Life of St Athanasius the Great and Account of Arianism

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128 Pages (Part I)

Page 54

This is a 'first approximation to the mysterious doctrine of the perichoresis' coinherence, or 'circuminsessio,' which is necessary to guard the doctrine of the Trinity against tritheism, but which, it must be observed, lifts it out of the reach of the categories of any system of thought in which the workings of human intelligence have ever been able to organise themselves. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity vindicated by the Nicene formula on the one hand remains, after the exclusion of others, as the one direction in which the Christian intellect can travel without frustrating and limiting the movement of faith, without bringing to a halt the instinct of faith in Christ as Saviour, implanted in the Church by the teaching of S. Paul and of S. John, of the Lord Himself: on the other hand it is not a full solution of the intellectual difficulties with which the analysis of that faith and those instincts brings us face to face. That God is One, and that the Son is God, are truths of revelation which the category of 'substance' fails to synthesise. The Nicene Definition furnishes a basis of agreement for the purpose of Christian devotion, worship, and life, but leaves two theologies face to face, with mutual recognition as the condition of the healthy life of either. The theology of Athanasius and of the West is that of the Nicene formula in its original sense. The inseparable Unity of the God of Revelation is its pivot. The conception of personality in the Godhead is its difficulty. The distinctness of the Father, Son, and Spirit is felt (allos ho Pater allos ho hui& 231;s), but cannot be formulated so as to satisfy our full idea of personality. For this Athanasius had no word; prosopon meant too little (implying as it did no more than an aspect possibly worn but for a special period or purpose), hupostasis (implying such personality as separates Peter from Paul) too much. But he recognised the admissibility of the sense in which the Nicene formula eventually, in the theology of the Cappadocian fathers, won its way to supremacy in the East.

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