The Nicene Tests of Orthodoxy

 WHAT were the cardinal additions, made at Nicæa, to the explicit faith of the Church, will be understood by comparing the Creed, as there recorded and sanctioned, with that of Eusebius, as they both are found (vol. i. supr. pp. 55-57) in his Letter to his people. His Creed is distinct and unexceptionable, as far as it goes; but it does not guard against the introduction of the Arian heresy into the Church, nor could it, as being a creed of the primitive age, and drawn up before the heresy. On the other hand, we see by the anathematisms appended to the Nicene Creed what it was that had to be excluded, and by the wording of the additions to the Creed, and by Eusebius's forced explanation of them, how they acted in effecting its exclusion. The following are the main additions in question:

 1. The Creed of Eusebius says of our Lord, [ ek tou patros gegennemenon ]; but the Nicene says, [ gennethenta ou poiethenta ], because the Arians considered generation a kind of creation, as Athan. says, Orat. ii. § 20, "Ye say that an offspring is the same as a work, writing 'generated or made.'" And more distinctly, Arius in his Letter to Eusebius uses the words, [ prin gennethei etoi ktisthei e horisthei e themeliothei ]. Theodor. Hist. i. 4, p. 750. And to Alexander, [ achronos gennetheis kai pro aionon ktistheis kai themeliotheis ]. De Syn. § 16. And Eusebius to Paulinus, [ ktiston kai themelioton kai genneton ]. Theod. Hist. i. 5, p. 752. These different words profess to be scriptural, and to explain each other; "created" being in Prov. viii. 22; "made" in the speech of St. Peter, Acts ii. 22; "appointed" or "declared" in Rom. i. 4; and "founded" or "established" in Prov. viii. 23; vid. Orat. ii. § 72, etc., vid. also § 52.

 2. We read in the Nicene Creed, "from the Father, that is, from the substance of the Father," whereas in Eusebius's Letter it is only "God from God." According to the received doctrine of the Church, all rational beings, and in one sense all beings whatever, are "from God," over and above the fact of their creation, and in a certain sense sons of God, vid. supr. Arian tenets, Adam, and Eusebius . And of this undeniable truth the Arians availed themselves to explain away our Lord's proper Sonship and Divinity.

 3. But the chief test at Nicæa was the word [ homoousion ], its special force being that it excludes the maintenance of more than one divine [ ousia ] or substance, which seems to be implied or might be insinuated even in Eusebius's creed; "We believe," he says, "each of these [Three] to be and to exist, the Father truly Father, the Son truly Son, the Holy Ghost truly Holy Ghost;" for if there be Three substances or res existing, either there are Three Gods or two of them are not God. The [ ex ousias ], important and serviceable as it was, did not exclude the doctrine of a divine emanation, and was consistent with Semi-Arianism, and with belief in two or in three substances; vid. the art. [ homoousion ]. "It is the precision of this phrase," says Athan., "that detects their pretence, whenever they use the phrase 'from God,' and that excludes all the subtleties with which they seduce the simple. For, whereas they contrive to put a sophistical construction on all other words at their will, this phrase only, as detecting their heresy, do they dread, which the Fathers did set down as a bulwark against their impious speculations one and all," de Syn. § 45. And Epiphanius calls it [ sundesmos pisteos ], Ancor. 6. And again he says, "Without the confession of the 'One in substance' no heresy can be refuted; for as a serpent hates the smell of bitumen, and the scent of sesame-cake, and the burning of agate, and the smoke of storax, so do Arius and Sabellius hate the notion of the sincere profession of the 'One in substance.'" And Ambrose, "That term did the Fathers set down in their formula of faith, which they perceived to be a source of dread to their adversaries; that they themselves might unsheathe the sword which cut off the head of their own monstrous heresy." de Fid. iii. 15.

 This is very true, but a question arises whether another and a better test than the homoüsion might not have been chosen, one eliciting less opposition, one giving opportunities to fewer subtleties; and on this point a few words shall be said here.

