
16: 18-20 (,Thou art Peter ... ') and also on the fact that Peter and Paul
were martyred and buried in Rome. It named the next two sees in
they d.d not concede the Easterners' distinctly moderate view of the
claims of the see of Rome. The bishops of the Eastern Church had
reached a consensus about the Christian doctrine of God. The bishops
of the Western Church could find no compelling reason to disagree.
121For the details see Schwartz 'Zur Kirchengeschichte' 206- 13.

order of precedence, Alexandria because it had been founded by

Peter's disciple Mark, who had been martyred there, and Antioch
because Peter had lived there before going to Rome. Concerning the
see of Constantinople the letter preserves a resounding silence."9
Constantinople steadily refused to grant any of these requests from
the West or to undo the work of its council of 381. As we have
already seen.'2. a council met in the capital city in 382, largely
concerned with replying to the complaints of the Council of
117 Ambrose Epp. Extra Col/ectio"em ed. Michaela Zelzer (CSEL 82 ('982) PL .6)
9 (13). The letter is from Ambrosius et ceter; episcopi Italiae.
118Sozomenus HEVII,II; Theodoret HEV.9;JeromeEpp. 108.6 (pL 22.881); see
Chadwick'The Council ofNicaea' 84; Zeiller Origines 339; Swete Early History 80;
Simonetti Crisi 448-51; King Tile Emperor Theodosius 48.
119Damasus Epp. PL 13:374-376. It is reproduced in the text of the Decretum
Gelasianum. ed. D. von DobschiitzTU 38.1-357 (fasc.lV). text Section III. pp. 7-<).
120S ee above, p. 8 I I.

822 823

The Development of Doctrine
I. The Influence of Scripture
The reader of this long work may have been struck as he has been
making his way through it with the refusal of its author on most
(though not on all) occasions to take sides. Indeed the reader may
have found this attitude exasperating. There is little denunciation or
derision, little approval or dissent. The chief reason for this is that in
the author's opinion the subject of the Arian controversy has suffered
from a great deal too much partisanship at the hands of those who
have written about it. Travers Smith, a conventionallate-nineteenth-
century Anglican, can describe some bishops as 'deeply tainted with
Semi-Arianism', I an expression which should provoke laughter
rather than assent from the modern scholar. Swete, also an Anglican a
little later in period that Travers-Smith and much more learned than
he, can say, 'Seven years after Lucian's martyrdom, the hint which he
dropped was suddenly expanded by Arius into a full-blown heresy', 2
almost as ifhe wanted to explain the controv~rsy by the principle of
spontaneous combustion. Gwatkin, a learned Anglican of a period
rather later than Swete, was capable of suggesting that the Ariaus
were morally deficient because most of their extant literature is
purely polemical' - a remark whose silliness needs no comment.
From a quite different point of view, Schwartz, an immensely
learned and very pugnacious Lutheran, was able to persuade himself
that the Arian controversy was one aspect of the struggle of the
bishop to reduce the ancient privileges of the presbyter, and that the
pro-Nicene cause was a crusade against education and intelligence, 4
151. Basil the Great 22.
2 History of the Procession of the Holy Spirit 79.
JSA 27 n4.
4Gesammt. Schrift. III, 178, 179.
The Development of Doctrine
thus demonstrating that emancipation from any desire to defend
traditional orthodoxy is no guarantee of impartiality nor even of
common sense. And anyone who has read L' Heresie II' Arius et la Poi de
Nieee ~ill realize that a Roman Catholic scholar standing in the
splendid French tradition of patristic scholarship, Boularand, could
even as late as 1972 give a completely conventional account of the
contro,:,ersy which consequently does little to throw light upon the
real spnngs and causes of the thoughts and actions of those who took
part in it .
. This chapter therefore, which of necessity must sum up in a brief
dls~usslOn what has gone before, will concern itself with attempting
to IdentIfy the forces play~g upon the actors in this sixty-year-Iong
drama, the influences whIch were most powerful in shaping their
thought and action; and in doing so will draw some conclusions
about what was one of the most remarkable instances of the
deVelopment of doctrine in the history of Christianity.
The first influence to examine is that of the Bible. s All parties to the
controversy shared very much the same exegetical assumptions."
They all expected to find direct prophecies of Christ in all parts of the
Old Testament. The key-text, Prov 8:22, for instance, was allowed
by everybody to refer to Christ, whereas we to-day would hesitate to
regard it as more than, on the most liberal interpretation, a possible
famt foreshadowin~ of him. Addressing the Arians, Hilary can refer
to thIs text and say WISdom, whom you admit to be Christ'.' Had it
occurred to Athanasius when he was writing the Second Book of his
Orations against the Arians, most of which is devoted to this single text,
to dISmIss the whole debate as a storm in a teacup because the text
does not ~efer to Christ, he would have been appalled, but the
~hought did not occur to him. All parties regarded the Bible as
merrant as far as it was possible to do so; that is to say, they recognised
S~imonetti devoted a long paper in Stud; to the interpretation of Proverbs 8.22
durmg the controversy (II-8?). Pollard has published several studies relevant to this
subject,' Johannine Christology and the Early Church. 'The Exegesis of Scripture and
,the Anan C:::0ntroversy' and 'The Exegesis of John X.30 in the early Trinitarian
Controversies', See also J, van Parys 'Exegese et theologie dans les Livres contre
Eunome de ~r~goire de Nyss;' and C, Kannengeiser 'Logique etidees motrices dans
le'recours blbhque seIon Gregoire de Nyssa',
~MesIin remarks that the norm of faith for the Arians is precisely similar to that of
their opponents: 'c'est la meme conception d'une Ecriture domaine exclusif de
l'autorite ~l~ricale et considert:e comme critere de segregati~n', (Les Ariens 229),
'De Tnmtate IV,2I.
 The Controversy Resolved
that it contained apparent errors and contradictions but they
laboured to explain them away, very often but not invariably by
allegorising. For instance, Hilary notices that none of the blessings
promised to Jacob in Gn 27:28, 29 actually happened to him, so
'because Scripture is not endangered by falsehood', the blessing must
apply to his descendants, not to himself." All sides lack almost
completely (with a little exception allowed in the case of Gregory of
Nazianzus) a sense of historical perspective. This is as clear in the
statement of Hilary that all the apostles taught the eternity of the
Son,. as in Damasus' fantastic reconstruction of the early history of
the church in Alexandria.'o Consequently all parties tend to read the
ideas and doctrine of their own day into the earliest period of
Christianity. Gericke remarks that Marcellus was not a Biblicist in
the strict sense. Rather he has a ready-made theological scheme and
reads it into the Bible." There were very few, if any, Biblicists in the
strict sense among the writers of the fourth century. The result is,
inevitably, much perverse and some positively grotesque
interpretation. We have seen some examples in Ambrose,'2 but this
practice is not confined to Ambrose. Cyril can manage to interpret
Job 14:17ff. 'For there is hope for a tree, ifit be cut down, that it will
sprout again', etc., where Job's point is precisely that man does not
live again after death, into an argument for resurrection after death."
And we have seen several examples of similar exegetical contortions
in the work of Athanasius and Hilary when they are dealing with the
human limitations of Jesus Christ.
It used to be thought that the Arians were so much interested in
metaphysics and the relation of the Father to the Son that they
ignored soteriology, whereas the pro-Nicenes because of their
concern to prove the divinity of Christ paid more attention to the
doctrine of salvation. Simonetti .has rightly rejected this theory'!·
The Arians were concerned with soteriology, and their ideas about
the relation of the Son to the Father show this. They made a serious
effort to meet the evidence of the Bible that God suffers, whereas the
8 Tractatus Mysteriorum ed. A. Feder (CSEL, Part IV) I, 23 (19. 20).
'Call. Arion II B 5 (25) (148).
]OSee above. p.822.
II Marcellus '70.
IlSCC above pp.672-J.
IJCatecheses XVIII. I 5 (314).
14Crisi 565-6.
The Development of Doctrine
general impression which the writings of the pro-Nicenes produces is
that this is the last admission which they wish to make. It has also been
asserted in the past that the Arians clung blindly and woodenly to
Scripture whereas the pro-Nicenes were ready to accept Scripture
within the context of tradition and a broad philosophical outlook.
There is some truth in this assertion, but it must be modified by
several exceptions. The pro-Nicenes often remark on the invariable
demand of the Arians for Scriptural proof, and how they accuse the
champions of Nicaea of introducing the non-Scriptural term
homoousios into the creed.!' But the pro-Nicene writers are equally
insistent upon the unique position of Scripture as a norm of faith.
Epiphanius remarks upon the absence of any appeal to Scripture in
Aetius' Syntagmation,16 and Basil at least twice warns against the
danger of either adding to or subtracting from Scripture. '7 The
insistence of the Arians upon pressing the analogy or metaphor of
Father and Son too far drove the pro-Nicenes to examine the nature
oflanguage about God and to become markedly more sophisticated
than their opponents about using it. They warn against too great
rationalism in exegesis.'" They can even protest against a too
wooden and factual acceptance of the words of Scripture, especially
when dealing with the first chapters of Genesis: God did not literally
walk nor literally speak, and so on.' 9 Almost everybody had learnt
from Origen the doctrine of 'accommodation', that is the idea that
God accommodates his language and ideas when communicating
with people to the limitations of their understanding and even of
their culture. 2o And the pro-Nicenes are quite often ready to appeal
I sTo give a few examples out ofmany, Athanasius De Synodis 36, Basil DSS X 25
(112). Gregory of Nazianzus Oral. XXXI. 18. 21; and we have seen above
pp. 769-70 how constantly the Macedonians demanded Scriptural proof The pro-
Niccncs could of course hit back by accusing the Arians afthe same fault, with their
talk of agellnesia,gennetos and agennetos, e.g. Athanasius Or. con. Ar. 1.30, Gregory of
Nyssa COli. Eunom. 11.13 (1016).
16Panarion 76.54.13 (411).
17Adv. Eunom. II.8 (585) and De Fide J (680).
l8E.g. Basil Adv. Eunom. II.24 (628).
19Marcellus of Ancyra, Fragment S2 in Eusebius Eee. Theol.III.3 (LS7); Gregory
of Nyssa Cat. Orat. V.71 and Ambrose Exaemeron 1.9.33. De Paradiso 14.69;
Epiphanius Ancoratus :54-:58, Gregory of Nyssa Con. Eunom. II 20S (977), 212 (981),
~1g--2.20 (984), ~26 (984), 39:5-409 (1?44-8). The protest is not so much against
hteraiism as agalOst a wooden and naive way of using the text.
2°Perhaps the most striking example of this occurs in the obscure and not
properly investigated Dialogue of Adamantius or On the Right Faith in God (ed. GCS
W. H. van de Sande Bakhuyzen PG X) 18,20 (810). where the author cheerfuUy
827
 The Controversy Resolved
behind the words of Scripture to their intention or drift (skOpOS).21
The pro-Nicenes did indeed appeal to 'the tradition of the Fathers',
very often meaning the creed N, but sometimes reaching behind it to
earlier times. 22 The appeal of Gregory of Nazianzus to the
experience of the church, which we have already examined, is a kind
of appeal to tradition, and so is the appeal to the church's practice,
especially in administering baptism, which, as we have seen, is quite
common. Basil's attempt to appeal to secret tradition in the church is
an extension of the same device, but an unusual, indeed unique one,
which neither of the other Cappadocian theologians imitated. 23 It
must, however, be remembered that the Arians also appealed to
tradition. Palladius is appalled by the Nicene faith not only because in
his eyes it is un Scriptural but because it is a novelty. Gryson reminds
tis that the Arians could and did appeal to great names in the past,
Cyprian, Eusebius of Caesarea, his namesake of Nicomedia and
Constantinople, and Theognis of Nicaea (but not Arius!).24
We cannot even contrast in any clear-cut way the pro-Nicenes as
users of allegory and the Arians as rejecters of it.25 Almost
everybody, with the exception of Didymus the Blind and Ambrose
(heirs ofOrigen and of Philo) rejected the excessive lengths to which
Origen had brought the art of allegorizing, and some, e.g. Eustathius
of Antioch and Epiphanius, explicitly dissociate themselves from him
on this point. 26 'Origen will not stand along with us on the day of
judgment' is the fierce comment of Epiphanius. 27 But nobody
admits that there are contradictory commands in Scripture. There are of course
many examples of the writers of the fourth century contrasting the obscurity and
enigmatic messages of the OT with the clear words of the NT e.g. Eusebius Eee,
Theal. I, 20.96 and Gregory of Nyssa Ref. Con. Eunom. 2, 3 (468).
2tE.g. Athanasius De Synodis4I, Basil DSS VII, 16 [93J, Or. con. Ar.III.3S; Hilary
Uher ad Constanlium (Feder) 9 (204). and see examples in Gregory of Nyssa cited by
van Parys op. cit.
22E.g. Athanasius De Synodis 41, Basil DSS VII, 16 [93] where, however, he
guards himself by declaring that the Fathers are consistent with the Scriptures.
"!·'Thc.:y also. towards the end of the century, realised that to interpret Scripture
simply using Scriptural words is not enough; see Gregory of Nyssa Con Eunom. II
)~j-409 (1044-1048) 412 (1048) 419 (1049).
24Scolies Ariennes 178-9.
2sAs, e.g., Lonergan wishes to do, The Way to Njcaea 71.
26For Eustathius, see above pp. 21 1-12, 214-15. But Sellers is unwise (Eustathius
d AlltioclJ 68) to take a rejection of allegorizing as an invariable criterion of
Eustathius' authorship, for Eustathius can on occasion allegorize. For Epiphanius see
AI/((lratus 62-63.
"'An,oratus 63·1 (75).
The Development of Doctrine
rejected allegorization altogether. Both Athanasius of Anazarbus and
Asterius used allegory.2. The Opus Imperieetum in Matthaeum can
allegorize the details ofJohn the Baptist's dress and diet. 29 The Latin
Arian Commentary on Job can allegorize the commands of the Lord to
put out a little from the shore and to launch out into the deep.30 The
Greek Arian commentator, Julius, on the same book cannot resist
allegorizing the Leviathan as the devil and the throne of God as the
sky, and knows of no other way of dealing with the otherwise either
incomprehensible or indecent Song of Solomon.31 Eusebius of
Emesa in one of his discourses has quite a long passage about
allegorizing. He allows that it cannot altogether be rejected but he is
very cautious about its use. It tends to read meanings into the text
which are good in themselves but are simply not present in the text. It
can be an illegitimate short cut. A man who is bound or who is in
prison is anxious to be free by any means, but not all means are
right. 32 Had all ancient interpreters of the Bible followed this advice,
subsequent generations would have been saved the necessity of
reading a great deal of nonsense.
Conversely, a number of passages from pro-Nicene writers can be
produced which make them seem as devout observers of the text of
the Bible as any Arian. At one point Hilary gives a creed representing
his own belief which is composed wholly of biblical texts." 'Do not
believe me', says Cyril of Jerusalem to the people whom he is
catechizing, 'believe the Scriptures'." Earnest but futile attempts are
made to prove that the Bible really does use the word ousia or
subslaniia. Potamius of Lisbon in his pro-Nicene phase does so
clumsily,35 Marius Victorinus in a more sophisticated but no more
convincing manner. 36
28For Athanasius see above pp. 42-43 and also Bardy Lucien 204-5 and Simonetti
Srudi lOT. For Asterius see Bardy op. cit. 356-59.
"Op. Imp. III PG 56, 648, 649, 650.
30Gryson 5, 2, 4 (214, 215. 216), Mai 201, 202.
31 6
3 .9-13; 157·13. ,14; 283.1-5; 232.17-19· But in every respect this is an
outstanding commentary for its learning. its good sense, its careful attention to the
te~t and its refusal to. iridulg~ in fantastic speculation. It contrasts very favourably
WIth the commentanes of Dldymus and of Gregory the Great ooJob. It has a fair
claim to be regarded as the best ancient commentary on the book.
32XI De Arbore Fici (4-'7), 258-260.
33Uber ad Constantium II II (204, 205). Zahn (Marcellus von Ancyra 52-56) is only
one among several to note how emphatically he appealed to the Bible.
