Life of St Athanasius the Great and Account of Arianism

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128 Pages (Part I)

Page 53

This brings us to the question in what sense ousia is used in the Nicene definition. We must remember the strong Western and anti-Origenist influence which prevailed in the council (above, p. xvii.), and the use of hupostasis and ousia as convertible terms in the anathematism (see Excursus A, pp. 77, sqq. below). Now going back for a moment to the correspondence of the two Dionysii, we see that Dionysius of Rome had contended not so much against the subordination of the Son to the Father as against their undue separation (memerismenai hupostaseis). In other words he had pressed the homoousion upon his namesake in the interest rather of the unity than of the equality of the Persons in the Holy Trinity. At Nicaea, the problem was (as shewn above) to explain (at least negatively) how the Church understood the Generation of the Son. Accordingly we find Athanasius in later years explaining that the Council meant to place beyond doubt the Essential Relation of the Divine Persons to one another (to idion tes ousias, tautotes, see de Decr. pp. 161, 163 sq., 165, 168, 319; of course including identity of Nature, pp. 396, 413, 232), and maintaining to the end (where he expresses his own view, p. 490, &c.) the convertibility of ousia and hupostasis for this purpose. By the word ho theos or theos he understands ouden heteron e ten ousian tou ontos (de Decr. 22). The conclusion is that in their original sense the definitions of Nicaea assert not merely the specific identity of the Son with the Father (as Peter qua man is of one ousia with Paul, or the Emperor's statue of one form with the Emperor himself, p. 396), but the full unbroken continuation of the Being of the Father in the Son, the inseparable unity of the Son with the Father in the Oneness of the Godhead. Here the phrase is 'balanced' by the ek tes [hupostaseos e] ousias tou Patros, not as though merely one ousia had given existence to another, but in the sense that with such origination the ousia remained the same.

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