Life of St Athanasius the Great and Account of Arianism

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128 Pages (Part I)

Page 41

The latter fact, his ascetic life, and his learning secured him widespread honour in the Church; his pupils formed a compact and enthusiastic brotherhood, and filled many of the most influential Sees after the persecution. That such a man should be involved in the reproach of having given birth to Arianism is an unwelcome result of history, but one not to be evaded [25] . The history of the Lucianic compromise and its result in the Lucianic type of theology, are both matters of inference rather than of direct knowledge. As to the first, whatever evidence there is connects Lucian's original position with Paul. His reconciliation with Bishop Cyril must have involved a reapproachment to the formula of the bishops who deposed Paul,--a thoroughly Origenist document. We may therefore suppose that the identification of Christ with the Logos, or cosmic divine principle, was adopted by him from Origenist sources. But he could not bring himself to admit that He was thus essentially identified with God the eternal; he held fast to the idea of prokope as the path by which the Lord attained to Divinity; he distinguished the Word or Son who was Christ from the immanent impersonal Reason or Wisdom of God, as an offspring of the Father's Will, an idea which he may have derived straight from Origen, with whom of course it had a different sense. For to Origen Will was the very essence of God; Lucian fell back upon an arid philosophical Monotheism, upon an abstract God fenced about with negations (Harnack 2^2, 195, note) and remote from the Universe. It was counted a departure from Lucian's principles if a pupil held that the Son was the 'perfect Image of the Father's Essence' (Philost. ii. 15); Origen's formula, 'distinct in hypostasis, but one in will,' was apparently exploited in a Samosatene sense to express the relation of the Son to the Father. The only two points in fact in which Lucian appears to have modified the system of Paul were, firstly in hypostatising the Logos, which to Paul was an impersonal divine power, secondly in abandoning Paul's purely human doctrine of the historical Christ. To Lucian, the Logos assumed a body (or rather 'Deus sapientiam suam misit in hunc mundum carne vestitam, ubi infra, p. 6), but itself took the place of a soul [26] ; hence all the tapeinai lexeis of the Gospels applied to the Logos as such, and the inferiority and essential difference of the Son from the Father rigidly followed.

[25] . 598, ii. 183 sqq. must, I think, convince any open mind of the fact. Consult his article on Lucian in Herzog^2. viii. 767 (the best investigation), also Neander H. E. ii. 198, iv. 108; Moeller K.G. i. 226, D.C.B. iii. 748; Koelling, vol. 1, pp. 27-31, who makes the mistake of taking the 'Lucianic creed' as his point of departure.

[26] This is ascribed to Lucian by Epiph. Ancor. 33, and there is no reason whatever to doubt it. The tenet was part of the Arian system from the first, and was attacked already by Eustathius, Fragm. apud Thdt. Dial. iii., but often overlooked, e.g. even by Athanasius in his writings before 362, but see p. 352, note 5. It came to the front in the system of Eunomius, and was much discussed in the last decade of the life of S. Athan. The system of Apollinaris was different. (See pp. 570, note 1, 575, note 1.)

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