34Catechesis IV.17 (J08). 35PL 8:1418.
36Ad"ersus Arium 1.30 (108, 109), 59 (160, 11.3 (175), 8 (181-3); De Homoousio
Redpiendio 2 (279-80).
829
 The Controversy Resolved
But when all is said and done, it must be conceded that the Arians
are less inclined to use allegory than the pro-Nicenes. This is not
because their respective theologies drove them in that direction, but
because the Ariaus were, with some exceptions such as Palladius and
the author of the Opus Imperjectum, less intellectual and less
sophisticated than the pro-Nicenes. We have seen this already in the
case of the Macedonians requiring Scriptural proo£·7 Prestige is near
the mark when he says that the Arians had fallen into the pitfall of
'mistaking anthropomorphic or physical metaphors for more than
what they purported to be."· The Ariaus maintain, says Epiphanius,
that their opponents ought to give notice when they are about to
treat the language of the Bible figuratively, and that 'if it is written
about (Christ) that he is a creature, then he must be acknowledged to
be a creature'?' The Lucianists claimed that becauseJn 1:14 said 'The
Word became flesh' and not 'flesh and soul', therefore the incarnate
Logos had no human soul. 40 'They take refuge again and again in the
literal sense of the Holy Scriptures' says Athanasius, 'but they fail, in
their usual way, to understand even that.'4! 'We do not call the Holy
Spirit God' says an Arian writer, 'because the Bible does not say so,
but subservient to God the Father and obedient in all things to the
commands of the Son as the Son is to the Father'42 God must have left
Job on his dung-heap for three and a half months (not three and a half
years in imitation of our Lord's ministry of three and a half years),
says the Latin Arian commentator onJob, because atJob 7:3Job says
'I have endured months (not years) of emptiness'. 43 Asterius, a much
more sophisticated writer than this one, can on occasion44 allegorise
mildly in a way different from Origen's raging subjectivism, but on
the whole he prefers in his Homilies to moralize. Yet the Arians did
certainly tend to regard themselves as the party who kept to the Bible
.l7I do not think that Pollard is correct in seeing in the Arians a greater 'Biblical
realism' than the pro-Nicenes displayed (,Origins of Arianism' 104--06). Meslin
(Ariens 343-52) discusses this difference usefully. Nor do I think that Barnard
(' Antecedents of Arius' 176) is justified in seeing Arius as reacting against Origen's
of allegory.
liSl,.'
J8GPT '79.
J9 Ancoratus 45-4 (58), 46.1 (56).
··Ibid 35.1-6 (44. 4S).
41 0, con. Ar. I, 52.
42Mai/Gryson fragments 11.265 (11.212).
43 11.474; the Latin is sustinui menses supervacuos.
"Homilies Xl.5 (77). Xlll.lo (96), 17 (99); XV.3 (109; XXX·5 ('4C>-1) frag.7
('5 8).
830
The Development of Doctrine
in contrast to the pro-Nicenes who added to it or distorted it.
Maximinius in controversy with Augustine, says:
'We believe the Scriptures. and we reverence those divine Scriptures;
and we do not desire to pass over a single iota (apicem), for we dread
the punishment which is to be found in the Scriptures themselves' (Dt
4: 2 ).45 Later he is more explicit: 'the divine Scripture does not fare
badly in our teaching so that it has to receive improvement
(emendationem) from US.'46
At one point in his De Synodis Hilary gives a list of places in the
Bible which present special difficulty to the expounder. The passages
in the Old Testament are Gn 1:2 (darkness appears to be co-aeval
with God); Gn 5:26 taken with I Peter 3:20 (Methuselah appears to
have lived beyond the days ofthe Flood, yet he is not among the eight
people in the ark, the only souls who were saved); Gn 18:21 (God
appears to be ignorant of the exact extent of the sin of Sodom and
comes down to investigate it); Dt 34:6 (nobody knows where Moses
is buried, and yet those who buried him must have known). And in
the New Testament the problems are that the Lord who was to send
the Holy Spirit on the disciples is himself said to be born of the Spirit;
that the Lord who condemned those who- use the sword himself
ordered a sword to be brought to him (Matt 26:52); that he who
descended into hell is apparently in Paradise with the thief(Lk 22:3 6);
-and that the apostles are commanded to baptize in the triple Name
(Matt 28:19), yet they baptized only in the name of Jesus (Acts
10:48).47
These are all passages which presumably would have given trouble
to any commentator. We can compile a list of passages which were
specially controverted and interpreted in different ways by different
sides. 4• One of these was Gn 19:24 'The Lord rained down ... from
the Lord': who were these two Lords? The 17th anathema of the First
Creed of Sirmium (35 I) specially damns people who misinterpret
this (and the target of the anathema is clearly Photinus), either to say
that this refers to the Father only and not to the Son, or to Interpret it
as meaning that there are two gods. 4' The Arians used Isa 1:2 ('I
45Collatio Augustini cum Maximinio 13 (730).
4620, 21 (736).
·'De Syn. 85 (537,538).
48Simonetti Crisi 475-80 gives a long and interesting list of such passages; see also
62-3, 269 and Studi 170, 171.
49S 0 Simonetti points out Studi 149-50. See above pp. 326-8 and Hahn Symbok
P·19 8 .
 The Controversy Resolved
have nourished and brought up children'), Mal 2:10 ('Have we not
one Father?'), and Job 38:28 ('Has the rain a father?') to reduce the
significance ofJohn 1:14 ('glory as of the only Son from the Father').
In his Letter to Paulinus of Tyre Eusebius ofNicomedia used Job 38:28
and Isa 1:2, and fv1aL 2:10, and Athanasius in Or. Con. Ar. 1159 uses
the Job, the Isaiah alid the Malachi passages in a counter direction.'o
The First Sirmian Creed also insists that at Gn. 1:26 God is talking to
himself and not to his Son.51 The pro-Nicenes, Hilary tells us,
adduced as proof-texts for the Son's origin from the Father Jn 10:30
and 14:7,9, 10, II, 12. The Arians explained them all as referring to
the moral and voluntary solidarity of the Father and the Son, not to a
supposed unity of nature, and counter-adduced to support their case
Acts 4:32; 1 Cor 3:8; Jn 17:20 and 21. 52
These passages, and others like them, were the outer fortifications
round which each side skirmished. But there were other texts which
were more crucial than these, the key-points or inner citadels of the
battle. We shall look briefly at these:
Proverbs 8:22 and some of the following verses. 53 Did this passage
declare plainly that the Son was created, or did the original of the
word 'created' only mean 'appointed', or did it refer not to the pre-
existent Son but to the human element in the incarnate Son or the
faithful who become his Body, or even to some innate power
within the Godhead and not to the Son?
Amos 4:12,13 We have already seen how sedulously the Macedonians
used this text. 54 Does it mean that the Holy Spirit actually is
50S0 Simonetti Studi 170:-1 and 171 n 53.
5 t See
references in n 49.
52Hilarv De Trinitate VIII, 3. s.
5.11 am not here giving an Auslegungsgeschichte; for this text see Simonetti Stud;
,1\ld Rieken 'Nikaia als Crisis' 33 1-3. The reader can consult the Index of Biblical
p;~ssa~cs at the end of chis ~ork. I merely mention the following (not exhaustive) list
ot wrI,tcrs and works which d,eal with this passage: Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia,
EllscblUS of Caesa rea, EustathlUs, Marcellus, Athanasius, the 'Macrostich', Basil of
'!-ncyra: George ~f ~aodicea, Epiphanius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa,
SCCl1ndlanUs of Smgldunu?I' HIlary, the Latin Commentary on N, Eunomius,
Am,brose, ~he Ps.~Athanaslan Expositio Fidei, Phoebadius of Agen, Gregory of
~lvlra, and m the Sixth century Thrasamund and Fulgentius are still disputing about
It.
5413ut it had been employed before them. Eusebius of Caesarea Dem. Ev.
1.v:I~.3,o--34 used it earlier i~ a quite uncontroversial way referring to the Holy
Spmt; It neve: occurred ~o him that the Spirit was not created. Against the Arian
.11ld Macedoman use of It we _can list Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea. Didymus,
832
The Development of Doctrine
created? Or does it simply refer to the wind as created or to men
who have become spirit or who have been renewed by the Spirit,
or to the spirit of the Jews; and is 'declaring to men their Christ' a
mistranslation of 'declaring to men their discourse' (so Didymus
who can appeal to the Hebrew)? .
Isaiah 53:8 The great text for speaking about the generation of the
Son ('His generation who shall declare?'). 55 The early anti-Arians
or pro-Nicenes use it to decry Arian attempts to define how the
Son was generated. The Arians use it to deplore attempts to define
the Son's generation in terms of ousia and cognates. The later pro-
Nicenes use it to prove that the Son's generation has had no
beginning. The Arians can appeal to it to prove that the Son's
generation was later than the Father's being, and accuse the pro-
Nicenes of saying that the Son is virtually unknowable; the pro-
Nicenes reply, 'incomprehensible but not unknowable'. Ps-
Maximus in Contra Iudaeos, in reply to the pro-Nicene use of the
text, maintains that the Holy Spirit can inform us about the Son's
generation. Eunomius of course avoids using the text because it
makes against his conviction that it is perfectly possible to know
about the origin of the Son.
Ps 45 (44):7 (7, 8) ('You love righteousness and hate wickedness,
therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness
above your fellows') The Arians seized on this passage as a proof
that God the Father was the God of God the Son: this was one of
their favourite doctrines. They pointed to the inferiority of Christ
in that he was anointed by God the Father, and exalted in this way
because of his righteousness and good life. Their opponents found
this hard to answer. They adduced texts from the Fourth Gospel
apparently contradicting this view or they said that Christ went no
further than acknowledging the Father's paternal authority, or
they argued that it was only his human nature that was anointed
and it was only as man that he called God the Father his God. 56
Epiphanius and. Pseudo-Didymus. Shapland, op. cit. 66--7, gives a list of authors
who treat of this text.
• 55Simo?et~! ref~~~ again a~d ,~~ain to ~~ use of this text, Studi 128-32. 175 n 79;
OsservaZlom sull AltercazlO 56; CrJSl 62, 231-2. The authors who treat of this
text are Alexand~r of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, the Second Sirmian Creed,
th~ Ps.-Ath~nasl~n E~positjo ~idej, Eusebius of Emesa (in a non-Arian sense!) ,
HIl~ry, Manus Vl~tonnus. Cynl ofJerusalem, Ps.-Didymus, Ps.-Maximus of Turin
(Arlan). Phoebadius, Ambrose, Thrasamund and Fulgentius.
560pponents quoted by Athanasius, Alexander and Hilary use this text, and they
833
 The Controversy Resolved
Ps 110 (109):1 and 3 gave material for speculative interpretation
because v. 1 ran 'The Lord said to my Lord', and thereby provided
a chance of showing that the Father and the Son were two distinct
hypostases. Both pro-Nicenes and Ariaus used it for this purpose.
But v.3 was even more employed because though the modem
English translation of the Hebrew (RSV) runs 'From the womb of
the morning like dew your youth will come to you', the LXX here
plunged into a wild. but prolific mistranslation, 'from the belly
before the morning star I have begotten thee'. 57 The Arians
unanimously applied the sentence to the production of the pre-
existent Son, because it seemed to hint at a beginning with some
relation to time for the Son. The pro-Nicenes usually applied it to
the incarnation (but not Hilary). Eusebius of Caesarea (Comm. on
Psalms) refers it to the generation of the pre-existent Son, even
though he knows and quotes other versions of the Hebrew which
produce a quite different sense from the LXX version. One Arian
writer (Mai/Gryson frags.) sees v. I as the Holy Spirit
acknowledging the Lordship of the Son.
The Gospel According to St.John was the major battlefield in the New
Testament during the Arian controversy. It was the chief resource
of the pro-Nicenes but was by no means free of difficulties and
pitfalls even for them. It is generally true that the Ariaus scored
heavily in using the Synoptic gospels. We have seen into what
exegetical mazes Athanasius and Hilary were led to dealing with
those texts which indicate Jesus Christ as weak or fearful or
ignorant. 5 • On the whole they recouped themselves in St.John's
Gospel, but not without the necessity of exercising at times
extreme ingenuity. Only a very few of the most controverted texts
can be dealt with here.
try to reply: the Mai/Gryson fragments also use it in their cause. Ps. 4S (44) was a
much discussed one because its first verse ('my heart overflows with (literally "has
belched out" LXX tl;l1pevyato) a goodly theme') brought up the manner of the
generation of the Son, and the description of the queen standing at the King's right
hand in v. 9 (10) provided a opportunity for the Arians to point out that though the
church (aUegorization of the queen) stands at Christ's right hand nobody would
conclude from this that it was equal to Christ. yet the pro-Nicenes inconsistently
claim that the Son. who stands at God's right hand. is equal to him.
S7tK' yacr'tp6<; 1tp6 srocrcp6pou t~t"(tYYT]cra crt. Eusebius of Caesarea. Asterius,
Marcellus, Hilary. Ps.-Maximus of Turin. Thrasamund. Fulgentius and Viglius of
Thapsc dealt with this psalm.
5!1S(.'C above PP.44?-50, 496-501.
The Development of Doctrine
John 1: 1 is naturally the great resort of the pro-Nicenes, but it is used
by Eusebius of Caesarea to express his doctrine of the Logos before
the outbreak of the dispute, and Marcellus and even Photinus (who
held that here the evangelist was simply calling God the Logos,
there being no Son before the Incarnation) can use it for their own
purposes. Arians known to Epiphanius argued ingeniously that the
Logos could not represent ultimate metaph ysical reality ('He who
is') because 'He who is' cannot be 'with' Him who is; they cannot
both represent ultimate reality. Epiphanius simply protests agaillst
pushing human analogies too far. 59
. John 10:30 ('I and the Father are One'), at fmt sight this looks like a
straight-forward pro-Nicene text, but closer investigation shows a
rather different picture. Alexander used it before Nicaea to show
that Christ here 'is neither calling himself the Father nor indicating
that natures which are two in hypostoses were one'. 60 Asterius and
the Second ('Dedication') Creed of 34', which may have been
influenced by Asterius, interpret the text as indicating a purely
moral unity of consent and will. Marcellus contested this strongly
and applied it to the ontological unity, indeed identity, of the
Father and his Logos (the Son not appearing till the Incarnation),
and to deny the existence of two hypostases. The statement of the
Western bishops after Serdica in 343 enthusiastically supports this
view; the text is there 'because of the unity of the hypostasis which is
one, both of the Father and of the Son'.61 Hilary can show
uneasiness at this text, insisting that the Two being One does not
preclude their being distinct, but usually he interprets it in what
might be called the conventional pro-Nicene way as indicating
their ontological unity, and this is how Athanasius takes it again
and again.
John 14:9, 10 ('He who has seen me has seen the Father' and 'I am in
the Father and the Father in me'). Those two texts were crucial and
capital to Athanasius because behind the ontological unity of the
Father and the Son he saw the unity of revelation, and they tended
59Alexander, Athanasius and Hilary appeal to this text as well as the others.
Simonetti Stud; 146 deals with it.
6°Opitz Urk III no. 14 38 (25); probably Alexander means. one in hypostaSis not
one in nature, though the Greek is so worded that we cannot be quite sure. For
comment on this passage see Simonetti Studi 127 n 2S (who points out that Origen,
the source of the doctrine of the moral unity of Father and Son, never uses this text
to prove their unity of nature nor ousia) and Kopecek History 30-31, 55-57.
61See Hahn Symbole 189.
835
 The Controversy Resolved
not to figure in Ari,m discussions because this was where Arian
theology was weakest. It could envisage that God suffered but
could not allow that the God who suffered was the full revelation
of the higher God. It is significant that the Latin Commentary on the
Nicene Creed preserved in EOMIA quotes In 14:9.
