III. Of the objections to which the Homoousion is exposed

in the present day, there are two which more particularly demand our attention.
(a) ‘Is not the Homoousion,’ it is said, ‘a development? Was it not rejected at the Council of Antioch sixty years before it was received at Nicea? Is not this fact indicative of a forward movement in the mind of the Church? Does it not shew that the tide of dogmatic belief was rising, and that it covered ground in the Nicene age which it had deliberately left untouched in the age preceding? And, if this be so, if we admit the prin- ciple of a perpetual growth i in the Church’s creed, why should we not accept the latest results of such a principle as un- equivocally as we close with its earlier results? If we believe that the Nicene decision is an assertion of the truth of God, why should we hesitate to adopt a similar belief respecting that proclamation of the sinless conception of the Blessed Virgin which startled Christendom twelve years ago, and which has since that date been added to the official creed of the largest section of the Christian Church ?’
Here, the first point to be considered turns on a question of words. What do we mean by a doctrinal development? Do we mean an explanation of an already existing idea or belief, pre- sumably giving to that belief greater precision and exactness in our own or other minds, but adding nothing whatever to its real area&? Or do we mean the positive substantial growth of
8 In this sense a Develcpment of Doctrine must necessarily be admitted. When the life of the individual soul is vigorous and healthy, there must be a continuously increasing knowledge of Divine Truth, St. Aug. in Joan. Ev. Tract. xiv. ὁ. 3. ἢ. 5: ‘Crescat ergo Deus qui semper perfectus est, crescat in te. Quantd enim magis intelligis Deum, et quantd magis capis, videtur in vu | Ffa2
436 True sense of the New Testament
the belief itself, whether through an enlargement from within, just as the acorn developes into the oak, or through an accretion from without of new intellectual matter gathered around it, like the aggrandisements whereby the infant colony developes into the powerful empire ?
Now if it be asked, which is the natural sense of the word ‘development,’ I reply that we ordinarily mean by it an actual enlargement of that which is said to be developed. And in that sense I proceed to deny that the Homoousion was a develop- ment. It was not related to the teaching of the apostles as an oak is related to an acorn. Its real relation to their teaching was that of an exact and equivalent translation of the language of one intellectual period into the language of another. The New Testament had taught that Jesus Christ is the Lord of nature» and of meni, of heaven, and of the spiritual world);
te crescere Deus; in se autem non crescit, sed semper perfectus est. Intel- ligebas heri modicum; intelligis hodi amplits, intelliges cras multd amplits: lumen ipsum Dei crescit in te; ita velut Deus crescit, qui semper perfectus manet. Quemadmodum si curarentur alicujus oculi ex pristina cecitate, et inciperet videre paululum lucis, et alia die plus videret, et tertia die amplits, videretur illi lux crescere: lux tamen perfecta est, sive ipse videat, sive non videat. Sic est et interior homo: proficit quidem in Deo, et Deus in illo videtur crescere; ipse tamen minuitur, ut ἃ gloria sua decidat, et in gloriam Dei surgat.? A somewhat analogous progress in the knowledge of Truth, received from Christ and His Apostles, is found in the collective Christian Society. Vincent. Lirinens, Commonit. 6. 28: ‘Nullusne ergd in Ecclesia Dei profectus? Habeatur plan? et maximus: nam quis ille est tam invidus homi- nibus, tam exosus Deo, qui illud prohibere conetur? Crescat igitur oportet, et multum vehementerque proficiat tam singulorum quam omnium, tam unius hominis quam totius ecclesia etatum ac seculorum gradibus, in- telligentia, scientid, sapientia.” Not that this increasing apprehension of the true force and bearings of the truth revealed in its fulness once for all involves any addition to or subtraction from that one unchanging body of truth. Commonit. c. 30: ‘Fas est enim ut prisca illa ccelestis philo- sophie dogmata processu temporis excurentur, limentur, poliantur; sed nefas est ut commutentur, nefas ut detruncentur, nefas ut mutilentur. Accipiant licet evidentiam, lucem, distinctionem; sed retineant necesse est plenitudinem, integritatem, proprietatem.’ There is then no real in- crease in the body of truth committed to the Church, but only a clearer perception on the part of the Church of the force and bearings of that truth which she had possessed in its completeness from the first. With some few drawbacks, this is fairly stated by Staudenmaier, Wetzer and Welte’s Diction. Encycl. ; art. Dogma.