 Two ways, then, lay before the Fathers at Nicæa of condemning and eliminating the heresy of Arius, who denied the proper divinity of the Son of God. By means of either of the two a test would be secured for guarding the sacred truth from those evasive professions and pretences of orthodoxy, which Arius himself, to do him justice, did not ordinarily care to adopt. Our Lord's divinity might be adequately defined either (1) by declaring Him to be in and of the essence of the Father, or (2) to be with the Father from everlasting, that is, by defining Him to be either consubstantial or co-eternal with God. Arius had denied both doctrines; "He is not eternal," he says, "or co-eternal, or co-ingenerate with the Father, nor has He His being together with Him." And "The Son of God is not consubstantial with God." Syn. § 15, 16 (vid. also Epiph. Hær. 69, 7). Either course then would have answered the purpose required: but the Council chose that which at first sight seems the less advisable, the more debatable of the two; it chose the "Homoüsion" or "Consubstantial," not the Co-eternal.

 Here it is scarcely necessary to dwell on a statement of Gibbon, which is strange for so acute and careful a writer. He speaks as if the enemies of Arius at Nicæa were at first in a difficulty how to find a test to set before the Council which might exclude him from the Church, and then accidentally became aware that the Homoüsion was such an available term. He says that in the Council a letter was publicly read and ignominiously torn, in which the Arian leader, Eusebius of Nicomedia, " ingenuously confessed that the admission of the Homoüsion, a word already familiar to the Platonists, was incompatible with the principles of his theological system. The fortunate opportunity was eagerly embraced by the bishops who governed the resolutions of the Synod," etc., ch. xxi. He adds in a note, "We are indebted to Ambrose (vid. de Fid. iii. 15,) for the knowledge of this curious anecdote." This comes of handling theological subjects with but a superficial knowledge of them; it is the way in which foreigners judge of a country which they enter for the first time. Who told Gibbon that Arius's enemies and the governing bishops did not know from the first of the Arian rejection of this word "consubstantial"? who told him that there were not other formulæ which Arius rejected quite as strongly as it, and which would have served as a test quite as well? As I have quoted above, he had publicly said, "The Son is not equal, no, nor consubstantial with God," and "Foreign to the Son in substance is the Father;" and, as to matter already provided by him for other tests, he says in that same Thalia, "When the Son was not yet, the Father was already God;" "Equal, or like Himself, He [the Father] has none" (vid. Syn. § 15), etc., etc. S. Ambrose too was not baptised till A.D. 374, a generation after the Nicene Council, and his report cannot weigh against contemporary documents; nor can his words at that later date receive Gibbon's interpretation. It was not from any dearth of tests that the Fathers chose the Homoüsion; and the question is, why did they prefer it to [ sunaidion, anarchon, ageneton ], etc., etc.?

 The first difficulty attached to "consubstantial" was that it was not in Scripture, which would have been avoided had the test chosen been "from everlasting," "without beginning," etc.; a complaint, however, which came with a bad grace from the Arians, who had begun the controversy with phrases of their own devising, and not in Scripture. But, if the word was not Scriptural, it had the sanction of various Fathers in the foregoing centuries, and was derived from a root, [ ho on ], which was in Scripture. Nor could novelty be objected to the word. Athanasius, ad Afros 6, speaks of the use of the word [ homoousion ] "by ancient Bishops, about 130 years since;" and Eusebius, supr. Decr. App. § 7, confirms him as to its ancient use in the Church: and, though it was expedient to use the words of Scripture in enunciations of revealed teaching, it would be a superstition in the Council to confine itself to them, as if the letter could be allowed to supersede the sense.