John '4:28 ('The Father is greater than 1'). This was an easy text for the
Arians to use in their interest. Alexander before Nicaea already has
to deal with it; he does so by explaining that though the Father is
greater as the ingenerate is greater than the generate, still as the
image of the Father the Son is still in the same incomparable class or
rank with the Father. Simonetti says that the text was only used by
the Arians rather late in the controversy,·2 but in fact Eusebius of
Caesarea uses it (conflated withJn 6:44) in his Letter to Euphration of
Balanea.· 3 This curiously conflated text ('My Father who sent me is
greater than 1') is also found in Eunomius, and at the Council of
Aquileia Palladius used the text in this form and when Ambrose
specially stressed 'who sent me' made no objection.·' Marcellus
was apparently the first pro-Nicene to apply In 14:28 to the
incarnate rather than the pre-existent Logos. Athanasius and Hilary
follow his example, but they also suggest that there is a certain
superiority in the Father because he is the Father, but not one that
affects the identity of nature of Father and Son. Gregory of Nyssa,
dealing with the text, says that the Father is greater as cause of the
Son, but equal in nature. Epiphanius suggests that Christ uttered
these words only out offilial respect, not making a statement about
the ontological status of either. Arians of course use the text to
show the inferiority of the Son. It is used for this purpose in the
Second Sirmian Creed. Basil, answering In 10:45 with Phil 2:6,
refers the verse to the incarnate Word.
John '7:3 ('This is eternal life, that they should know thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent'). This is one of the
texts most strongly exploited by the Arians. The Logos was
62Simonetti comments on this verse Stud; 128 and C,isi 52, 232 "43, 259, and 478.
Set' also Gryson Scolies Ariennes 193. Kopecek History 14 and Tetz 'Zur Theologie
d1..'s Markell von Ancyra I'. 270.
6JOpitz Urk. NO.3. 2(5) MesHn notes the use of this conftated text in Les Ariens
396-9: Potamius of Lisbon also uses it in a Latin form, see Moreira Potamius de
Lisbonne 222.
64Gryson ScoUes A,iennes JI8(294). An orthodox interpolation in the Opus
lmperfectum abo uses this contlation (xliv.33 (PC 56:882)). Marius Victorinus takes
the conventional pro-Nicene line here.
The Development of Doctrine
certainly God (theos) but not true God. Arius had used this concept
again and again in his surviving work.· 5 Eusebius of Cae sarea had
used it for just this purpose in his Letter to Euphration:·· the Son IS
'the image of the true God' and 'God' (theos) but not true God.
Palladius uses the text twice and Maximinius cites it also. Aetius
took it as a proofofhis doctrine that we can kno,,:, G?d perfectl?,"',
which is a quite different use from the normal Anan mterpretatlOn.
Against this Athanasius and Hilary and Epiphanius produce an
array of texts showing that in other places and in other ways the
Bible witnesses to Christ being true God (e.g. 'I am the way the
truth and the life' Gn 14:6) and 'this is the true God and life eternal'
(I John 5:20». Hilary asks how we can be saved by him who is not
true God; Gregory of Nyssa points to all the places in the New
Testament in which (as he thinks) Christ is called God (Rom 16:27;
I Tim 1:17 and 6:16), and declares that to accept the Arian view of
In 17:3 would be to deprive these texts of meaning.
John 20:17 ('I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God
and your God'). The Second Sirmian creed, which includes several
texts which the Arians thought capital, cites this also. God the
Father is the God of the Son; this was a constantly-repeated
doctrine of the Arians, though not perhaps in the early stages of
their history, for Athanasius does not pay much attention to it.
Hilary, Epiphanius, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory ofNyssa
all reply in the same way to this argument. God the Father was the
Father and the God ofJesus Christ as man; but of Jesus Christ as
God he was Father in a different and pre-eminent way, by divine
generation.
1 Cor 15:28 (,When all things are subjected to him, then the Son
himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him,
that God may be everything to everyone'). This is a text which
appears to provide good ground for Arian· doctrine. Simonetti
observes. s that Hilary and the Ps-Athanasian Sermo Maior de Fide
interpret it of the human nature of Christ, which will of course be
65S e e Stead 'The "Thalia" of Arius' 36-:-38; he points out that Origen had made
this distinction, Comm. on John Il.2.16. See also Kopecek History 296--7 who
observes that this text In 17:3 occurs in both the Euchologion of Serapion and the
Apostolic Constitutions; and Gryson ScoUes Ariennes 179-84.
"Opitz U,k. III NO.3.3(5).
67S CC above, p.606.
68Cris; 480.
 The Controversy Resolved
subordinated to the Father, and that Gregory of Nyssa borrows
from Origen an ingenious explanation which refers the text to
Christ as the church, for of course in the end the church will be
subjected to God. Ambrose follows Hilary in the conventional line
of applying the verse to Christ as Son of Man. Marius Victorinus
characteristically plunges into an esoteric philosophical
explanation. 69 Epiphanius refuses to admit that this subjection
affects equality or unity with the Father or honour, the Son's
inferiority simply consisting in the fact that he is only-begotten
Son and the Father is his Father. The pro-Nicenes were on
particularly delicate ground here because on the one side they must
avoid appearing to favour the idea of Marcellus that the Son's
humanity would disappear at the rendering up of the Kingdom
and the Logos,revert to original unity in the Father, and on the
other side they must not give in to Arian insistence, based on this·
very promising text, that the Son is permanently and by
constitution inferior to the Father. It is no wonder that their
interpretations here are sometimes far-fetched.
A characteristic exegetical ploy of the Arians was to invoke texts
in the interests of what might be called 'reductionism', that is to say
they would try to reduce the value of the titles given (or thought to
be given) to Christ in the Bible by showing that they were also
applied in the Bible to quite ordinary people or things. Asterius
played this game extensively in a well-known passage:
. "Like H (tn.e Son to the Father): well, it is written about us that "man
is the image and is the glory of God" (I Cor 11:7): as for (the Son
existing) "always", it is written "while we live we are always ... "
(2 Cor 4:1 I): as for (the Son being) "in him", (it is written) that "in
him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28): as for (the
Son being) "unchanging", it is written "nothing shall separate us
from the love of Christ" (Rom 8:35). On the subject of (the Son
being) the power (of God), (it is written) that the caterpillar and the
locust are called the "power" even the "great power" of God Goel
2:25 LXX), and the same is often said about the people, for instance,
"all the power of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt" (Ex.
12:44 LXX), and there are other heavenly powers forit says "the Lord
69'When everything else has been cleared out, active potency rests, and in it God
will exist according to what it is to exist and what it is to be at rest, but in all other
things spirituaIJy according to both his potency and substance', Adv. Arium 1.39
(I~. . 76De Trinitate IV.S.
83 8
The Development oj Doctrine
of the powers is with us, the God ofJacob is our champion'" (Ps 46
(45):8).7.
Greg and Groh give a list of texts used by Arians to reduce the
significance of the Son's partaking in God." Kopecek gives a similar
list of texts employed by the Neo-Arians to reduce the significance of
the title 'Son'. 72 Eusebius of Nicomedia in his Letter to Paulinus of
Tyre remarks that if the Son is to be described as 'from the ousia'of
the Father (which Eusebius dislikes) because he is begotten, then he
can produce several instances in Scripture where things are said to be
begotten which yet have no connection with the nature of him who
begat them; he instances Isa 1:2 ('I have begotten and exalted sons'
LXX), Dt 32:18 ('you were unmindful of the Rock that begot you')
and Job 38:28 (,Who has begotten the drops of dew?' i.e. God has).73
Another 'reductive' move was to argue that where God is named
along with Christ and the word 'through' is applied to Christ, as at
I Cor 8:6 and 2 Cor 15:18, the Person to whom 'through' is applied
must be inferior. Another was to reduce the significance of the Son
being 'in the Father' by making it equivalent to the same relationship
as all Christians have when they are 'in' Christ, e.g. In 4:30; 14:30;
17: 11. 74
Arian exegesis also emphasised strongly the uniqueness and
incomparability of God the Father by way of contrast to the status of
God the Son. Meslin notes the use of Baruch 3:35 (36), 'This is our
God, and there shall none other be accounted of in comparison of
m
him'," by Germinius the Altercatio. Hilary at one point gives a long
list of passages used thus to establish the uniqueness of the Father:
Rom 16:25, Isa65:I6,Jn 17:3, Ex 3:14, and manyothers,76 and later a
shorter list thought to manifest the inferior condition of the Son',
divinity: 77 In 17:3, '14:28 and Mk 13:32. There were also lists of texts
70Fragment XVI, Bardy Lucien 347, from Athanasius De Decret. 20. A very
similar argument is attributed to the Arians in Ep. ad Afros .5. Athanasius can play the
same game against the Arians when they call the Son 'like' the Father, Or. con. Ar.
m.lo.
71Early Arianism 107-8.
72History 171-2. At .502-3 he gives a list of proof-texts used by the Neo-Arians
for the Son's subordination to the Father.
"Opitz Urk.m No.8, 6, 7 (17).
74 50 Athanasius Or. con. AT. III.I7 quoting his opponents.
75Les Ariens 294-9. The Baruch text wrongly attributed to Jeremiah is used
elsewhere by Arian writers for tbe same purpose. Meslin gives an interesting list of
Arian proof texts, Us Ariens 230--5.
77Ibid.IX.2.
 The Controversy Resolved
witnessing to the creatureliness of the Son. We have seen Prov 8:22
brought up again and again, along with Acts 2:36 ('God has made
him both Lord and Christ'); most of Gregory of Nyssa's Contra
Eunomium Book III is devoted to refuting the argument based on this
text from Proverbs. Another curious piece of exegesis was made to
serve this end also, a fantastic interpretation of Jn 8:25, which the
Revised Standard Version translates: 'They said to him: "Who are
you?" Jesus said to them "Even what I have told you from the
beginning'" (alternative translation in footnote 'Why do I talk to
you at am'). The words 'in the beginning' which can also be
translated 'at aU' were seized on by the Arian exegetes and they
rendered the last sentence 'I am the Beginning who am talking to
you' and concluded that the Son certainly'had a beginning.7s Gross
misunderstanding of the text was not the exclusive perquisite of the
pro-Nicenes. A favourite text for proving that the Holy Spirit was
not divine and was a creature was 1 Cor 8:6, where he is not
mentioned (the significance lying in his absence, like the bark of
Sherlock Holmes' dog), and another was Jn 1:3 (he was made with
every\hing else). By the time of Vigilius of Thapse in the sixth
century this list had been enlarged by Jn 16:14, 15:26, 14:26, and Ezek
37:5. 79 One of the oddest proof texts adduced for the creatuteliness of
the Son was Ezek 37" ('The hand of the Lord was upon me'); the
Latin, or a Latin, version of this ran facta est super me manus Domini
which could by a far-fetched renderin'g be made to mean 'and the
hand of the Lord was made above me', the hand of the Lord being
taken as the Word of God. so
We have already had plenty of opportunity of seeing the Arians
dealing with the Synoptic Gospels so as to bring out the
imperfections and limitations of the incarnate Logos, which they
attributed to his divine nature, a nature fitted, as they saw it, for
becoming incarnate by its very limitations. One of the capital texts
78'tiJv apxi)v 6 'tl Kat AaM» ilf.l.tv, Latin Prindpium quod et loquor vobis which, to be
sure, allows no alternative but mistranslation. See Maximinus' exegesis (Gryson
ScoUes Ariennes 19 (220, 222)), connecting it with Gn 1:1 andJn I:I. The text crops
up again in Ambrose De Fide 111.7.49 (125). My brother (see Preface) suggests that
this interpretation was actually intended by the author of the Fourth Gospel, and
therefore that the ancients were not perverse in following it. But no English version
of the N.T., whether AV, RV, RSV. NEB, orJr. Bible, even hints at this rendering
either in text or margin.
79Vigilius of Thapse Contra Arianos etc. 11.32 (PL 62:218).
80S 0 the opponents cited in the Latin Commentary on the Creed oJNicaea, Turner
EOIMA I, Jl6(2). . everywhere, but the author is certainly Arian (Les Ariens 244-5).
840
The Development of Doctrine
here was Mk 10:18 (,There is none good save God') and another Mk
13:32 where Jesus says that the Son does not know the hour when
heaven and earth are to pass away, and another Matt 20:23 where
Jesus confesses his inability to determine who are to occupy' the
positions of honour near him when his Kingdom comes. Ambrose,
who has to face this difficulty, can only suppose that Jesus
dissimulated out of a kindly feeling towards the mother of the sons of
Zebedee, for he must in fact have possessed this power. 81
Greg and Groh 82 make the interesting co11iecture that the Arians
were responsible for the origin in the ancient and mediaeval church
of the cult of Job as a kind of pre-Christian martyr. Certainly it is
remarkable that no fewer than two Arian commentaries on that book
should have come into our hands. They also observe s3 the strong
Penchant which Arian writers and disputants had for the Epistle to
the Hebrews. This is understandable, because this book represents
Jesus as in a sense working out his own salvation and learning
obedience through suffering (5:8), and this was peculiarly congenial
to the Arian concept of the character and mission of Christ. In spite of
their insistence upon confming evidence for doctrine to the
Scriptures, Arian writers do not eschew appealing to writings outside
the canon of Scripture on occasion. They had a particular likingfot
the Ascension of Isaiah. Potamius of Lisbon is probably dependent on
it in his sensational account of Isaiah's end,84 and some very
fragmentary sentences preserved by Mai from an Arian document
appear to be indebted to this book also. 85 Meslin, noting this
penchant for the book, said that the Ascension of Isaiah appealed to
Arians because it presented a subordinate Christ and a Holy Spirit
who was not divine, and this suited their doctrine admirably.8.
Another favourite was the pseudo-Clementine literature.
Maximinius, says Meslin,87 cites the Clementine Recognitions five
times. Rufinus, who translated this work, says (Prologue) that he
found in it some heretical interpolations 'about the ingenerate and
81Ambrose De Fide V.S, 64 (241).
82Early Arianism 394-8.
"Ibid. 160--8.
84S0 Moreira Potamius 281-91; whether this was Potamius in his pro-Nicene or
his Arian phase we cannot tell.
85Mai Script vet. Nova Coll. IIlJrags XX (238) and XXI (238. 239).
86Les Adem '243.
1170r rather Meslin's attribution to Maximinus, whom he is inclined to see
 The Controversy Resolved
generated God' (de ingenito deo genitoque), which he omitted. They
may have been Arian interpolations, or the whole may have been re-
worked by an Arian hand. It is interesting to note that the author of
the Apostolic Constitutions, whose Arian proclivities are notOrIOUS,
counts among the books of the New Testament the two Epistles of
Clement and the Clementine 'Ordinances' (olatayal), whatever exact
document he meant by that. ss Athanasius reproaches his Arian
opponents for using an appropriate sentiment from Hermas'
Shepherd, which runs thus:
'First of all, believe that there is one God who created and ordered
everything and brought everything out of non-existence (tIC tau Il~
OVtO~) into existence.'
The Arians, he says, accuse the pro-Nicenes of using 'non-Scriptural
expressions' (uypa<pol M~SI<;), but they are themselves using a non-
Scriptural book.s9 Pseudo-Maximus of Turin can appeal to Hermes
Trismegistus and to the Sibylline Oracles. 90
It is not easy to epitomise the exegetical practice of the pra-
Nicenes, though readers of this book will perforce have seen
something of it already. We shall glance at some examples taken
from the works of a few great names. Athanasius produces as proof
text for the divinity of the Son Romans 9:5, where to modern readers
it is uncertain whether the expression 'God who is over all' refers to
Christ or not, and as proofs for the eternal pre-existence of the Logos
In 1:1, Rev 1:8, Rom9:5 again and 1:20, with 1 Cor 1:24 and he adds
Isa 40:28 and Ps 90 (89):17, 36 (35):10 and 145 (144):13. 91 Elsewhere
he produces a list of testimonies to Christ's Gedhead culled from the
Old Testament, Gn 19:24 (two Lords in heaven), Ps 1I0 (109):r; 45
(44):6, and again 145 (144):13. 92 In the New Testament for the same
doctrine he appeals toJn 6:15,17:10,1:1, Rev 1:8 and againJn 8:12,
1:3, 5:r9, Rom I:20,Jn I:r, 9, I Cor 8:6 (compared with Amos 3:13),
Heb 1:6, Mk 4:II, Mtt 24:31, In 5:23, Phil 2:6. 93 A little later he sets
88Apostolic Constitutions (Funk) VIII, xlvii.8S (592).