h St. John v.17; St. Matt. viii. 3,13; ix. 6, 22, 25, 29; St. John iv. 50; v. 8. This power over nature He delegated to others: St. Matt. x. 1, 8; St. Mark xvi. 17; St. Luke x. 17; St. John xiv. 12; Acts iii. 6, 12, 16; ix. 343. xvi. 18. 1 St. Matt. xxviii. 18-20; St. John v. 21, 22; xvii. 2.
4 St. Matt. vii. 21, 23; xviii. 18; xxvi. 64; St. Johni. 51; xx. é ete.
LECT.
embodied in the Homoousion. 437
that He is the world’s Legislator, its King and its Judge *; that He is the Searcher of hearts!, the Pardoner of sins ™, the Well- spring of life2; that He is Giver of true blessedness and salva- tion 9, and the Raiser of the dead P; it distinctly attributed to Him omnipresence 4, omnipotence, omniscience®; eternity *, absolute likeness to the Father¥, absolute oneness with the Father, an equal share in the honour due to the Father Y, a like claim upon the trust 2, the faith®, and the love» of humanity. The New Testament had spoken of Him as the Creator® and Preserver of the world 4, as the Lord of all things, as the King of kings®, the Distributor of all graces f, the Brightness of the Father’s Glory and the Impress of His Being 8; as being in the form of God}, as containing in Himself all the fulness of the Godhead i, as being God‘. This and much more to the same purpose had been said in the New Testament. When therefore the question was raised whether Jesus Christ was or was not ‘of one substance with’ the Father, it became clear that of two courses one must be adopted. Either an affirmative answer must be given, or the teaching of the apostles themselves must
k St. Matt. v.-vii.; xi. 29, 30; xv. 18; xviii. 19; xxv. 34, 40; St. John viii. 36; xiv. 21; xv. 12; xx. 23, ete. _ | St. John i. 47-50; ii. 24, 25; iv. 17, 18; vi. 15, 70; xvi. 19, 32; Rev. i: 23. τὸ St. Matt. ix. 2, 6; St. Luke v. 20, 24; vii. 48; xxiv. 47; and St. John xx. 23, where He delegates the absolving power to others.
o St. John iv. 13, 14; v. 21, 26, 40; vi. 47, 51-58; x. 28.
ο St. Matt. vii. 21 sq.; St. John vi. 39, 40; x. 28; Actsiv.12; Heb. i. 10, 14.
P St.John v. 21, 25; xi. 25. Christ raises Himself from death: St. John his l OH ΧΟ 18.
4 Ibid. iii. 13; St. Matt. xviii. 20.
τ St. Matt. xxviii. 18; Phil. iii. 21; Heb. i. 3.
® St. Matt. xi. 27; St. John iii. 11-13; vi. 46; x. 153 Col. ii. 3.
* St. John viii. 58; xvii. 5; Rev. i. 8; ii. 8; xxii. 12, 13.
2 St. John v. 17, 19, 21, 26; x. 28, 29; xiv. 7.
Σ Ibid. x. 28, 30; xiv. 10. αν. ΔΆ.
5. Ibid. xiv. 1; xvi. 33; Col. i. 27; St. Matt. xii. 21.
® St. John vi. 27; 1 St. John iii. 23; Acts xvi, 31; xx. 21.
b 1 Cor. xvi. 22; St. John xiv. 23.
ὁ St. John i. 3; Col. i. 16; Heb. i. 2, 10.