 A more important difficulty lay in the fact that some fifty or sixty years before, in the Councils occasioned by the heretical doctrine of Paulus, Bishop of Antioch, the word had actually been proposed in some quarter as a tessera against his heresy, and then withdrawn by the Fathers as if capable of an objectionable sense. Paulus, who was a sharp disputant, seems to have contended that the term either gave a material character to the Divine nature, or else, as he wished himself to hold, that it implied that there was no real distinction of Persons between Father and Son. Anyhow, the term was under this disadvantage, that in some sense it had been disowned in the greatest Council which up to the Nicene the Church had seen. But its inexpedience at one time and for one purpose was no reason why it should not be expedient at another time and for another purpose, and its imposition at Nicæa showed by the event that it was the fitting word, and justified those who selected it. But true as this is, still the question recurs why it was that the Nicene Fathers selected a term which was not in Scripture, and had on a former occasion been considered open to objection, while against "co-eternal" or "from everlasting" no opposition could have been raised short of the heretical denial of its truth; and further, whether it was not rather a test against Tritheism, of which Arius was not suspected. "Consubstantial" was a word needing a definition; "co-eternal" spoke for itself.

 Arius, it is true, had boldly denied the "consubstantial," but he had still more often and more pointedly denied the "co-eternal." The definition of the Son's eternity a parte ante would have been the destruction of the heresy. Arius had said on starting, according to Alexander, that "God was not always a Father;" "the Word was not always." "He said," says Socrates, "if the Father begot the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence." Arius himself says to his friend Eusebius, "Alexander has driven us out of our city for dissenting from his public declaration, 'As God is eternal, so is His Son.'" Again, to Alexander himself, as quoted supr., "The Son is not eternal, or co-eternal, or co-ingenerate with the Father." Vid. also Decr. § 6. Would it not, then, have avoided all the troubles which, for a long fifty or sixty years, followed upon the reception of the Homoüsion by the Nicene Council, would it not have been a far more prudent handling of the Creed of the Church, to have said "begotten from everlasting, not made," instead of introducing into it a word of doubtful meaning, already discredited, and at best unfamiliar to Catholics? This is what may be asked, and, with a deep feeling of our defective knowledge of the ecclesiastical history of the times, I answer, under correction, as follows:

 There are passages, then, in the writers of the Ante-Nicene times which suggest to us that the leading bishops in the Council were not free to act as they might wish, or as they might think best, and that the only way to avoid dangerous disputes in an assemblage of men good and orthodox, but jealous in behalf of their own local modes of thought and expression and traditional beliefs, was to meet with the utmost caution a heresy which all agreed to condemn, which all aimed at destroying. So it was, that various writers, some of them men of authority and influence, and at least witnesses to the sentiments of their day, had, in the course of the three centuries past, held the doctrine of the temporal gennesis, a doctrine which afterwards gave an excuse and a sort of shelter to the Arian misbelief. (Vid. supr. art. Arians, 3.) I am not denying that these men held with the whole Catholic Church that our Lord was in personal existence from eternity as the Word, connatural with the Father, and in His bosom; but they also held, with more or less distinctness, that He was not fully a Son from eternity, but that when, according to the Divine counsels, the creation was in immediate prospect, and with reference to it, the Word was born into Sonship, and became the Creator, the Pattern, and the Conservative Power of all that was created. These writers were such as Tatian, Theophilus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus; and if the Fathers of the Nicene Council had defined unconditionally and abruptly the Son's eternity, they would have given an opening to the Arians, who disbelieved in the eternity of the Personal Word, to gain over to their side, and to place in opposition to the Alexandrians, many who substantially were orthodox in their belief. They did not venture then, as it would seem, to pronounce categorically that the gennesis was from everlasting, lest they should raise unnecessary questions: at the same time, by making the "consubstantial" the test of orthodoxy, they provided for the logical and eventual acceptance of the Son's à parte ante eternity, on the principle, (which Athan. is continually insisting on,) "What God is, that He ever was;" and, by including among the parties anathematised at the end of the Creed "those who said that our Lord 'was not in being before He was born,'" they both inflicted an additional blow upon the Arians, and indirectly recognised the orthodoxy, and gained the adhesion, of those who, by speaking of the temporal gennesis, seemed at first sight to ascribe to our Lord a beginning of being.