89De Decretis 18.3-5 (IS). The passage quoted is Mandates I.E of Helmas'
Shepherd.
90Tumer 'Maximus of Turin against the Pagans' p. 331 lines 319-2) and p. 332
lines 352--g.
91 0,. con. AT. I la, II; at'12 he adds)n 1:3, Col 1:17. In 14:9, Heb 1;2, Daniel
(LXX) Il:42 (Susanna 42) and Baruch 4:20, 22.
92lbid.II.ll.
"De Sr". 49:1-5 (273. 274).
The Development of Doctrine
out another list designed to show that the Bible says that Christ is
worthy of worship: Ps 2:7 (eked out by Mtt 3:17 and 4:1I), 96(97):7;
Heb 1:6; Isa 45:14;Jn 13:13, 20:28 and Ps 24: 10. 94 Pollard in an article
dealing with the hermeneutical principles of Athanasius singles out
five: sufficiency of Scripture, scope (i.e. ultimate intention) of
Scripture, custom of Scripture, style of Scripture and context of
Scripture'" We may grant all this, and allow that Athanasius had a
firm grasp of the ultimate drive or burden of the New Testament at
least. But we cannot but observe the great gulf which divides him,
and virtually all his contemporaries of whatever ecclesiastical
complexion, from the moderns in his methods of handling and
presuppositions in approaching the text of the Bible.
Marcellus of Ancyra solved the difficulties presented to his
generation by Prov 8:22 and 1 Cor 15:28 by applying the first to the
incarnate Word and the second by his peculiar doctrine of the re-
absorption after the rendering up of the kingdom of the Logos into
God and the disappearance of the Son (i.e. of the human nature of the
Logos when incarnate). In the first he was paid the flattery of imitation
by almost all the pro-Nicenes thereafter, for the second he was
execrated and deposed by the anti-Nicenes and finally condemned,
though with reluctance, by those who had been his friends. He
perceived as virtually nobody else did how very unsatisfactory was
the universal habit of reading into the Old Testament the presence of
the pre-existent Son and tried to remedy it. He declared that at Gn
1:26 ('Let us make man') God was as it were exhorting himself, like a
sculptor before beginning a piece of statuary"· The pro-Nicenes of
course interpreted it as God addressing his Son, and the Jews alleged
that he was talking to angels. Marcellus' favourite texts, after 1 Cor
15:24-28, wereJn 10:30 and 38, 16:r5 and Col 1:15, 16'"
Hilary can produce cogent and effective exegesis. Combatting the
Ebionite doctrine that the pre-existence of the Word was only as a
word (sonus) not as the distinctly existing Logos, he explains that John
wrote that the Word was with (aputT) God, not simply in God, and
that 'the Word was God'. This means that 'the Word is proclaimed to
be not in somebody else but alongside (cum) somebody else ... 'Let
940r. (011. AT. 11.23.
95'Exegesis of Scripture' 419-29.
96Sec above p.225.
97S0 the Commentator on the Nicene Creed EOMIA 337(2). and for Marcellus'
favourite texts see Gericke Marcell von Ancyra 178.

The Controversy Resolved
the sound of a vocable and talk about a thought cease. This Word is
fact (res), not a sound, nature, not speech, God not vacuity'. 9S The
proof texts which he throws at Sabellianism (refusal to acknowledge
the distinct existence of the Persons) are Mtt I7:s,Jn 14:28, 12, 11:41,
17:5, Mtt 16:16. 99 To prove that the distinct existence of the Son is
known in the Old Testament he musters Ps 45 (44):7 (8), Isa 43:10,
Hosea 1:6,7, Ps 2:8, Isa 4S:rrff(this last a trump card, to which much
exposition is devoted) and Baruch 3:36f.'00 The proof texts for the
Son's birth from the Father areJn 10:30 and 14:7-12.'0' Elsewhere he
uses the traditional very unconvincing proofs of the existence of
more than one Person in God: God apparently addresses a command
to another at creation (Gn 1:6,7); 'Let us make man' (Gn I :26) implies
more than one Person ('he removed the assumption of his solitariness
by declaring that he has a partner'). His final statement is a fine one:
'And for us too neither a solitary nor a diverse God is to be confessed',
but his proofs for this sentiment from the Old Testament are fragile
in the extreme. '02 He reproduces also all the traditional epiphanies of
Christ under the old dispensation: the figure with whom Jacob
wrestled, the figure who stood at the top ofJacob's ladder, he whom
Moses saw in the Burning Bush, he who gave Moses the law on
Mount Sinai,,03 and then ranges through the prophets on the same
principle. ;04 The Arians would of course have accepted all this
fallacious evidence as valid, but would simply have applied it to
witness to their reduced and inferior Son. The reader gains the
impression that as long as the two opposed parties are on the ground
of Scripture they seldom come seriously to grips with the real issue.
Basil, facing an opponent who is at once more specific and more
sophisticated than those against whom Athanasius and Hilary were
98De Trinitate II.II.
99Ibid. 11.23 (59). Notice that no ancient exegete ever troubles to give texts in
order as they occur in a particular chapter or passage: it is their 'atomic' attitude to
the Bible that is responsible for this, the assumption that almost any passage can be
pulled clean out of its context and directly applied to the subject in hand.
loolbid. IV .45-3 I. But in the Tractatus de Mysteriis 11.14 (37) he refers to Gn 19:24
(the Lord sending down rain from the Lord) to God giving orders apparendy to the
Son (,Let us make man'), to God creating (through the Son),and to God (one God)
making man in his own image. The passage is rhetorical and obscure.
IOlVIII.4.
I02IV. 16, 17. 18: the Latin for the quoted words is nobis quoque nee solitarius tantum
nee diversus est eonfitendus.
103Y.I!r23 (169-'75).
I04Y.2S (l77t1).
•
The Development of Doctrine
wrItmg, though he accepts and where necessary deploys the
traditional proof texts, is compelled to be more careful and more
cogent in his appeal to Scripture. For the consubstantiality of the Son
he producesJn 6:27,1:15, Phi12:6, 7,Jn 14:19, 17:10, S:26,Heb 1:3. In
particular he says of the text from Philippians:
'I say that. the text "to be in the form of God " is equivalent to being in
the ousia of God. For just as the text "to assume the form of a slave"
means-that our Lord came into' existence in the ousia of humanity, so
also to be "in the form of God" suggests certainly the particular nature
(1516t'1ta) of the divine ousia.' 'os
Again, he can say
'He was and he was begotten. But "I have begotten" (Ps 110 (109):)
denotes the cause from which he has .the beginning of his existence;
"was" an 1:1) denotes the timeless and primaeval (lIpOUUOVIOV)
existence'. 106
Later he produces a shower ofproof-texts designed to display at once
the function and the divinity of the Holy Spirit: Ps 33:6;Job 33:4; Isa
4 8: 16; Ps I39:7;Jn 1:12; Rom 8:15; Mtt 23:Io;Jn 14:26, I Cor 12:4-6,
II; Acts 21:II; 1 Cor 2:10, II; 1 Tim 6:13;Jn 10:27; Rom 8.:II .. 107
But even after all this documentation he is honest enough to realize
that it is not wholly convincing, and that on this point he must round
off or complement Scripture with the experience of the Church.'os
In his third theological Oration Gregory of Nazianzus gives a
succinct list of passages from the Bible calculated to supply a pro-
Nicene controversialist with a handy arsenal of prefabricated
arguments, thus:
That the Son is Cod: In I:r; Ps lIO (109):2 (3) (,With thee is
government' is Gregory's version (he does not appeal to 'this day have
I begotten thee'»; Isa 4"4 {'he who calls him Beginning from the
generations' is his version)
That he is the only begotten Son:Jn I:r8 (where he reads 'only-begotten
Son' not 'only begotten God').
That he is the Way, the Life and the Truth: In 14:6; 18:12 and various
other passages conferring titles, 1 Cor 1:24; Heb 1:3; Wisd 7:26; In
6:27·
105 Adv. Eunomium 1. 18 (55 2 -3).
'06Ibid. H.17 (608).
1017HI.4 (661-665).
IOKSI..'t' above PP.777-9.
 The Controversy Resolved
That He is Lord, King and He Who Is: Gn 19:24; p, 45 (44):7; Rev 1:4,
8; 4:8; n:I7; 16:5. 109
On the difficulty presented by the fact that the New Testament
appears to witness undeniably to the subordination of the Son to the
Father, Gregory is both ingenious and honest. Christ is subordinated,
he says, or is yet to be subordinated, in us who are subordinate or to
be subordinate, as he is said to be a curse and sin (GaI3:!3; 2 Cor 5:21),
because we are so; and the cry of dereliction on the Cross (Mtt 27:46)
means that we are abandoned for our sins and that Christ is thus far
abandoned in us. But he is not really abandoned and does not really
dread suffering. llo And, as we have seen, Gregory, like Basil, also
admitted that the witness of Scripture to the Godhead of the Holy
Spirit needed supplementing. I I I Among all the biblical expositors of
the fourth century Gregory brings to bear on the text the greatest
force of ordinary common sense.
The pro-Nicenes are at their worst, their most grotesque, when
they try to show that the new terms borrowed from the pagan
philosophy of the day were really to be found in Scripture. The
Greek speakers cannot pretend that ousia appears in either Septuagint
or New Testament, but they rack the Bible to find examples of
hypostasis, and when they find it do their best to make the context
appear relevant. With one doubtful exception, Heb 1:3 where it
means 'substance', whereas they want to make it mean 'person', this is
an impossible task; but the impossibility does not deter them. (The
Latin speakers were a little better off because all that they had to do
was to find substantia somewhere, though it was embarrassing that the
word could mean both 'substance' and 'Person'). The favourite text
wasJer 23:22"2 'If they had stood in my council' ('if they had stood
1090 ra l. XXIX,I?
1 I 00ra,. XXX.5.
IIISc.'C above PP.782-3.
112Athanasius, Marius Victorinus. Phoebadius and Gregory of Elvira use it.
Potamius of Lisbon (in his pro-Nicene mood) found four examples of substantia in
Scripture (not three, as Moreira (Potamius 235) who has failed to recognise one not
italicised in the Migne text) in his work De Substantia:Jer 23:22 read si stetissent in
substantia mea in Potamius' Bible Gerome's Vulgate corrected this to in consilio meo).
and 9: 10 non audierunt "oeem substantiae, which is a Latin translation of the LXX (9:9)
OUK i'jKOuaUV cpoovi!v 61tap~to:x;. The original (believe it or not!) means 'they did not
hear the Jowing of cattle' (V ulg voeem possidentis). But clearly Potamius, a man by all
appearances of no great learning nor sophistication, was merely reproducing an
earlier source.
The Development of Doctrine
in my hypostasis' LXX), which had no remote connection with the
Christian doctrine of God as understood in the fourth century, but
whIch undoubtedly provided in the Greek mistranslation the word
hypostasis. The best that can be said for this kind ofjuggling is that it
showed the almost desperate desire of the theologians to base their
doctrine on Scripture. Ambrose similarly gives the impression that
hIS proof texts for pro-Nicene doctrine were learnt by rote. 113 And
he falls mto the trap, though he. certainly knew Greek, of translating
In 8:25 as 'th~ Begin~ing which I am who speak to you'. 11.
SImonetti m an Illuminating discussion of the handling of
SCrIpture by the pro-Nicene writers l15 remarks that these authors
when they took over the traditional interpretations of the epiphanies
of God in the Old Testament as appearances of the Son were
embarrassed to find the Arian writers seizing on these and using them
as examples of inferiority of the Son to the Father, and that the pro-
Nlce~es before the appearance of the Cappadocian theologians, at
!east m the .west, could not exclude something of the notion that
mcamatlon Imphes mferiority. 116 Gryson goes further, and declares
that the pro-N~cenes were always a little apprehensive of entering the
ground of SCrIpture m encounter with the -Arians:
:because the sacred ~ut.hors were not acquainted with the philosophic
Idea of consubstantlality, and their language tended to support the
archaising theology of the Arian,'.
The. pro-~~cenes. were in consequence much readier to appeal to
tradItIon. It IS mdeed noticeable that the texts adduced by
Athanasms to support the homoousion in his De Synodis come very
largely from the Fourth Gospel and the Psalms; a few are from the
prophets; not many come from Paul, and almost none from the
Synoptic Gospels. We have already had occasion to remark on many
occaSIOns how confident and embarrassing is the Arian exegesis of the
first three Gospels and how uncertain and strained that of the pro-
Nicenes.
'''E.g. De Fide I ).2) (12); 27(14).
.I 14Ibid. 111.7.49 (125); principium quod 10quor vobis see above n 78 Even Jerome
trans1atcd principiuin quia loquar vobis. ' .
115Cris; 505-510.
8 He Instances
.
. 0 p. '
116 !
CIt. 50?-. particularly Phoebadius, Gregory of Elvira and
Hdary.
"'sco /.les A'rtennes. 178 n 2;. but Gryson goes on to point out that the Arians could
appeal to the Council of ~nminum as tradition also.
 The Controversy Resolved
The reason for this is clear. The defenders of the creed of Nicaea
were in fact fighting on behalf of tradition, not in the sense that they
were defending what had been already determined to be the doctrine
of the church, but in the sense that they were themselves engaged in
forming dogma, in working out a form of one of the most capital
and crucial doctrines not only of the Bible but of the very spirit and
genius of Christianity itself. They only came gradually to realize this.
It was in fact only the Cappadocian fathers who faced fully the fact
that they were contributing to the formation of dogma, and they did
so only reluctantly. It was only very slowly, for instance, that any
pro-Nicenes recognized that in forming their doctrine of God they
could not possibly confine themselves to the words of Scripture,
because the debate was about the meaning of the Bible, and any
attempt to answer this problem in purely Scriptural terms inevitably
leaves still unanswered the question 'But what does the Bible mean?'
Hence the frantic attempts to find the words ousia and hypostasis in
Scripture. The Arians and the Macedonians never realized this truth.
This ultimately explains their failure to establish themselves
permanently.
The last word on the appeal to the Bible during this crucial period
in the history of Christian doctrine, however, must be of the
impression made on a student of the period that the expounders of the
text of the Bible are incompetent and ill-prepared to expound it. This
applies as much to the wooden and unimaginative approach of the
Arians as it does to the fixed determination of their opponents to read
their doctrine into the Bible by hook or by crook. This impression
emerges strongly in the fact that time and time again both sides
produce diametrically different meanings from the same text,
sometimes neither of them convincing. We must make allowance, of
course, that nobody, except perhaps Didymus, knew the original
Hebrew of the Old Testament, and indeed nobody gave it a thought.
We must realize that the Latin speakers were labouring under a
double disadvantage in that their Bible came to them in the form of a
not particularly good translation of the Greek which itself as far as
concerns the Old Testament Was a very uneven translation of the
Hebrew and Aramaic. But it is not so much the errors arising out of
mistranslation that impeded a full understanding of the Bible by the
theologians of the fourth century. It was much more the
presuppositions with which they approached the Biblical text that
clouded their perceptions, the tendency to treat the Bible in an
84 8
The Development of Doctrine
'atomic' way as if each verse ?r set of verses was capable of giving
direct mformatIOn about ChrIStian doctrine apart from its context
the 'oracular' concept of the nature of the Bible, the incapacity with ~
few exceptions to take serious account of the background and
circumstances and period of the writers. The very reverence with
which they honoured the Bible as a sacred book stood in the way of
their un~erstanding it. In this matter they were of course only
rep.roducmg the presuppOsltlons of all Christians before them, of the
wnters. of the New Testament itself, of the tradition of Jewish
rabbmlc .piety and scholars.hlp. If the long and involved dispute
resulted m leadlI~g figures hke Athanasius to some extent standing
back from the Bible and askmg what was its intention, its drift (or
~kopos). mstead of plunging into a discussion of its details based on an
Imperfect understanding of them, this was a gain and not an
unworthy attempt to evade the strict meaning of Scripture.
