Life of St Athanasius the Great and Account of Arianism

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128 Pages (Part I)

Page 57

It is also I think clear, that not only was the current theology of the Eastern Church unable to cope with Arianism, but that it was itself a danger to the Church and in need of the corrective check of the Nicene definition. Hellenic as was the system of Origen, it was in its spirit Christian, and saturated with the influence of Scripture. It could never have taken its place as the expression of the whole mind of the Church; but it remains as the noblest monument of a Christian intellect resolutely in love with truth for its own sake, and bent upon claiming for Christ the whole range of the legitimate activity of the human spirit. But the age had inherited only the wreck of Origenism, and its partial victory in the Church had brought confusion in its train, the leaders of the Church were characterised by secular knowledge rather than grasp of first principles, by dogmatic intellectualism rather than central apprehension of God in Christ. Eusebius of Caesarea is their typical representative. The Nicene definition and the work of Athanasius which followed were a summons back to the simple first principles of the Gospel and the Rule of Faith. What then is their value to ourselves? Above all, this, that they have preserved to us what Arianism would have destroyed, that assurance of Knowledge of, and Reconciliation to, God in Christ of which the divinity of the Saviour is the indispensable condition; if we are now Christians in the sense of S. Paul we owe it under God to the work of the great synod. Not that the synod explained all; or did more than effectually 'block off false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference' which 'challenged the acceptance of Christian people.' The decisions of councils are 'primarily not the Church saying "yes" to fresh truths or developments or forms of consciousness; but rather saying "no" to untrue and misleading modes of shaping and stating her truth,' (Lux Mundi, ed. i. p. 240, cf. p. 334). It is objected that the Nicene Formula, especially as understood by Athanasius, is itself a 'false form of thought,' a flat contradiction in terms.

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