The Positive Tradition of the First Four Centuries — Article 3: The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers

ARTICLE 3: THE NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS

1. The Dogmatic Teaching of the Fathers Against Arius and Macedonius

a) The sensation caused throughout Christendom by the first appearance of the Arian heresy can be explained only on the assumption that the truth had been in quiet possession for three full centuries. The Bishop of Alexandria, Alexander, at a synod held in his episcopal city about the year 320, excommunicated Arius. He explained the motives for this step in a lengthy letter to Bishop Alexander of Constantinople. “Quis unquam talia audivit?” he said among other things, “aut quis nunc audiens non obstupescat et aures obstruat, ut ne talium verborum sordes auditum contaminent? — Who ever yet heard such language? and who that hears it now, but is shocked and stops his ears, that its foulness should not enter into them?”¹ This utterance clearly proves that the heresy of Arius, which attacked the very foundations of the dogma of the Divine Trinity, by asserting that the Logos-Son (Christ) is a mere creature, was at the beginning of the fourth century regarded as an intolerable innovation. St. Athanasius himself took a leading part in the Arian controversies which for many years shook the entire Orient and even made their evil effects felt among the Germanic nations of the Western world, especially among the Vandals in Africa. Athanasius was Bishop of Alexandria and is deservedly called “the Great.” He was ready to give up his life in defense of the Catholic truth that the Son is eternally begotten from the substance of the Father, and is consubstantial with Him, as defined by the Council of Nicaea.

b) When (about 360) Macedonius began to undermine that other pillar of the dogma of the Blessed Trinity, viz.: the Divinity and Consubstantiality of the Holy Ghost, Athanasius again appeared in the arena and denounced his teaching as “impious” and “unscriptural.”² “It is impious,” he said, “to call the Holy Ghost created or made (κτιστόν ἢ ποιητόν), seeing that both the Old and the New Testament connumerate and glorify Him with the Father and the Son, because He is of the same Divinity (συναριθμεῖ καὶ δοξάζει, διότι τῆς αὐτῆς θεότητός ἐστιν).” St. Athanasius found powerful allies in the “three Cappadocians,” Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and particularly St. Basil, who in his work On the Holy Spirit³ quotes a number of older writers in confirmation of the ecclesiastical Tradition.⁴

Honorable mention must also be accorded to St. Amphilochius, who was consecrated Bishop of Iconium, A. D. 374, and later became metropolitan of Lycaonia, (†after 394). In the name of a synod of his Lycaonian suffragans he published a magnificent letter on the Divinity of the Holy Ghost.⁵

To Didymus the Blind, of Alexandria, “one of the most notable men of an age that abounded in great personalities,” (†about 395) we owe, besides an important work On the Trinity (Περὶ Τριάδος), a lucid treatise entitled De Spiritu Sancto, which has reached us only in the sixty-three brief chapters of St. Jerome’s Latin translation,⁶ and which is indeed, as Bardenhewer says, “one of the best of its kind in Christian antiquity.”⁷

The most eminent defenders of the dogma in the West were St. Ambrose⁸ and St. Augustine,⁹ who was the first to attempt a systematic exposition of the mystery of the Divine Trinity. His famous work On the Trinity became the starting-point of the Trinitarian speculations of medieval Scholasticism. St. Anselm adopted Augustine’s profound considerations in his Monologium, whence they found their way into the Liber Sententiarum of Peter Lombard, and through this channel into the numerous theological Summae, among which that of St. Thomas Aquinas has ever held the place of honor.¹⁰

2. Patristic Polemics

The method which the Fathers chose to refute the Scriptural objections raised by the Arians and Semi-Arians furnishes a valuable argument for the purity and imperishable freshness of the ecclesiastical Tradition touching the dogma of the Blessed Trinity.