2. The Influence of the Emperor
If we ask the question, what was considered to constitute the ultimate
authonty m doctrine during the period reviewed in these pages there
can be only one answer. The will of the Emperor was th~ final
authorIty. When Constantius is represented by Athanasius as saying
brusquely to the pro-Nicenes at Milan who alleged that he was
transgressing ecclesiastical law, 'But what I wish, that must be
reg~rde~ a~ the canon'118 he summarizes in a sentence the situation
which did m fact prevail over most of this time. Simonetti remarks
that the Emperor was in fact the head of the church.'" Epipha .
tells us that the Arians of his day not only argued against the ;:~~
N,cenes o~ theological grounds, but also objected: 'You are opposing
the Impenal orders and the attitude of the Emperor Valens.'.2o It is
clear that at the Council of AquiIeia neither side wished to blame
Gratlan .directly for the misunderstanding about the intention and
cOmpOSitIOn of the council, though at one point Palladius comes
close to domg SO.121 Everybody recognised the right of an Emperor
/ hiS Hist~rja Ariano.rum 33; on t!lls point, see Zeiller Les Origines 586-7 (the attitude
o t e Anans), Klem ConstantlUs II 271-96 and Brennecke Hilarius von Pail'
368-'71.· lers
t19Crisi 21 3.
120Panarion 69.31.1 (r80).
121Gryson Seo/ies Ariennes 84 (270).
 The Controversy Resolved
to call a council, or even to veto or quash its being called ..'22 In fact
the policy of individual Emperors towards <?ounCl~s varIed
considerably. Constantine took part in the CounCIl of Nlcaea and
ensured that it reached the kind of conclusion which he ~ought best.
Constantius interfered continually in councils, threatenmg, argumg,
manipulating either in person or by his agents. In his ~etter to the
Western bishops at, Ariminum, along with the expressIOn of much
pious sentiment, he warns the bishops that he regards as null an.d vOl~
any decision which they may have made about the Eastern bIShops.
'For a decision about which our edicts declare that force and scope are
denied it can have no validity',123
Theodosius did not imitate Constantine because he refrained from
personally attending the Council of Constantinople of 381, but he
watched it carefully and made sure that it did not move 10 any
direction of which he disapproved. It was probably he who ensured
that an attempt was made to conciliate the Macedonians and who
invited the Egyptians and Thessalonicans to attend aft~r the death of
Meletius. Constantine in other respects behaved despotically towards
the church when he thought it necessary. He writes to the churches
after Nicaea like a mediaeval Pope.'2. He despatches a brief, brutal
messag,e to Theodotus of Laodicea that if he do,:s not a7cept t~e
decisions of Nicaea he will suffer the fate of Eusebms of Nlcomedla
and Theognis of Nicaea - deposition and exile.'25 We have seen
reason to conclude that though Constantius regarded himself as the
ruler of the church he displayed more toleration than he has usually
been credited with.'26 Julian opposed and obstructed the church;
'persecution' is too strong a word for his policy. He: ~eprived the
clergy and the faithful of financial and economiC prIvIleges whIch
had been extended to them by his predecessors; he stopped the pohcy
of using the materials of disused temples for ~uilding Christian
churches and edifices. When he saw an opportunity to do so legally
he punished Christians severely. He was attempting to exelude them
from the educational system of the Empire when he died. He
122 50Ritter Das Konzil 237· .
123Hilary CpU. Antiar. A viii. 1-2 (93. 94). Lucifer Moriundum XIII (293) claImed
that Constantius styled or regarded himself as bishop of bishops, but we must take
this statement with a pinch of salt.
124See Opitz Urk. III No. 25.
'''Ibid. No. 28 (6J).
Il6S(.'C above Pp.318-25.
85 0
The Development of Doctrine
encouraged anti-Christian propaganda. But he took no severe
measures. When the people of Alexandria murdered bishop George
he rebuked them, though his rebuke was a mild one. Jovian had not
time to reveal his sentiments fully, though it seems likely that he
would have oppressed the Arians had he been given a chance.'27
Valentinian succeeded fairly well in preserving a policy of neutrality
in ecclesiastical affairs, but Valens revived the policy ofCoQstantius in
the interests of the same school of thought. Gratian began at least by
attempting to continue his father's policy. Theodosius was more
partisan than any of his predecessors. While he had the same aim as
Constantine and Constantius, the unity of the church, he went
further than any of them in ruthless suppression of dissent. It is worth
while asking the question, why did he succeed in enforcing a much
larger measure of consent and a longer period of agreement in the
church than any of the other Emperors before him?
We can at once dismiss the romantic suggestion, which has
sometimes been made, that it was the ordinary Christian people, the
mass of the faithful who so seldom had an opportunity of expressing
their views publicly, who held out against heretical Emperors,
cherishing the true faith in good times and bad. The chief, indeed the
only, means of self-expression possessed by the people in the la,te
ROqJ.an Empire was the practice of rioting, as is the case even to-day
under despotic governments, and during the period which we have
surveyed popular riots occurred frequently, but for a variety of
different causes and in defence of a variety of different people. The
fact that a bishop was heretical did not necessarily reduce his popular
support. The pro-Nicene mob did indeed on several occasions
support Athanasius tumultuously, but it was a pagan, not a Christian
crowd which lynched George in Alexandria in December 361,
because he had followed a policy of attacking pagan shrines. Photinus
proved very difficult to remove from his see, in spite of ecclesiastical
opposition from both East and. West, because he had the support of
the populace. The Arian Germinius manifestly has the support of the
mob in his dispute with the pro-Nicene Heraelian, and Germinius has
to prevent them taking the law into their own hands. Eustathius of
Sebaste cannot be dislodged by Meletius, in spite of Meletlus'
imperial backing, because he is popular (perhaps as a leader of
127See the Appendix to Athanasius' Letter to Jovian PG 26:820-824. where he is
represented as dealing very brusquely with Arian complaints and petitions.
 The Controversy Resolved
asceticism); Eusebius of Erne sa finds it difficult to reside in his see, not
because he is Arian, but because he is learned and perhaps suspected of
magic. Valens of Mursa, Auxentius of Milan and Ursacius of
Singidunum were denounced again and again as heretics by the
highest ecclesiastical authorities, but none of them was ever deposed,
because they plainly had popular support. It is noteworthy that all the
expressions of vulgar theological opinion which Gregory of Nyssa
complains of hearing as he goes about the ordinary business oflivmg
in Constantinople are Arian. '2 • The ecclesiastical historians tell us
that the expulsion of bishops of unorthodox views which followed
the decisions of the Council of Constantinople of 3 8I provoked nots
in manyparts of the Empire.'2' One can of course produce ev.idence
for popular support of pro-Nicene bishops, as m the case of L1berlUs
(if he can really be called Nicene) and Basil of Caesarea. But it is
obvious that popular opinion was influenced by a variety of
circumstances, by the personality of individual bishops, perhaps by
local patriotism, and no generalisation can be made about it.
The crude theory that the Western Church upheld the rights and
freedom of the Christian religion against the Emperor's
encroachments whereas the Eastern Church (and especially the
Arians) tamely submitted to the whims of successive Emperors is
rightly rejected by Klein.'3. But certainly the West offered more
resistance as far as surviving utterances are concerned than the East. It
is true indeed that Athanasius consistently opposed and disobeyed
those imperial orders which he did not like, and in the course of his
writings uttered several noble sentiments about the freedom and
rights of the church.'31 But he had himself used soldiers early in his
career as bishop in harrying the Melitians, and when Jovian succeeded
Julian Athanasius was quick to enlist his support for the pro-Nicene
cause. On the Western side we can note that the 'Canons ofSerdica',
128S ce above p. 806.
129S ocrates HE V. 10; Sozomenus HE VII. I 2. Swete remarks on this, Early
History 96.
'JOKonstantius II 13-15.
131Apol. Secunda 8.1-5 (94), Council of Tyre impugned for permitting military
intervention; 144(98) prefect of Egypt overawes the Mareotic Commission with
soldiers; HA 34. I (202) the bishops warn Constantius not to break ecclesiastical1aw
nor to cause imperial authority to interfere with the church's rules; 36.1-5 (203);
eloquent though probably fictitious protest ascribed to Liberius on behalf of
traditional freedom of the church against threats and bribery of the eunuch
Eusebius. It is worth noting that Athanasius on the whole tried to exempt the
Emperor Constantine from blame; see HA 1.2 (183) and contrast 50.2 (212).
The Development of Doctrine
rules probably drawn up by the Western bishops at Serdica in 343,
seem at least partly framed in order to limit the possibility of
ecclesiastics appealing to the Imperial Court. 132 We must observe the
outspoken letter of Ossius to Constantius telling him to keep his
hands off the church's affairs,''' and the opposition which Liberius
put up to the Emperor before he was exiled. 134 Hilary too protests on
more than one occasion that the Emperor should leave the church
freedom to order its own affairs, and he rebukes Constantius mildly
when Hilary is within his jurisdiction, and with ferocious
vituperation when he is under the rule of Julian, for illegitimate
intervention of this sort. '35 In their letter to Constantius after the
debacle at Serdica, the Western bishops pleaded that each local
community should be allowed to choose its own bishop (without, it
is implied, interference from the Emperor). 136 We have already seen
the relish with which Lucifer ofCalaris attacked Constantius. '37 It is
the duty of princes to obey bishops, he declares, and not vice versa. 13.
Constantius should have kept 'within the hounds of his authority',
and even should thank Lucifer for rebuking him.'39
Against this we can only set from the Eastern Church (apart from
the protests of Athanasius) complaints of persecution by Valens from
Basil, violent attacks on Constantius and Julian when they were
safely dead by Gregory of Nazianzus, and from the latter also some
doubt about Theodosius' policy of establishing orthodoxy by
coercion. '4 • But Gregory called in state troops to protect him against
the encroachments of the Apollinarians, and this faint cheep is the
only tiny protest amid the complacent silence with which the other
pro-Nicenes accepted the exercise of the Emperor's power in their
132S ec C. H. Turner 'Genuineness of Sardican Canons'.
13JSCC above Pp.334-5. cf Simonetti Cds; 225.
I :4Even if we discount Athanasius' imaginative narrative, there are Liberius'
earhest letters, and Sozomenus HE IV.4, Theodoret HE 11.16; see Declercq Ossius
440-1.
. "'Col/. Anlior.Appendix [[.1(6) (185); BI Praef. 5 (WI); De Srn. 78 (53 I) (mild);
Lib. «Ill. Constantmm 24-27 (600-602) (violent denunciation mingled with decent
protcst).N. B. like Athanasius, Hilary is careful to excuse Constantine.
l.l6Liher 1 ad Constantium (Appendix in Coll. Antiar.) 1.1-4 (181-8 3).
137Above PP.33 2-3.
!JaDe Athanasio VII (12, 13).
1391bid. XXIX (49). It is noteworthy that Lucifer does not hesitate to include
Constantine as well as Constantius in his invective, see De Reg. Ap. VI (147), De Non
Conv. IX (179), De Non Porco XIII (219).
'4°De Vita Sua 1273-1305 (116).
 The Controversy Resolved
cause. Neither East nor West formulated any coherent theory during
the period under review of the relation of church and state. 141 When
the state brought pressure to bear on them bishops of every
theological hue complained. When it used its power to coerce their
opponents, they approved.
The truth is that in the Christian church of the fourth century there
was no alternative authority comparable to that of the Emperor. The
century did indeed see an increase in the power of the bishop of
Rome, but he still could not be regarded as a figure even remotely as
powerful as that of the Emperor. Though Sylvester sent
representatives to Nicaea in 325 we have no reason to think that he
was consulted about its convoking or procedure, far Jess that his
representatives presided at it. Julius used the dispute which sent
prominent bishops as refugees to his see in order to enhance his own
claims to authority, and the Western bishops at Serdica to some
extent supported him in the canons which they passed there. But the
Eastern Church (with the notable exception of Athanasius) resented,
and righdy resented, his attempt to overrule the Council ofTyre and
to act as a court of appeal from its decisions. The Pope succeeded in
the end only in adding unnecessary fuel to the·. flame of
controversy.'42 Liberius began by asserting the independence of his
see and of his church, but \lis subsequent abject surrender to the will
of the Emperor and his acceptance of the Emperor's doctrine undid
all this earlier constancy and served to emphasize the weakness of his
position. Damasus had the good fortune to live under Emperors who
were either neutral to his cause or favourable to it (for the influence of
Valentinus II and his mother can hardly have affected him). His
policy of forceful self-aggtandisement succeeded for the most part in
the West, but made no impression at all on the East. He was never in
communion with the outstanding defender and former of orthodoxy
in the Eastern Church, Basil of Caesarea, and at various times he
supported figures of doubtful orthodoxy, Paulinus and Vitalis. He
was never powerful enough to depose the standard-bearers of
Arianism in the West, Auxentius, Germinius, Valens and Ursacius.
The crucial Council of Constantinople of 381 took place without his
being consulted, indeed against his will. His suggestion that a general
council should take place in Rome in 382 was politely rebuffed.
141Borchardt observes this in the case of Hilary, Hilary's Role 172.
142See Simonetti C,;si 149-152.
854
The Development of Doctrine
And if the Pope could provide no authority to rival that of the
Emperor, far less could any council. The history of the period shows
time and time again that local councils could be overawed or
manipulated by the Emperor or his agents. The general council was
the very invention and creation of the Emperor. General councils, or
councils aspiring to be general, were the children of imperial policy
and the Emperor was expected to dominate and control them. '43
Even Damasus would have admitted that he could not call a general
council on his own authority. .
But the Emperor's authority was not unlimited. He could not
indefinitely coerce the consciences of the great majority of his
subjects. Even Constantine, Constantine who had unexpectedly
almost miraculously, turned imperial displeasure towards
Christianity into imperial approval, whom Eusebius of Caesarea
treated almost as a god, was unable to impose the creed N on his
subject for more than a short time. His son Constantius made
strenuous and apparently successful efforts to bring about doctrinal
unity by coercion, but his achievements lasted no longer than his
lifetime. There were always men and women who preferred
whatever penalties the government might inflict to professing to
believe in doctrine which they thought false, and this applies equally
to the pro-N,cenes and the anti-Nicenes. Imperial opposition,
discouragement and persecution were exasperating and debilitating,
but they usually dId not achieve their aim of stamping out the
dISsenters and heretICs. The Manichees - the most suspected, disliked
and execrated of all sects - continued to exist in spite of all the
Emperors could ~o. We must therefore conclude that the reason why
the rehglOus pohcy ofTheodosius on the whole succeeded, whereas
that of Constantine, Constantius and Valens had failed, was because it
was supported by a genuine widespread consensus of opinion in the
church. Sheer coercion would not have achieved this. And the
consensus was present bec<tuse during the sixty stormy years since the
issue between Arius and Alexander had first been raised the
fundamental questions had been explored, identified and fully
143S ee ~imonet~ Crisi ,170. 388: According to the Roman Catholic theory, the
Pope has SInce acquIred thiS authonty. But the Orthodox have so far not recognised
an~. Council ,which was not caned by a Roman Emperor. The last took place, on
theIr t?eory. m 787. The~e few facts show how frail and how futile is the suggestion,
sOI?etlmes found even 10 Anglican quarters, that some outstanding issue should
walt to be solved until a General Council should be called to decide it. This is to
postpone a decision till the Greek Kalends.
855
 I
The Controversy Resolved
debated, and a solution of them had been reached which appealed to
the great majority of thoughtful people and corresponded also to the
spiritual needs, aspiration and understanding of the mass of the
faithful.
3. The IntIuence of Philosophy
Until quite recently the influence of Greek philosophy upon the
thought of the theologians of the fourth century was not regarded as
an important question. With the work of such scholars as the
Englishman Hatch and the German von Harnack, however, this
became one of the burning issues in any discussion of the subject.
