|
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.
|
|