4 Col. i. 17; Heb. i. 3.
9 Acts x. 36; Jude 4; Rev. xvii. 14; xix. τό,
f St. John i. 12, 14, 16,17; 2 Thess. ii. 16.
& Heb. i. 3; Col. i. 15; 2 Cor. iv. 4.
h Phil. ii. 6. i Col. ii. 9; St. John i. 14, τό.
* St. John. i. 1; Acts xx. 28; Rom. ix. 5; Titus ii, 13; 1 St. John v. 20. Compare Rom, viii, 9-11 with Rom, xiv, 10-12, vi
438 Why the Homoousion was rejected
be explained away! As a matter of fact the Nicene fathers only affirmed, in the philosophical language of the fourth century, what our Lord and the apostles had taught in the popular dialects of the first. If then the Nicene Council developed, it was a development by explanation. It was a deve- lopment which placed the intrinsically unchangeable dogma, committed to the guardianship of the Church, in its true relation to the new intellectual world that had grown up around Chris- tians in the fourth century. Whatever vacillations of thought might have been experienced here or there, whatever doubtful expressions might have escaped from theologians of the inter- vening period, no real doubt could be raised as to the meaning . of the original teachers of Christianity, or as to the true drift and main current of the continuous traditional belief of the Church. The Nicene divines interpreted in a new language the belief of their first fathers in the faith. They did not enlarge it; they vehemently protested that they were simply preserving and handing on what they had received. The very pith of their objection to Arianism was its novelty: it was false because it was of recent origin™, They themselves were forced to say what they meant by their creed, and they said it. Their explanation added to the sum of authoritative ecclesiastical language, but it did not add to the number of articles in the Christian faith: the area of the creed was not enlarged. The Nicene Council did not vote a new honour to Jesus Christ which He had not before possessed : it defined more clearly the original and unalterable bases of that supreme place which from the days of the apostles He had held in the thought and heart, in the speculative and active life of Christendom.
The history of the symbol Homoousion during the third century might, at first sight, seem to favour the position, that its adoption at Nica was of the nature of an accretive develop- ment. Already, indeed, Dionysius and others (perhaps Origen) had employed it to express the faith of the Church; but it had been, so to speak, disparaged and discoloured by the patronage of the Valentinians and the Manicheans. In the Catholic theo-
1 Mohler, Symbolik, p. 610: ‘ Wiiren sie (the Socinians) schirfere Denker gewesen, so mussten sie zur Einsicht gelangen, dass, wenn das Evangelium den Sohn als ein persénliches Wesen, und zugleich als Gott darstellt, wie — die Socinianer nicht laiigneten (Christ. Relig. institut. bibl. frat. Pol. tom. i. p.655. Es wird Joh.i.1; xx. 21 citirt.), kein anderes Verhiltniss zwischen ihm und dem Vater denkbar sei, als jenes, welches die katholische Kirche von Anfang an geglaubt hatte.’ ™ Socr. Hist. Eccl. Ἷ 6.