Strong opinions on both sides were expressed, i.e. that Greek
philosophy had virtually no influence on the fathers, or that their
thought was so much soaked in Greek philosophy that their doctrine
corrupted and distorted original genuine Christianity. Some, such as
Wolfson, thought that the influence of Philo and of Gnosticism
combined accounted for the development in doctrine which the
fourth century witnessed. Prestige, curiously, found it possible
virtually to ignore the qnestion. Two fairly recent developments in
scholarship have thrown 'much light upon the subject and have
enabled ns to make a more accurate and more realistic estimate of the
subject. In the first place, Gnosticism has been much more fully
investigated than before, especially by the help of such newly
discovered documents as the Nag Hammadi find. It has become clear
that though Christianity in the second and third centuries was not
uninfluenced by Gnosticism, either by reaction or by absorption of
some of its features, by the fourth century the Gnostic threat to the
Christian faith was over and none of the many diverse forms of
thought or belief which that term covers figured seriously as an
influence on Christian thinking. The other new factor in the situation
was the much greater attention paid to the history of ancient Greek
philosophy during the third, fourth and fifth centuries A.D., an
attention signalized by the publication of the Cambridge History of
Late Greek and Early Mediaeval Philosophy in 1970 and the appearance
of numerous books on Middle Platonism and Neo-Platonism. '44
I 44For a su~cinct and informative account of change in studying the philosophy
of me Fathers, see A. M. Meijering God Being History 'Zehn Jahre Forschung zum
The Development of Doctrine
The scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had
almost all been brought up on the works of Plato and of Aristotle,
with which they were thoroughly at home. But by the fourth
century seven hundred years had passed since the days of those two
great philosophers, and Greek tho\lght had not stood still during that
time. A quite new and most influential philosophy - Stoicism - had
sprung to life, flourished and begun to decline between the day of
Aristotle and the day of Athanasius. Platonism had undergone more
than one drastic change, and a new and brilliantly conceived form of
Platonism, the philosophy of Plotinus, had emerged as the last great
flowering of ancient Greek Philosophy. Mathematics, medicine and
physics had all made advances during this period. Above all, the spirit
of Greek philosophy had altered. Eclectism, by which a single thinker
could borrow and put together several different elements from
different systems of philosophy, had become the prevailing and
popular method; the works of Plutarch and of Philo are only two
instances of this. A general assumption in favour of religion, of an
integration of theistic belief, often monotheistic belief, in one form or
another now characterised Greek philosophy. Sheer rationalism was
at a discount. Neo-Platonism, austerely philosophic though it was in
its origins, had by the fourth century begun to ally itself with
theu.rgy, with an interest in the occult on one,ide and with mysticism
on the other. The works of Aristotle were still read, or at least parts of
them were, and his thought was still influential at least in the realm of
logic and of cosmology; but Aristotelianism as such scarcely existed.
The third and fourth centuries were the age of epitomisers,
doxographers, of selections and manuals. Even the most intellectual
theologians, with the possible exception of Marius Victorinus, are
most unlikely to have read right through Plato, though all of them
would probably have read the Timaeus and the Symposium at least.
This'radically altered climate of philosophy, which can only have
been dimly glimpsed by scholars such as Newman and of which even
Gwatkin shows little awareness, must be borne in mind when we try
to estimate, however briefly, the influence of philosophy on the
minds of those who took part in the great debate about the Christian
doctrine of God in the fourth century.
Thema Platonismus und Kirchenvater', 1-18. This is a book which deserves much
more attention than its ridiculous title suggests.
 The Controversy Resolved
Several passages can be produced in which fourth century writers
disparage or reject .philosophy, and usually the rejection is the more
confident the less sophisticated is the writer. The unorthodox speaker
in the Dialogue oj Adamantius, as they begin to debate the subject of
the resurrection of the body, asks the other speaker to 'leave aside
philosophical arguments and rely on the Scriptures only' .'45 In his
De Incarnatione Athanasius states that no Christian needs philosophy
because he has the proof of the truth of his belief before his eyes; all
that the Greek philosophers could do was to convert a few people,
and they only locals. But he allows that philosophy attained to the
truth concerning immortality and a virtuous life. 14• Hilary at the
beginning of his De Trinitate speaks disparagingly of 'the argument
based on universal opinions' because it is 'incapable of reaching
heavenly knowledge' and 'thinks only that to be really existent (in
natura rerum esse) which either it observes within itself or can by its
own capacity prove to exist"47 and with this appeal to universal
opinion he later couples 'the futile enquiries of philosophy' .'48
Epiphanius, who was no great intellectual, can produce no more than
the wretchedest parodies when he tries to give an account of the
philosophies of Plato and of Aristotle. '49 His descriptions of
numerous other Greek philosophers are mere glib vulgarizations.
Ambrose is capable of referring to Plato's Symposium in these terms:
'Plato summoned souls to this drinking-party, but he could not satisfy
them because he was providing the cup, not offaith but of non-faith'
(perjidiae) 150
And any pro-Nicene who read the work of Aetius or Eunomius was
loud in his condemnation of their reliance on the techuique derived
from Aristotelian logic. '51
But in fact all Greek-speaking writers in the fourth century were to
145Dialogue of Adamantius 859 (202). The interlocutors here are often at cross-
purposes with each other because they cannot discern what the Bible does not teach
(e.g. the immortality and indestructible nature of the soul) from what it does.
146
47 . 1 - 5 .
1471.12 (12),
14'1.13 (13).
149De Fide 9.12 (s07) and 9.3S (s08).
150De Fuga Saeculi 8.51. Ambrose believed that Plato was imitating Prov 9:5.
l"E.g. Epiphanius Panarion 76.IS.I. 23-4(371), 26.S(273). 28.2(377) (Aetius;
Epiphanius knows Hute about Eunomiush Gregory of Nyssa Con. Eunom. l.ISS
(297), IS6-I60 (297, 300), 1.188-9 (308). iI 306 (lOIS). SIO (1081). III (viii) 43
(844-S): Ps.-Didymus De Trini'a'e iI. 3. 30 (S8).
85 8
The Development of Doctrine
a greater or lesser degree indebted to Greek philosophy. The ancients
did not distinguish sharply between .theology, philosophy,
psychology, physics, mathematics and medicine as we do today, but
took them all in one embrace. If any wnter had had a hIgher
education (that is any stage beyond the grammar school) he would
perforce had imbibed some philosophy and would have sucked m
certain fundamental assumptions in the process. Dorrie at one point
attempted to make clear-cut distinctions between what were the
critical assumptions of Platonic thought and what were the baSIC
doctrines of Christianity accepted by all theologians which
contradicted or clashed with them, but Meijering had little difficulty
in showing that the true state of affairs was much more confused than
that.'52 One can draw up a rough list of the general presuppositions
derived from contemporary philosophy which were likely to occupy
the mind of any Christian theologian in the fourth century: reality
meant ontological permanence so that God, the highest form of
reality, is most immutable of all; and he cannot in any way involve
himself with pathos (process, change or flux or human experience) - a
conviction which held obvious difficulties for the Bible account of
the history of salvation;'53 the soul has existed from eternity, is
distinct from the body and is immortal and indestructible; ideas
about psychology and ethics derived from Stoic, Platonic and
sometimes Cynic philosophies as well as those provided by the
Bible.'54 These did not necessarily cancel nor obscure Biblical ideas
and assumptions in the minds of those who held them, but they
certainly coloured and shaped their general outlook.
Origen had in the third century given a brilliant example of how
to synthesize Christian doctrine and contemporary philosophy
(Middle Platonism in its last stage combined with some Stoic ideas).
His performance had, however. stunned rather than fired his
contemporaries and successors. There were no Origens in the fourth
century and references to him were usually polite and wary rather
than enthusiastic, except for those few who attacked him like
152See 'Wie Platonisierten Christen?', 133-146 in God Being History.
1531'6 yt atp&1tTOV,
ii10UV a<p9apTov, et'l9u<; avapxov, a:t&4ut'ltOV Kat 61t&patroV16v
ecrttv. 'that which is immutable. or rather incorruptible, is simply without
beginning, without end and beyond time', Ps-Didymus De !rin. 11.6.3.7(114)"
154It is fascinating to observe in the Canonical Letters of BasIl of Caesa rea how In
order to regulate the morals ofhis flock he mingles without gene ideas, customs and
rules from the Pentateuch, from the Wisdom Literature of the QT, from the NT,
from Stoic ethics and even sometimes perhaps from Roman law.
 The Controversy Resolved
Methodius, Eustathius of Antioch, and Epiphanius, and at the very
end of the century,Jerome (that burnt child who dreaded the fire).
Until we reach the Cappadocians, acceptance of philosophy by the
theologians is eclectic and opportunist. There is no better illustration
of this than the writings ofEusebius of Caesarea who, for better or for
worse, was one of the most influential authors of the fourth century.
In his Praeparatio Evangelica he quotes a long list of pagan authors, but
he relied considerably on other people's epitomes or doxographies,
and as far as Aristotle was concerned he did not know him at first
hand. A large part of book XV of that work (23.1--{)2.6) is occupied
with what might be called 'A Brief Outline of Philosophy' culled
from the work of Plutarch, listing under various headings a large
variety of natural philosophers. He quotes Aristotle on the four types
of causes from Alexander of Aphrodisias.!" He quotes Plato
frequently, and clearly has read some of his original works as well as
several commentators on him, but in a miscellaneous, opportunist
manner, taking pieces indiscriminately out of his works to support
the widely-held but quite unrealistic theory that the worthies of the
Old Testament had anticipated all Plato's most important ideas and
that Plato on a visit to Egypt had picked them up there. For instance,
the first part of the XIIth book is taken up with a comparison of the
story of Adam and Eve in Genesis with the account in Plato's
Symposium of the origin of mankind and of separate sexes. A
quotation from Plato's Laws to the effect that it is sometimes
necessary for the Lawgiver to lie in order to persuade people rather
,han coerce them is paralleled by the anthropomorphic descriptions
in the Bible of God being jealous or asleep or angry."· Every little
coincidence or similarity, every image common to Plato and a
biblical author, every law in the Pentateuch that bears the least
resemblance to anything in Plato's Laws is pressed into the service of
this theory. Eusebius admires Plato more than any of the other
philosophers.!'7 But he criticizes him too. He dislikes his arguments
155,Praep. Ev. VI.9.I.
IS6XII.3I. I .2.
157XIU,I7 Similarly Ambrose can say (De Abrahamo 11.10, 69. 70) that the
sentiments expressed in Lk I8:29ff. had been magniloquently expressed earlier by
Aristotle, the' Peripatetics and the Pythagoreans, but they in their turn had been
anticipated by Abraham's vision recounted at Gn 15:18 (allegorically interpreted, of
course). In De Isaac vel Anima 7.68 he quotes without acknowledgement Plato's
metaphor of the passions as horses in a chariot to be controlled. Presumably it was
by then a cliche.
860
The Development of Doctrine
for the existence of a plurality of gods.!'· He dislikes his doctrine of
the soul, not because it represents the soul as eternal, but because Plato
thought that the souls of men might migrate to become the souls of
animals.!'· He dislikes Plato's theory that the world and the celestial
bodies might be gods.!.o He objects to several details in Plato's
legislation such as his suggestion that women should take part in
gymnastic exercises and in war, and his ideas about a community of
wives.'·! He conducts a severe critique of Aristotle's thought,
quoting only from other authors', such as Plutarch, Aristocles,
Atticus, Plorinus and Porphyry, attacking several disconnected
features such as his doctrine of happiness, of providence, of the
eternity of the world and thenon-eternity of the soul, without giving
any sign of grasping Aristotle's thought as a whole.'·2
In his De Incarnatione Athanasius can parallel the Christian doctrine
of the Incarnation with the doctrine of 'the Greeks' that the Logos
inhabits the whole world.'·3 Is he referring to the Stoic doctrine of
the divine Logos immanent in the world, or to the Middle Platonist
concept of the Logos controlling the world as an emanation from the
supreme Being? We do not know, and perhaps neither did
Athanasius; he may indeed have intended both. Certainly no Middle
Platonist scheme of hypostases could have acted as a genuinely
effective model for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, not even
that of Albinus nor that of Numenius. Meijering points out that
Athanasius in his De Incarnatione quotes from Plato's Timaeus (29E)
'For God is good ... and a good person would not be jealous of
anything'!·4 but that does not make him a Platonist. A Neo-
Platonist would apply this sentiment to the second, not to the first, of
the ultimate hypostases. Even if Athanasius uses the term of God
'beyond being' (t1ttK&lVU 'iic; oOO"iuC;) this does not make him a
Platonist. Other Christian theologians had used it before him.
Irenaeus, for instance, had used it to show that Plato knew more
about God than did the Gnostics (Adv. Haereses III.41). All this
quotation of philosophical tags means is that Christians were capable
158XIII.I5. I -IO.
159XIlI.I6.I-I8.
160XIII.18.1-16.
161XIII.I~2I.
162XIV.2.Z; 16.8; XV.I-I3.
1634 1.[-'7. •
'''De Inc. 3: 6 9EO, yap aya96,t"tl ... aya9<j>6t XEpi o068vo, /ivytVOl<O <p96vo"
quoted without acknowledgement. I
861
 The Controversy Resolved
of using Platonist terms without necessarily being Platonists.'·'
Plotinus had indeed named one of his treatises upi tOiv tptOiv ciPXtKOiv
,,"oatciaemv 'On the three ultimate hypostases' .' •• We have already
seen Basil of Caesarea quoting this title without approving of it. ' • 7
Eusebius of Caesa rea had quoted it earlier;'·· and Pseudo-Didymus
was later to cite his 'high and good God, the second Creator and third
the World-soul','·· both happy to think of this schema as a
reasonably accurate model for the Trinity. In fact it is not (and Basil
no doubt knew this well). The Plotinian One could not be an
hypostasis because it is beyond existence; the three are conceived of as
being in a descending order, the second and third derived from the
one before it and incapable of being attracted by the one after it. Only
that which is what Plotinus calls autohypostaton (a word which does
not occur in the fourth-century theologians), i.e. which manifests
itself in pure being without any connection with the material, can
have ontological significance. l7O
Before the advent of the Cappadocian theologians there are two
clear examples only of Christian theologians being deeply influenced
by Greek philosophy. One is provided by Marius Victorinus whose
theology is a synthesis ofNeo-Platonism and Christianity, confident
and brilliant. One can understand how before he was baptised he
could say to his Christian friends that he was in reality one of them.
He paid a price for this achievement, of course; among other points,
he quite failed to avoid at least the appearance of Sa belli anism. But, as
has been observed before, Marius Victorinus had no influence that
can be ascertained on his contemporaries in the West. Few, if any,
could have understood him, certainly not Ambrose nor Damasus,
and Hilary would have been alarmed at his ready use of philosophical
terms. The other example is the Neo-Arian theologians Aetius and
Eunomius. The first could write a treatise on the Christian doctrine of
165Meijering God Being History 14-15 (from the essay 'ZehnJahre Forschung').
166But Dorrie suggests that it is perfectly possible that this title was bestowed by
some editor of his works after Plotinus (Hypostasis 74).
167S l'C above, p. 691.
16SPraep. Ev. XI.I6.4. Eusebius gives further quotations from Plotinus in Xl. 17
and XV.:Z2.
169De Trin. 1l.27 (760).
17°D6rrie Hypostasis 7Q--74. But his statement later in this otherwise valuable
essay (79-80) that Athanasius was responsible for bringing the word hypostasis into
regular use by the orthodox, and that he declared emphatically the unity of being
and hypostasis (quoting to support this view Or. can. Ar. IV.I and the Expositio Fidei,
neither of which are likely to be works of Athanasius), is very wide of the mark.
862
The Development of Doctrine
God without apparently at any point appealing to the Bible. The
second was so deeply enamoured of his analysis of the Godhead
conducted by an eclectic use of contemporary philosophy that he
believed that there were no obstacles at all to his comprehension of
the Deity. They represented a relatively small current of thought
repudiated by almost all other Christian parties, pro-Nicene or anti-
Nicene.