a) Prov. VIII, 22 reads: “Dominus possedit me in initio viarum suarum — The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways.” The Septuagint has ἔκτισέ με. This text was considered by the Arians as the weak spot in the Catholic armor. Catholics did not deny that the passage referred to the Logos, and the Arian contention that the Septuagint offered sufficient warrant for taking Christ to be κτίσμα θεοῦ — a creature of God — seemed well founded. It was a Gordian knot, which the Fathers, each in his own way, tried hard to unravel. Some suggested that the Septuagint text had been practiced upon by the Arians. Others referred the difficult passage to our Lord’s sacred Humanity, while others again thought it applied to His Divinity. On one point, however, all were unanimously agreed, viz., in holding that Christ was God and the Second Person of the Divine Trinity. Those among the Fathers who (wrongly) believed that ἔκτισε was an Arian forgery for ἔκτησε = ἐκτήσατο (from κτάομαι = acquiro, possideo) were guided by the thought that, since Eve said after the birth of Cain: “Possedi hominem per Deum — I have gotten a man through God,”¹¹ the Hebrew text of Proverbs must have read, as our Latin Vulgate reads: “Dominus possedit me in generatione — [he] habet me; ἔκτησε or ἐκτήσατό με.” This interpretation was favored by Epiphanius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Jerome. Most of the other Fathers, however, notably Athanasius and Nazianzen, in view of a parallel passage in Ecclesiasticus,¹² referred Prov. VIII, 22 to the Humanity of Christ and interpreted it thus: “The Lord created me in my human nature as the beginning [ἀρχή = principle] of his ways.”¹³ There was a third group of Fathers who did not hesitate to apply Prov. VIII, 22 to Christ’s Divine Nature. They interpreted the verb κτίζειν generically as producere = gignere,¹⁴ or looked upon it as a drastic term calculated to throw into relief the hypostatic self-existence of the Logos in contradistinction to the Father.¹⁵ The dogma of the Divinity of Christ, and consequently that of the Blessed Trinity, was safeguarded in any event.¹⁶

The New Testament pièce de résistance of the Arian heretics was Christ’s own declaration, recorded in John XIV, 28: “Pater maior me est — The Father is greater than I.” Here, they alleged, Christ Himself attests His subordination to the Father. This objection, too, was met differently by different Fathers. While the Latins were inclined to limit John XIV, 28 to Christ’s Humanity (in which hypothesis the Arian argument simply collapsed), most of the Greek Fathers, notably Athanasius and Nazianzen, preferred the somewhat strained assumption that Christ is subject to the Father even in His Divine Nature, i. e., that the Father, by virtue of His being the First Person (αὐτόθεος = ἄναρχος), is at the same time the principle of the Son, who must therefore be conceived essentially as “Deus de Deo.” According to this theory the expression “maior me” signifies Christ’s immanent succession with regard to origin in the Godhead, not a difference in rank or power.

The difficulty based on Christ’s primogeniture was tersely and effectively refuted by St. Ambrose: “Legimus primogenitum, legimus unigenitum: primogenitus, quia nemo ante ipsum; unigenitus, quia nemo post ipsum — We read ‘the First-born,’ and we read ‘the Only-begotten’: He is the First-born, because there was no one before Him; He is the Only-begotten, because there is no one after Him.”¹⁷

b) Besides a large number of philosophical fallacies, the Macedonians marshalled against the dogma of the Divinity of the Holy Ghost a series of Scriptural texts, which were loyally and learnedly restored to their true meaning by the Fathers. From Rom. VIII, 26: “Ipse Spiritus postulat pro nobis gemitibus inenarrabilibus — The Spirit himself asketh for us with unspeakable groanings,” these heretics concluded: One who prays to God with unspeakable groanings cannot be Himself God; therefore the Holy Ghost is a mere creature. Without pointing to the evident anthropomorphism in this text, St. Augustine refutes the false interpretation of the Macedonians by the simple remark: “Dictum est ‘interpellat,’ quia interpellare nos facit nobisque interpellandi et gemendi inspirat affectum — The Bible says, the Spirit intercedes for us, because He makes us intercede and puts it into our hearts to intercede and groan.”¹⁸ 1 Cor. VIII, 6, where, strangely enough, the name of the Holy Ghost does not occur at all, was cited by the Pneumatomachians in favor of their heretical tenet that the Third Person is a creature and therefore cannot be God. But, as St. Athanasius effectively retorted: “The Holy and Blessed Trinity is so indivisibly united with itself, that when the Father is named, His Logos is included, and in the Logos also the Spirit. And when the Son is named, the Father is in the Son, nor is the Spirit outside the Logos, inasmuch as there is but one grace, which is perfected out of the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Ghost.”¹⁹

Readings

Petavius, De Trinitate, I, 7 sqq.; George Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (against Petavius, I, 3 sqq.), Oxon. 1685 (On Bull’s work and its unmerited reputation, cfr. Hunter, Outlines of Dogmatic Theology, Vol. II, pp. 206 sq.); Möhler, Athanasius der Grosse, 2nd ed., Vol. I, pp. 1–116, Mainz 1844; Hergenröther, Die Lehre von der göttlichen Dreieinigkeit nach Gregor von Nazianz, Ratisbon 1850; Atzberger, Die Logoslehre des hl. Athanasius, Freiburg 1880; A. Beck, Die Trinitätslehre des hl. Hilarius von Poitiers, Mainz 1903; J. Bilz, Die Trinitätslehre des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Paderborn 1909.

On the apologetical aspects of the subject, see Hettinger, Apologie des Christentums, 9th ed., Vol. III, Freiburg 1907.