LECT,
at Antioch and adopted at Nicea. ; 439
logy the word denoted full participation in the absolute self- existing Individuality of God ®. Besides this, the word suggested the distinct personality of its immediate Subject; unless it had suggested this, it would have been tautologous. In ordinary language it was applied to things which are only similar to each other, and are considered as one by an abstraction of our minds. No such abstraction was possible in the contemplation of God. His οὐσία is Himself, peculiar to Himself, and One; and there- fore to be ὁμοούσιος with Him is to be internal to that Uncreated Nature Which is utterly and necessarily separate from all created beings. But the Valentinians used the word to denote the relation of their AZons to the Divine Pleroma; and the Mani- cheans said that the soul of man was ὁμοούσιον τῷ Θεῷ, In ἃ materialistic sense. When then it was taken into the service of these Emanatist doctrines, the Homoousion implied nothing higher than a generic or specific bond of unity®, These uses of the word implied that οὐσία itself was something beyond God, and moreover, as was suggested by its Manichzan associations, something material. Paulus of Samosata availed himself of this depreciation of the word to attack its Catholic use as being really materialistic. Paulus argued that ‘if the Father and the Son were ὁμοούσιοι, there was some common οὐσία in which they partook,’ higher than, and ‘distinct from, the Divine Persons themselves Ρ.’ Firmilian and Gregory were bent, not upon the philological object of restoring the word ὁμοούσιος to its real sense, but upon the religious duty of asserting the true relation of the Son to the Father, in language the meaning of which would be plain to their contemporaries. The Nicene Fathers, on the other hand, were able, under altered circumstances, to vindicate for the word its Catholic meaning, unaffected by any
» St. Cyril of Alexandria defines οὐσία as πρᾶγμα αὐθύπαρκτον, μὴ δεόμενον ἑτέρου πρὸς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ σύστασιν. Apud Suicer, in voc, οὐσία, As οὐσία meant sometimes individuality or personality, ὁμοούσιον had for some minds even a Sabellian import.
© ὋὍμοούσιος properly means of the same nature—i.e. under the same general nature or species. It is applied to things which are but similar to each other, and are considered as one by an abstraction of our minds. Thus Aristotle speaks of the stars being " ὁμοούσια with each other.’ Newman, Arians, p. 203. ‘Walentinianism,’ he says (p. 206), ‘applied the word to the Creator and His creatures in this its original philosophical sense. The Manichees followed... . they too were Emanatists,’ kc. But such a usage offends against ‘the great revealed principle’ of ‘the incommunicable.... Individuality of the Divine Exssence:’ according to which principle ὅμο- οὐσιος, as used of the Son, defined Him as ‘necessarily included in That Individuality.’ See Dr. Newman’s valuable note on St. Athanasius’ Trea- tises, i. 152, note a (Libr. Fath.); Ibid. 35, note ¢; and Soc. i. 8.
Ρ ; ewman, Arians, p. 209. See the whole passage.
Vil
440 Adoption of the Homoousion not to be paralleled
Emanatist gloss; and accordingly, in their hands it protected the very truth which at Antioch, sixty years earlier, it would have obscured. St. Athanasius tells us that ‘the fathers who deposed the Samosatene took the word Homoousion in a corporeal sense. For Paulus sophisticated by saying that if.... Christ was consubstantial with the Father, there must necessarily be three substances, one which was prior and two others spring- ing from it. Therefore, with reason, to avoid that sophism of Paulus, the fathers said that Christ was not consubstantial, that is, that He was not in that relation to the Father which Paulus had in his mind. On the other hand,’ continues St. Athanasius, ‘those who condemned the Arian heresy saw through the cunning of Paulus, and considered that in things incorporeal, especially in God, “ consubstantial” did not mean what he had supposed ; so they, knowing the Son to be begotten of the Substance,..... with reason called Him consubstantial4.’ Paulus, as a subtle and hardheaded dialectician, had endeavoured to connect with the term a sense, which either made the Son an inferior being or else destroyed the Unity of God. He used the word, so St. Hilary says, as mischievously as the Arians rejected the use of it'; while the fathers at Antioch set it aside from a motive as loyal to Catholic truth as was that which led to its adoption at Nicea’, Language is worth, after all, just what it means to those who employ it. Origen had rejected and Tertullian had defended the προβολὴ from an identical theological motive; and the opposite lines of action, adopted by the Councils of Antioch and Nica respectively, are so far from proving two distinct beliefs respect- ing the higher Nature of Jesus Christ, that when closely examined, they exhibit an absolute identity of creed and purpose brought
a St. Athan. De Synodis, § 45; cf. Cave, Hist. Lit. i. 134. ‘Non aliud dicit Athanasius quam Paulum ex detorto Catholicorum vocabulo sophis- ticum argumentum contra Christi Divinitatem excogitasse; nempe, nisi confiteremur Christum ex homine Deum factum esse, sequeretur ipsum Patri esse ὁμοούσιον, ac proinde tres esse substantias, unam quidem pri- mariam, duas ex illa derivatas: σωματικῶς enim et crasso sensu vocabulum accepit, quasi in essentid divin, perinde ac in rebus corporeis usu venit, ut ab und substantia altera, eaque diversa, derivetur. Quocirca, ne hac voce heretici -ulterits abuterentur, silentio supprimendam censuerunt patres Antiocheni: non quod Catholicum vocis sensum damnarent, sed ut omnem sophistic cavillandi occasionem hereticis preriperent, ut ex Athanasio, Basilio, aliisque, abunde liquet.’