The Cappadocians, however, present us with a rather different
picture. They had all probably had an intenser education in
philosophy than other theologians of the fourth century. They were
all in a sense Christian Platonists because their intellectual tradition
stemmed from Origen and from Gregory Theodorus. But they were
all in different ways eclectic theologians, not uncritical devotees of
any single system. Sheldon-Williams in his contribution to the
Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Mediaeval Philosophy sums
up certain principles which they rejected in any philosophical
tradition which they came across; they are:
'the eternity of the cosmos
the divinity of the individual human soul
the belief that the soul is a substance distinct from the body from
which it can and should escape as from something evil'.171
And he similarly summarizes what in his view the Christians shared
with the Platonists: 'the conception of universal nature as a rest-in-
motion or motion-in-res.t consisting of three aspects: the eternally
abiding First Principle; a procession therefrom through the Forms
into their effects; and a return of the effects through the Forms to their
First Principle' .'72 For the sake of accuracy we must transpose these
highly abstract and impersonal concepts into the personal and rather
more anthropopathic terms and images of traditional Christian
doctrine if we are to taste the full flavour of Cappadocian
theology 173 and we must remind ourselves that the basis of all the
thought of these three men was the human person as constituted by
his freedom and his capacity to respond to the advances which God
makes to him.'74 In this sense they were Christian humanists.
The debt of Basil of Cae sa rea to philosophy is undeniable but is not
1710p. cit. 426.
172Ibid. 430.
173See B. Salmone 11 filosofare ne; Luminari di Cappadocia 28.
174This is the main argument of Salmone's book.
 The Controversy Resolved
easy to determine precisely because all are agreed that his
philosophical choice was miscellaneous. Giet's edition of the text of
his Commentary on the Hexaemeron brings out how freely he borrowed
from Aristotelian and Stoic sources for his cosmology and
psychology. The books over which the question of the philosophical
influences which he underwent have roused most interest are the little
De Spiritu at the end of Book V of his Adversus Eunomium and the
larger, later book vindicating himself against Eustathius and
elaborating his doctrine of the Holy Spirit, usually called De Spiritu
Sanclo (DSS). The little book is full of Neo-Platonic vocabulary; if
Basil wrote it, then he certainly had some acquaintance with the
work of Plotinus. DSS shows us Basil using a good deal of Stoic
vocabulary .• 75 His introduction of the word cruvuP.OflSicrOat
('classify as equal with') and 01lUpIOlieicrOuI (,sub-classify') in cap XVII
comes from Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics Book A caps 7 and 8.'76 He
often in this book, as elsewhere, uses arguments drawn from several
different philosophical traditions to assist the progress of his theme,
along with arguments drawn from Scripture and tradition .• 77
Hubner has made a strong and attractive case for concluding that
Basil's use of ousia is not the Aristotelian prote ousia (first ousia) and
deutera ousia (second ousia) - the particular and then the general.
Neither is it that 'Platonic realism' (an eternal reality perceptible to
our sense only in material or transitory things which imperfectly
participate in it), as some (e.g. Lebon) have thought. It is the Stoic, or
late-Stoic, concept of ousia as the category which underlies all
existence of any sort, an ousia of which the whole world is ultimately
composed (though of course Basil excepts the divine Logos from this
category).'7. Hubner allows that this does not prevent Basil from
borrowing philosophical ideas from several other sources.' 79
The question of Basil's relation to the thought of Plotinus in the
DSS, which is perhaps his greatest work, must be pursued a little
further. Rist has attempted to discount such Plotinian influence
175S 0 Pruche lotrod. to DSS 169-78.
176Pruche, lotrod. 159.
.7'Ibid. Introd. 154--68.
178R. Hiibner 'Gregor von Nyssa als Verfasser des sog. Ep. 38 des Basilius' in
Epektasis 468-82. Hfibner argues that Ep. 38 is not by Basil but by Gregory of Nyssa.
It is in this letter that the relation of hypostasis to ousia is set forth as that of Aristotle's
first ousia to his second ousia. Pruche has a note on Basil's use of ousia Introd. to DSS
181-2.
1790p. dt. 482-3.
The Development of Doctrine
almost wholly; in a radically minimizing essay he has suggested that
Basil knew almost nothing of the thought ofPlotinus, that, with the
exception (which he has to admit) of Marius Victorinus, there are no
clear signs of acquaintance with the thought of Plotinus until the
middle of the fourth century. Basil's use of Plotinus is minimal and
could have derived from his knowledge ofEusebius of Caesa rea who
in his tum knew little more than a few passages edited by somebody
other than Porphyry. He doubts whether Basil is the author of the
short De Spiritu.'· o But Rist's case is not convincing; as each piece of
evidence has to be explained away by a different argument the thesis
dies the death of a thousand qualifications. In particular his rejection
ofWaszink's late dating ofCalcidius' Latin Timaeus and his attempt
to show that the Ossius to whom the work is dedicated was Ossius of
Cordova, and his relegation of Athanasius' Contra Gentes et De
Incarnatione to the year 318 are fatally weak spots in his argument.
Dorrie in a more balanced survey'·' concludes that while cap IX at
least of DSS has plenty of Nee-Platonic and even Plotinian
vocabulary, Basil never takes over Neo-Platonic ideas wholesale but
rather picks on individual concepts and works them into a quite
different sequence of thought from their original context. For
instance, the Holy Spirit in Basil's account is like the 'soul' (psyche) in
Plotinus' system, but he is more immanent (without losing
transcendence) and personal. Plotinus can say that the destiny of the
soul is 'to become God, or rather it is God' (Oe6v yevtcr9ul, 1l1i1..1..ov
l\'ovtU Enneads VI 6.9); but this could never have been Basil's idea of
the soul's ultimate apotheosis .. And Dorrie, here in accordance with
Rise's view, allows that the Cappadocians need not have actually read
the Enneads as edited by Porphyry.··2 Pruche, in his Introduction to
the DSS points out that in cap XVIII Basil uses the Plotinian
distinction of the One and plurality; that cap XVIII apparently quotes
from the Enneads,'·3 and in his note on the text of cap IX.23
(109)[326; 328], which actually contains the words 'become God'
(Oe6v ytvecrOuI) he remarks that the thought may derive from Origen,
18°Basil's 'Neoplatonism' in Platonism and its Christian Heritage XII: 138-220.
181De Spiritu SanCIa 55-6 n I.
182Cf. -Hauschild's conclusion that Basil extended the Middle Platonist dual
model of reality into a Neo-Platonist triple model 'with the help of Plotinus'
rBasileus von Caesarea' 310), which goes further than Dorrie (and, "in my view, the
evidence) allows. Hauschild summarizes Basil's work as everywhere 'making
bridges between opposites through mediation' (op. cit. 3 II).
183
154-6.
86 5
 The Controversy Resolved
but the vocabulary is borrowed from Plotinus. It seems impossible to
deny that Basil knew something of the work of Plotinus and
consciously employed both his ideas and his vocabulary when he
thought them applicable.
The most striking example ofthis is the passage in cap XVI when
Basil directly refers to the 'three ultimate hypostases', a clear reference
to the title of Enneads V.I. But with that very reference Basil shows
that he dissents from Plotinus here. 'Do not let anyone imagine', he
says, 'that I am saying that there are three ultimate hypostases, nor that
the power of the Son is incomplete"84 and in the rest of the chapter
he goes on to emphasize the perfection and completeness of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit. It seems perverse to deny that Basil is here
referring deliberately and directly to a passage from Plotinus known
to him and is explicitly dissociating his doctrine from it. In cap XVIII
he certainly contrasts the One and the mass very mum in the style of
Plotinus. (fv 1'0vaBucQic; in contrast to ~v tQiv ltO"A.ciiV).185 But later in
the chapter he refuses to number the three as the heretics do, 186 and it
is reasonable to take this, with Prume, as a reference to Plotinus. Basil
never forgot that he was a Christian bishop, as well as an intellectual,
and was bound to safeguard the essential truths of Christianity. In a
passage in cap VIII of DSS he makes the point that God's self-giving
in the Incarnation is the highest sign we could have of Christ's glory
and pre-eminence. It is not so much the superb ordering of the world
that commends his superior might:
'as that God the infmite should be involved without damage (cinaBiiic;)
by the flesh with death, so that he should graciously give us freedom
from suffering by his own suffering',lS?
Coming as this does in a treatise in which Basil uses the material
supplied by Neo-Platonism more freely than in any other of his
works (unless we count the De Spiritu), it is an eloquent witness to his
refusal to surrender Christian doctrine to any dangerous seduction
that might present itself in late Platonism.
I84DSS XVI.3(13S) [376, 378J.
185XVIII.4S (149-152) [408]; Proche, note in loco observes this.
"6 47 .(I5)}[4 14J.
187DSS VIII.IS (99) [306-308. quotation 30S} Basil of course subscribes to the
traditional 'theft' theory of how the ancient philosophers acquired their wisdom.
See Hom. XVI.I (472). In his Address to Young Men he gives cautious approval to
pagan literary culture.
866
The Development of Doctrine
Gregory of Nazianzus is capable, like all the Cappadocians, of
belittling philosophy.''' but he certainly was deeply influenced by
Platonism, and not least by Neo-Platonism, 18. though like the other
Cappadocians and the theologians of his day in general he used ideas
from other systems ofphilosphy, Stoic, Aristotelian and even Cynic,
as well. Trisoglio in his summary of the study of Gregory set out in
the seventeenth chapter of his book brings out how almost
everybody agrees that Gregory used philosophy of every current
complexion as an aid, albeit a second-best approach to truth
compared with Christianity."o Much the best study ofGregory's
philosophical predilection is that of Moreschini in 'n Platonismo
Cristiano di Gregorio Nazianzeno'. It is easy to see a debt to Plato in
his thought and in relation to Plotinus he certainly has absorbed some
of his ideas, but Gregory's thinking tends rather to run parallel to
than simply to appropriate his, and sometimes he seems to be
deliberately dissenting from him. '" In Trinitarian contexts Gregory
parallels Plotinus' nous (mind) to the Father, and the Logos to the
Son, "2 and his thought of God as simple as 'first ousia', 'first nature'
(Physis), the 'first cause', and his concept of the summum bonum, the
object of all aspiration and desire, all resemble doctrines of
Plotinus. "3 A well-known passage in the Third Theological Oration
contains an unmistakeable reference to Plotinus and at the same time
a deliberate modification or rejection of his ideas. He directly dissents
from the concept of the three ultimate principles (he calls them
'causes' altta,), referring to 'one of the pagan philosophers'.'94 The
18'Orat. XXVII.8 (19).
189The opinion of Rose may Ruether that his philosophy was doxographical and
anecdotal and that he did not know anything about Neo-Platonism (Gregory of
Nazianzus 26-27) cannot be sustained.
190Grigorio di Nazianzo 277-99.
1910p. cit. 1362-82.
192Ibid. I3 82.
193 13 83-87.
1940rat. XXIX.2 (76). The manner in which the Trinity exists is first described
thus: 'Therefore the Monad "from the beginning" an I: I) moving into a Dyad ends
in a Triad' ... And we shall not dare to speak of an overflow of goodness (6Jt6PXl>OW
a:ya96tTtto~) which one of the Greek philosophers ventured to speak of, like some
wine-cup spilling over, when he wrote clearly in this vein while theorizing about
the first cause and the second.' Even Rist (,Basil's Neoplatonism' 2IS) cannot deny
that this is a direct: reference to Plotinus. Moreschini deals with the passage
'Platonismo di'Gregorio Nazianzeno' 1388-90. He calls Gregory's account of the
Monad moving through the Dyad to the Triad 'un Plocino rielaborato' (1391), and
concludes (1392) that Gregory had probably read Tractates V.I and V.2 ofPlatious.
 The Controversy Resolved
generation of the Son is not the spontaneous overflowing of goodness
in which a first and a second cause is posited, nor is generation against
the will (which in fact Plotinus never taught). God produces the Son
by his own nature, not by unwilled spontaneity like an overflowing
fountain and not by a sheer act of will. And what he produces by the
sheer overflow of goodness is the created world, not as in the
Plotinian parallel, the world of ideas (kosmos noetos). But when he
comes to deal with how God created, Gregory places the Son within
the creating Godhead. In Orat. XXXVIII 10 (34) it is thus that the
kosmos noetos is created.'" Sheldon Williams prefers to seethe
strongest Neo-Platonic influence on Gregory in his basic scheme of
God as rest (mone), going forth (proodos) and return (epistrophe) which
was, he thinks, the basis of the later theology of pseudo-
Dionysius. 196 In any event we cannot believe either that Gregory
completely ignored late Greek philosophy nor that he was entirely
dominated by it; in particular we cannot attribute a decisive influence
upon his Trinitarian theology to this source.
In dealing with the Trinitarian theology of Gregory of Nyssa l97
we have perforce said almost all that needs to be said here about his
use of philosophy. He was a disciple of Origen much more
consistently than either of the other two Cappadocians '98 and,
perhaps as a consequence, he was more concerned than they to build a
consistent philosophical account of Christianity. He had therefore
much more need of philosophy than they. Even so, like all his
contemporaries he did not confine himself, Platonist though he was,
to Platonism. He borrowed freely from many sources. His theory of
knowledge, for instance, was Aristotelian, in opposition to the
Platonic belief in 'innate ideas' of Eunomius.' 99 It is impossible to
deny that he was influenced by the work of Plotinus, though
opinions may differ as to precisely how he came by it.200 This is
particularly evident in his doctrine concerning the soul and how the
cr. Meijering 'The Doctrine of the Will and of the Trinity in the Orations of
Gregory of Nazianz us· 225-'7; he cannot avoid the conclusion that this passage is an
echo of Enn. V.2.I.7-fJ.
1955ee Moreschini 'Platonismo' 1390.
Cambridge History ofLater Greek Thought442, 446-7.
196
oo above pp. 723f.
1975
I 9SS ee Han Amphilochiu5 von lconium 198 for the places where Gregory mentions
Origen.
1995 0 Danielou L'£tre et Ie Temps 5-8.
200Even Rise allows that in the De Virginitate he refers to the Enneads (,Basil's
"Neo-Platonism'" 217).
868
The Development of Doctrine
Christian can purify his own.201 A. Meredith, in a study devoted to
the influence ofPlotinus on Gregory, finds it impossible to deny that
Plotinus influenced him but difficult to pin Gregory down to actual
quotations,202 but he allows that the most obvious field of influence
is Gregory's doctrine of the soul.
Yet Gregory did not identify the soul with God, as did Plotinus.
Plotinus taught that the soul is divine, Gregory that it becomes a pure
mirror of God or at the most that it becomes divine but does not
become God. 'We are in the presence of an entire transformation of
Platonism' says DanieJou, and he compares Gregory's mystical
reconstruction of Christianity by the aid of Platonic materials to the
reconstruction effected by the Mediaevals centuries later, with the aid
of Aristotelianism. 203 In accepting the reality of the Incarnation and
in his refusal to see the Trinity as a graded hierarchy of beings,
Gregory made no concessions to Platonism. Muhlenberg goes so far
as to say that Gregory of Nyssa's philosophy is ultimately a rejection
ofNeo-Platonism, at least in its idea of the structure of being, and is
rather an emendation of Origen's work by his own independent
thought in order to accommodate the Nicene faith. It is not that he
ignored Plotinus; he altered him. 204 Meijering concludes that the
Fathers did not directly contradict Platonism in their enterprise of
interpreting the Credo, or, to be more exact: they believed that
Christianity
'did not seriously contradict their Platonism, and not, that it did not
seriously contradict Platonism' .205
4. The Development of Doctrine
After this long survey of the process whereby the traditional and
Catholic doctrine of the Holy Trinity was finally formed and
2(IlSCC Danie}ou Platonisme et theologie mystique 42,43.
lt12'Grcgory of Nyssa and Plotinus, passim.
20JPlatonisme et theologie mystique 215-217. quotation 216.
204'Philosophische Bildung Gregors von Nyssa' 243-4. See also the summary of
Sheldon-Williams Cambridge History of Late Greek Philosophy 455-6 and the
statement of Ritter 'Arianismus' 714 to the effect that the doctrine of the Trinity is
in entire contradiction to the Neo-Platonist three hypostases because the Three in the
doctrine of the Trinity are co-ordinated. not subordinated.
205God Being History 145-6, quotation from 145 from the essay 'Wie
Platonisierten Christen?'
869
 The Controversy Resolved
established, it is appropriate to ask, what was the process whereby this
development took place? We can begin by ruling out some wrong
answers to that question which have been given in the past. It is not a
story of embattled and persecuted orthodoxy maintaining a long and
finally successful struggle against insidious heresy. It should be
perfectly clear that at the outset nobody had a single clear answer to
the question raised, an answer which had always been known in the
church and always recognised as true, one which was consistently
maintained by one party throughout the whole controversy.
