Life of St Athanasius the Great and Account of Arianism

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128 Pages (Part I)

Page 49

(b) The homoousion as a theological formula [33] .

The distinction, which in the foregoing discussion we have frequently had under our notice, between the pistis and gnosis of the early Church, the pistis common to all, and formulated in the tessera or rule of faith, the gnosis the property of apologists and theologians aiming at the expression of faith in terms of the thought of their age, and at times, though for long only slightly, reacting upon the rule of faith itself (Aquileia, Caesarea, Gregory Thaumaturgus), makes itself felt in the account of the Nicene Council. That the legacy of the first world-wide gathering of the Church's rulers is a Rule of Faith moulded by theological reflexion, one in which the gnosis of the Church supplements her pistis, is a momentous fact; a fact for which we have to thank not Athanasius but Arius. The pistis of the Fathers repudiated Arianism as a novelty; but to exclude it from the Church some test was indispensable; and to find a test was the task of theology, of gnosis. The Nicene Confession is the Rule of Faith explained as against Arianism. Arianism started with the Christian profession of belief in our Lord's Sonship. If the result was incompatible with such belief, it was inevitable that an explanation should be given, not indeed of the full meaning of divine Sonship, but of that element in the idea which was ignored or assailed by the misconception of Arius. Such an explanation is attempted in the words ek tes ousias tou patros, homoousian to Patri, and again in the condemnation of the formula ex heteras hupostaseos e ousias. This explanation was not adopted without hesitation, nor would it have been adopted had any other barrier against the heresy, which all but very few wished to exclude, appeared effective. We now have to examine firstly the grounds of this hesitation, secondly the justification of the formula itself.

[33] , pp. 185 to 193, and his notes and excursus embodied in this volume, especially that appended to Epist. Euseb. p. 77; Zahn's Marcellus, pp. 11-27 (also p. 87), perhaps the best modern discussion; Harnack ii. pp. 228-230, and note 3; Loofs S:S:32-34; Shedd i. 362-372; and the Introduction to the Tomus and ad Afros in this volume pp. 482, 488. The use of ousia in Aristotle is tabulated by Bonitz in the fifth volume (index) to the Berlin edition: its use in Plato is less frequent and less technical, but see the brief account in Liddell and Scott.

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