τ St. Hil. de Syn. 86: ‘Male Homoousion Samosatenus confessus est, sed nunquam melits Ariani negaverunt.’
5 Routh, Rel. Sacr. iii. 360, ed. 1846. See too Dr. Newman’s note 2, in St. Athanasius’ Select Treatises, i. p.166. (Oxf. Libr. Fath.), [
LECT.
with the definition of the Immaculate Conception. 441
face to face with two distinct sets of intellectual circumstances. The faith and aim of the Church was one and unchanging. But the question, whether a particular symbol would represent her mind with practical accuracy, received an answer at Antioch which would have been an error at Nicwa. The Church looked hard at the Homoousion at Antioch, when heresy had perverted its popular sense; and she set it aside. She examined it yet more penetratingly at Nica; and from then until now it has been the chosen symbol of her unalterable faith in the literal Godhead of her Divine Head.
Therefore between the imposition of the Homoousion and the recent definition of the Immaculate Conception, there is no real correspondence. It is not merely that the latter is accepted only by a section of the Christian Church, and was promulgated by an authority whose modern claims the fathers of Niceea would have regarded with sincere astonishment. The difference between the two cases is still more fundamental ; it lies in the substance of the two definitions respectively. The Nicene fathers did but assert a truth which had been held to be of primary, vital import from the first ; they asserted it in terms which brought it vividly home to the intelligence of their day. They were explaining old truth; they were not setting forth as truth that which had before been matter of opinion. But the recent definition asserts that an hypothesis, unheard of for centuries after the first promulgation of the Gospel, and then vehemently maintained and as vehe- mently controverted t by theologians of at least equal claims to orthodoxy, is a fact of Divine revelation, to be received by all who would receive the true faith of the Redeemer. In the one case an old truth is vindicated by an explanatory reassertion; in the other the assertion of a new fact is added to the Creed. The Nicene fathers only maintained in the language of their day the original truth that Jesus Christ is God: but the question whether the Couception of Mary was or was not sinless is a distinct question of fact, standing by itself, with no necessary bearing upon her office in the economy of the Incarnation, and not related in the way of an explanatory vindication of any originally revealed truth beyond it. It is one thing to reassert the revealed Godhead of Jesus; it is,in principle, a fundament- ally distinct thing to ‘decree a new honour’ to Mary. The Nicene
* Cf. especially the treatise of the Dominican, John de Torquemada, Cardinal de Turrecremata, entitled, Tractatus de Veritate Conceptionis B, ie Rome, 1547, 4t0; Oxon. 1869. ed. Pusey. Note H in App. Vil ᾿