Orthodoxy on the subject of the Christian doctrine of God did not
exist at first. The story is the story of how orthodoxy was reached,
found, not of how it was maintained. Alexander of Alexandria
retained a concept of the subordination of the Son which would have
been thought heretical by the Cappadocians. Athanasius had no word
for what God is as Three in distinction from what God is as one, and
acquiesced in a formulation of God as a single hypostasis at Serdica
which by the standards of Cappadocian orthodoxy was heretical.
And he had at the beginning no inclination to recognise the existence
of a human mind in Jesus Christ. Ossius evidently believed that God
is a single hypostasis and was responsible for the Westerners at Serdica
saying so. And conversely, the Photinians knew very well that the
incarnate Word must have had a human mind, a doctrine for which
Hilary condemned them?o. Hilary himself, for all his judicious
handling of the doctrine of the Trinity, plunged heedlessly into
Docetism when he came to consider the passion ofJesus. The Arians
understood' very well the necessity of allowing that in some sense
God suffered in the course of saving mankind; the pro-Nicenes
consistently tried to avoid this conclusion. The very formula which
has always been regarded as the palladium oforthodoxy, the creed N,
included in one of its anathemas a statement which could by no
ingenuity be regarded as consistent with orthodoxy as the
Cappadocians understood it. It was only' very slowly, as a result of
debate and consideration and the re-thinking of earlier ideas that the
doctrine which was later to be promulgated as orthodoxy arose. .
It is equally incorrect to see this process as one of an Hellenization
206S ee Simonetti Stud; 142-44. IS6--? Compare the'conviction of Apollinaris
that the human body of Christ is in heaven and will remain there till the end of the
age with the idea of Gregory of Nyssa (borrowed from Origen) ,that the humanity
was dissolved into the divinity at the Ascension (Gregory of Nyssa Antirrhelicus 232
(Lcidcn»). The heretic is the more orthodox here.
The Development of Doctrine
of an originally simple Christian gospel. The theologians of the
fourth century were compelled by the very necessity of doing
theology at all to use the terminology of Greek philosophy. We have
seen that the truth gradually dawned upon the most intelligent of
them (though it was never accepted by the Homoian Arians) that it is
impossible to interpret the Bible simply in the words of the Bible.
This being so, no alternative vocabulary was open. to them than that
of late Greek philosophy. They used this vocabulary with a fme
disregard for consistency and an eclectic method which ensured that
they were wholly absorbed or captured by no single system but used
the materials provided by all. Even the Cappadocian Christian
.Platonists at the end were conscious of the necessity of preserving the
essential Christian truths without compromise with Platonism,
useful though they found that Platonism in certain respects. Only if
we define Christianity in such simplistic terms as those to which
Harnack thought it should be reduced can we see the process as one of
Hellenization. Christianity in order to achieve an understanding of
itselfhas always been compelled to borrow, where and as it could, the
materials of contemporary philosophy.
Again, the process of developing the doctrine of the Trinity was
not a deliberate articulation of an impressive structure of dogma
undertaken in a spirit of free speculation by theologians who were
happy to create a doctrinal system upon the basis of the Bible. A few
writers in the earlier period were dimly aware that they were
contributing to a development of doctrine. Athanasius recognises
that critical moments demand doctrinal decisions when he points out
that no such crisis existed at the time of the Council of Ariminum in
359, whereas it did exist at the time of Nicaea in 325.207 And he is
making the same point when he speaks of the necessity of grasping
the intention (dianoia) and the drift or burden (skopos) of Scripture.
Hilary betrays the same awareness when he replies to the objection of
the Arians that homoousion is not in Scripture by saying that new
developments demand new words and points out that nowhere does
the Bible say that the Son is ingenerate (innascibilis) nor even that he is
like the Father (the favourite terms of the Arians).2o, Later the
Cappadocians acknowledged that they were engaged in a process of
developing doctrine when they appealed to the practice and
207 De Synodis 2, 4.
208Liber con. Constantium 16 (593. 594).
 The Controversy Resolved
experience of the church as a support for their doctrine of the Holy
Spirit and prepared for some sort of clarification ofN in the field of
pneumatology. And all sides, Arians as well as pro-Nicenes, appealed
to the tradition of the Fathers, and recognised that they must as far as
possible teach doctrine in the light of contemporary requirements but
also in consistency with what had been taught in the past. But with
these exceptions all theologians show the greatest reluctance to build
a dogmatic system or to depart in any way at all from the actual
words of the Bible. Their very strenuous attempts to show that the
technical terms which they were introducing into the debate were to
be found in Scripture manifest this. Further, we must observe that the
doctrine of the Trinity as taught by Athanasius and the Cappadocians
and as finally accepted by the Church actually put an abrupt stop to
one train of development in doctrine and acted as a pruning rather
than a developing force. The traditional, centuries-old, much-used,
one can almost say Catholic, concept of the pre-existent Christ as the
link between an impassible Father and a transitory world, that which
made of him a convenient philosophical device, the Logos-doctrine
dear to the heart of many orthodox theologians in the past, was
abandoned. This was rather a return to Scripture than a development
of dogma.
There is no doubt, however, that the pro-Nicene theologians
throughout the controversy were engaged in a process of developing
doctrine and consequently introducing what must be called a change
in doctrine. In the middle of the third century Dionysius, bishop of
Alexandria; produced in a tre·atise an account of the Son as created
which evoked a rebuke from the bishop of Rome but no more. At
the end of the fourth century such a sentiment would have·cost him
his see. The Apologists of the second century, Irenaeus, Tertullian
and Hippolytus all believed and taught that, though the Son or Logos
was eternally within the being of the Father, he only became distinct
or proIa ted or borne forth at a particular point for the purposes of
creation, revelation and redemption. The result of the great
controversy of the fourth century was to reject this doctrine as
heretical. 'For whatever is prior to God, whether time or will, is in
my view a dividing of the Godhead' sings Gregory of Nazianzus at
the end of his career?o, The break with the past which the evolution
of the doctrine of the Trinity made, however, went further than this.
87 2 .
The Development of Doctrine
It meant that God is wholly independent of the world, that there is no
scale of being at whose summit he shall be placed, no 'continuity of
being between the temporal and the eternal' which had been one of
the assumptions of ancient philosophical thought. 21 0 I do not say that
this was a change for the worse nor a betrayal of either Christian
tradition or the witness of the Bible. On the contrary, I believe that it
was necessary and right and marked the emergence of a genuinely
Christian doctrine of God. But that it was a change can hardly be
denied.
If we are to find a proper expression whereby to describe the
process itself, no better words can be found than to say that it was a
process of trial-and-error. After all, human thought in every other
field of study or endeavour has always proceeded by a process of trial-
and-error, and even though this was a process of considering the
consequences and corollaries of revelation, it was still a process of
human thought. And in such a process it is inconceivable that all the
trial should be on one side and all the error on the other. Mistakes,
confusion, the re-formulation and re-thinking of previous ideas,
were confined to neither side in this long controversy. Indeed it could
be argued that the Arians failed just because they were so inflexible,
too conservative, not ready enough to look at new ideas. I do not .
think that it is particularly helpful to call this process a 'dialectical'
one, as Lonergan does,>" though it may not be an incorrect
description. It is not enough to say the orthodox learnt from the
mistakes of the heretics nor even that the heretics had hold of some
truths which the orthodox only gradually came to appreciate. It was
only by making errors and correcting them that those whose views
finally prevailed were able to see as far as they did and carry out what
was a bold and creative new formulation of the truth. In ·order to
perceive the full genius and drive of the Christian faith it was
necessary for them to some extent to emancipate themselves from the
tradition, even from the orthodoxy, of the past.
In order to understand what happened to the Christian doctrine of
God in the fourth century, we must appreciate what in the end the
210The quotation is from P.24 of the thesis of M. M. Thomas on 'The
Christology of St. Hilary of Poi tiers' • in whose early pages this point is well brought
out.
211 The Way 'to Nicaea 40-42. This account of the process has some useful things to
say but is marred by the fact that the author does not possess a proper knowledge of
the texts involved.
 The Controversy Resolved
various participants in the debate were trying to do. This was not a
debate about a single iota as Gibbon would have liked to suggest, but
did not quite dare to do. It was not a quarrel of Greek metaphysicians
imperfectly understood by simple Latin-speaking Westerners. It
concerned the basic elements of Christianity itself. Though
conducted largely in terms of Greek ontology, it was about the
Christian doctrine of God. How can an unyielding monotheism
accommodate the worship of Jesus Christ as divine? This was the
question which had been with the church since the second century or
perhaps earlier and which came to a head in the fourth. Why did
Athanasius produce the decisive doctrine which the Cappadocians
later elaborated? Why did he write:
'For the Spirit is not outside the Logos but is in the Logos and is in God
through him '?212
For Athanasius the Incarnation was an indispensable necessity if the
goodness and healing activity of God, and not just his justice and
truth were to be manifested and communicated to men and women
and thus remedy the absurd situation whereby human beings created
for a good purpose by God wholly miss that purpose and fall into
nothingness and decay.>" He perceived that the alternative offered
by the heirs ofEusebius of Caesarea, the picture of a lesser god created
and sent by the inaccessible higher god to suffer in order to bring
about this healing and restoration, was a completely unsatisfactory
one in spite of having some superficial attractions such as an
appearance of being more faithful to the witness of the Synoptic
Gospels. It could only be called monotheism by courtesy and it
always was in peril of making God unknowable as weJl as
inaccessible. Nothing could perhaps show more clearly that the pro-
Nicenes were following the inner drive and genius of the Christian
religion than the development at the end of the process of the
doctrine of the divinity of the Spirit. No philosophical necessity
pressed here. The·Neo-Platonic three hypostases perhaps eased the
situation a little but they had comparatively little effect on the
thought of the Cappadocians here. The acknowledgement of the full
divinity of the Son was certainly assisted by and partly promoted in
response to the religious experience of the faithful. This was even
212Ep. ad Serap. I1l.s. Shapland op. cit. p. 42 remarks on the significance of this
sentence.
213 50, finely, Kannengiesser PTAA 212.
The Development of Doctrine
more true of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It even seemed to many
(witness the protest of the Macedonians) that this was a development
made in the teeth of the witness of Scripture. We can see that to refuse
divinity to the Spirit would have been to leave Jesus Christ as an
isolated, inexplicable historical enigma, or else to see him, as the
ancients never were tempted to do but as too much modem theology
tends to accept, as a deified man. 'We have to maintain the view', sa ys
Meijering, 'that any talk about a divine being which is not truly and
essentially divine is mythology .... There must be an inner move-
ment in God which implies both identity and distinction'2!' The
theologians who contributed to form the doctrine of the Trinity
were carrying out, whether they knew it or not, a kind of theological
revolution, and one that left to the next century the task of squaring
this new understanding of God with a beliefin the Incarnation, a task
which they were not very well equipped to perform. But the pro-
Nicene theologians were responding properly and honestly, as
properly and honestly asthe circumstances of their age would allow,
to a genuine compulsion. In spite of an inadequate equipment for
understanding the Bible, in spite of much semantic confusion which
required protracted and elaborate clearing up, in spite of being
compelled to work with philosophical terms and concepts widely
different from those of the Bible, they found a satisfactory answer to
the great question which had fired the search for the Christian
doctrine of God, and one which won not only imperial support but a
wide consensus throughout the church. Development meant
discovery.
214God Being Hislory r61-2, from his essay on 'Athanasius on the Father and the
Son', But he goes on to add (102) that what we cannot accept is that Jesus of
Nazareth is identical with the Eternal Son and knew himself to be so.
 Appendix I Appendix
The Creed of the Council of
Nicaea of 32 5
(see G. L. Dossetti n Simbolo di Nicea e di Constantinopoli
22611)
",cr"UOlltV &lr; ijva OtOV "attpa "aVt01CpcltOpa "clVtroV opatiiiv tt Kai
aopatrov "OlTJtTJV. Kai &1<; Eva KUPlOV 'ITJcrouv XPlcrtOV tOV ulov tOU OtoU
ytVvTJOtvta tK tOU "atpo<; 1I0voyevfj toutecrtlv tK tiir; oucria<; tOU "atpo<;,
Otov tK Oeou, <poor; tK <prot6r;, O&l>vaA.TJOIVov tK Otou aA.TJOIVoU, ytvvTJOtvta
ou 1tolTJOtvta, 61100U<rIOV teji "atpl, liI'ou ta "avta tytVttO ta tt tv teji
oupaveji Kai ta tv tij yij . tOV liI'1'1lla<; tOilr; avOpro"ou<; Kai 61a tT]V
fJlltttpav crrotTJplav KateA.06vta Kai crapKroOtVta, tvavOpro"TJcravta,
1ta06vta, Kai avacrtclvta tij tPltij 1'1l'tpC1, avtA.06vta tIr; toil<; oupavou<;,
tpx611tvoV Kpival ~OOvtar; Kai VtKPOU<;. Kai tI<; to aylOv "veulla. tOil<; 6e
Atyovta<; . iiv "Ott ott OUK iiv Kai "piv ytvvTJOiivai OUK iiv Kai Otl t~ OOK
oVtrov tytVttO il t~ EtEpa<; u"omclcreror; il oucrlar; <pa<r1Covtar; elval il
tpe1ttov il aAAoirotOV tOV ulov tOU OtOU tOUtou<; avaOtl'ati~el 1'1 KaOOA.IKT]
Kai a1tocrtOA.IKi') t1C1CA. TJcria.
2
The Creed of the Council of
Constantinople of 381
(see G. L. Dossetti n Simbolo di Nicea e di Costantinopoli
24411)
£i.e; Eva aeov 1tutepa 1tUv't01cpa:tOpa, 1tOlTJti]V oupavou Kat
1ItO''t&UOJ.l.&V
Yii<;, 6patOOv tt 1tavtrov Kai aopatrov. Kai tI<; Eva KUPIOV 'ITJcrouv XPlcrtOV
'tov ut6v 'tou OEOU 'tov J.10voyevij, 'tov tIC 'tou nu'tpoc; yEvv119tv"CQ 1tpO
1tavtrov tOOv aIrovrov, <pOi<; tK <proto<;, OtOV aATJOIVOV tK Otou aA.TJOIVOU,
ytvvTJOtvta 00 1tOITJOtVta, 61100ucrIOv teji 1tatpi, 61'ou ta 1tavta tyevttO .
tov 61'1'1l'a<; toilr; avOpro1tou<; Kai 61a ti')v TJlletepav crrotTJpiav KateA.OOvta
tK trov oopavrov Kai crapKroOeVta tK 1tVtullato<; ayiou Kai Mapla<; tii<;
1tUpOevou Kai tvavOpro1tTJcravta crtauproOtvta tt U1tep TJllrov t1ti fiovtiou
nlAUtOU Kai 1taOovta Kai ta<pevta Kai avacrtavta tij tpltij 1'1llePC1Kata
ta<; ypa<pa<; Kai avtA06vta tI<; toil<; oopavoil<; Kai KaOt~oll&vov tv 6t~iC1
tOU 1tatpo<; Kai 1tclAIV tPXOlltVOV IItta M~TJ<; Kpival ~rovtar; Kai veKpOUr;,
ou tii<; ~acrIAtia<; OOK tcrtal teA.o<;. Kai tI<; to "veulla to aylOv to KUPIOV
Kai t;ro01tOIOV, to tK tOU 1tatpo<; tK1tOptUolltvov, to crilv "atpi Kai uieji
cruV1tpocrKuvOUlltVOV Kai cruv60~at;0l'tvoV, to AUATJcrav oUI tOOv
npo<pTJtrov. &1<; lIiav ayiav KaOOA.IKT)V Kai a1tocrtOA.IKT)V tKKATJcriav'
0IlOAOYOUI'tV EV ~cl1tncrlla tI<; li<pecrlv al'apnrov . 1tpocr60KOOll&v
uvacrtacrlv veKprov Kai t;roT)V tOU IItA.A.OVtOr; alrovor;. 'AII"V.
 Bibliography.

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