ERRORS DENYING THE DIVINITY OF THE PERSONS

Most famous of these heresies was that of Arius, a priest of Alexandria, who was addicted to the Gnostic principle that God by reason of His excellence could not immediately produce inferior creatures but required some superior creature to mediate between Him and His creation. Following the leadership of the Ebionites and Gnostics, Arius denied the divinity of the Son, declaring that the Son was only the most perfect of creatures, made out of nothing in time, and thus subordinate to God. Hence the name Subordinationism. According to Arius, God the Father alone is eternal; the Father created the Son, not of His own substance but out of nothing, and then God made use of the Son as an instrument to create the universe and redeem men. According to Arius the Holy Ghost also is a creature, inferior not only to the Father but also to the Son. Hence Arius, at least in the beginning, held that the Son was entirely different from the Father in nature. This error was attacked by Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, who called a synod attended by almost a hundred bishops, and excommunicated Arius. Best known among the opponents of Arius was St. Athanasius, who valiantly defended the Catholic teaching and the words of St. John, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."[52]

To restore peace to the Church, a general council was called in 325 at Nicaea in Bithynia, which defined against Arius that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, homoousion two patri ("of the same substance with the Father").[53] The Council's formula of faith was: "We believe in one God, the Father almighty maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten born of the Father, that is, out of the substance of the Father[not out of nothing], God of God, light of light, true God of true God, born, not made, of one substance with the Father, which in Greek is called "homoousion", by whom all things were made. And in the Holy Ghost... ." After Arianism was thus condemned by the Church as a heresy, the Arians tried to dissimulate their error and said that the Son was similar in nature to the Father, "homoiousion" or "homoion", but they refused to say that He was consubstantial or "homoousion". Such was the teaching of Basil of Ancyra and Auxentius of Milan, who are called Semi-Arians. Arianism lasted into the sixth century, when it completely disappeared.[54]

St. Athanasius' defense of the dogma may be briefly summed up as follows: The Word is called God in St. John's prologue, "And the Word was God"; His divinity is often affirmed in the epistles of St. Paul and by Christ Himself when He said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Further, the Word deifies us, making us gods by participation, and for this it is necessary that the Word be God essentially, consubstantial with the Father, although distinct from Him as His Son. Similarly the Holy Ghost who vivifies us is essentially God, and therefore is mentioned with the Father and the Son in the formula of baptism.[55]

Following the principles that misled Arius, Eunomius concluded that the Holy Ghost was not God but a creature made by the Son of God, inferior to Him and similar to the angels. At about the same time, the Macedonians like the Semi-Arians denied the divinity and consubstantiality of the Holy Ghost. Eunomius was refuted by St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Basil of Caesarea, and St. Ambrose. Macedonianism was condemned by St. Damasus in the fourth Council of Rome (380) and in the following year by the second ecumenical Council of Constantinople.[56] The most important definition of the Council is: "If anyone shall say that the Holy Ghost is not truly and properly of the Father, like the Son, of the divine substance, and true God, let him be anathema." Thus in the fourth century, opposing these heresies, the Church explicitly taught a Trinity of distinct persons, upheld their divinity and consubstantiality, and so preserved the unity of essence together with the distinction of persons. In the earliest centuries, therefore, the Church explicitly condemned that Unitarianism which the liberal Protestants have recently revived.