442 Explanations of, and additions to, the Faith.
decision is the act of a Church believing itself commissioned to guard a body of truth which had been delivered from heaven in its integrity, once for all. The recent definition appears to presuppose a Church which can do more than guard the ancient faith, which is empowered to make actual additions to the num- ber of revealed certainties, which is the organ no less than the recipient of a continuous revelation", It is one thing to say that language has changed its value, and that a particular term which was once considered misleading will now serve to vindicate an acknowledged truth ; it is another thing to claim the power of transfiguring a precarious and contradicted opinion, resting on no direct scriptural or primitive testimony, and impugned in terms by writers of the date and authority of Aquinas ¥*, into a certainty, claiming submission from the faith of Christendom on nothing less than a Divine authority. There is then no real rea- son for the statement that those who now reject the Immaculate
« T have been reminded that Roman Catholics do not admit this (see the ‘Month,’ Nov. 1867), and, at the instance of my reviewer, I quote with pleasure the following language of the Bull Jneffabilis, which is sub- stantially that of Vincent of Lerins, and which will command the assent of English Churchmen. The Church of Christ, says the Bull, ‘sedula depositorum apud se dogmatum custos, et vindex, nihil in his unquam permutat, nihil minuit, nihil addit, sed omni industria vetera fideliter sapienterque tractando si qu’ antiquitis informata sunt, et Patrum fides sevit, ita limare expolire studet, ut prisea illa ceelestis doctrine dogmata accipiant evidentiam, lucem, distinctionem, sed retineant plenitudinem, integritatem, proprietatem, ac in suo tantum genere crescant, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eidemque sententia,’ p.11. But the ques- tion is whether, if the principle thus stated had been really adhered to, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary could have been defined to be an article of necessary faith. It is one thing to propose a new and necessary definition or explanation of a truth which has been confessed from the first; it is another thing to say that a fact, the truth vf which has been controverted by ἃ series of writers of the highest au- thority, is now so certain that it must be received as matter of faith. Should not the ‘nihil addit’ of the Bull alone have sufficed to render the definition impossible? See Observations d’un Théologien sur la Bulle de Pie IX, relative ἃ la Conception de la Sainte Vierge, Paris, 1855, pp. 28-38; La Croyance ἃ l’Immaculée Conception de la Sainte Vierge ne peut devenir dogme de foi, par M.1l’Abbé Laborde, Paris, 1854, pp. 77-83. Can the assertion that the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin is a cer- tainty of faith, be really rested upon any other ground, than an assumption in the modern Church of some power to discern and proclaim truths which were altogether unknown to the Church of the Apostles ?
x Sum. Th. iii. a. 27, q. 2: ‘B. Virgo contraxit quidem originale pec- catum, sed ab eo fuit mundata antequam ex utero nasceretur.’ Cf. St. Bernard. Ep. 174; Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, vii. 7. 4; St. Bonaventur. Sent. iii. Dist. 3, pars i. art. i. quest. 2.
[ LECT.
Was the Nicene definition necessary? 443
Conception would of old have rejected the Homoousion. There is nothing to shew that those who bow with implicit faith before the Nicene decision are bound, as a matter of consistency, to yield the same deference of heart and thought to the most modern development of doctrine within the Latin portion of Catholic Christendom.
(8) But it may be rejoined: ‘Why was a fresh definition deemed needful at Nicea at all? Why could not the Church of the Nicene age have contented herself with saying that Jesus Christ is God, after the manner of the Church of earlier days? Why was the thought of Christendom to be saddled with a metaphysical symbol which at least transcends, if it does not destroy, the simplicity of the Church’s first faith in our Lord’s Divinity 9”
(1) Now the answer is simply as follows. In the Arian age it was not enough to say that Jesus Christ is God, because the Arians had contrived to impoverish and degrade the idea con- - veyed by the Name of God so completely as to apply that sacred word to a creature ¥. Of course, if it had been deemed a matter of sheer indifference whether Jesus Christ is or is not God, it would have been a practical error to have insisted on the truth of His real Divinity, and an equivocal expression might have been allowed to stand. If the Church of Christ had been, not the school of revealed truth, in which the soul was to make knowledge the food and stimulant of love, but a world-wide de- bating club, ‘ever seeking and never coming to the knowledge of the truth,’ it would then have been desirable to keep this and all other fundamental questions open%. Perhaps in that case the Nicene decision might with truth have been described as the ‘greatest misfortune that has happened to Christendom.’ But the Church believed herself to possess a revelation from God, essential to the eternal well-being of the soul of man. She further believed that the true Godhead of Jesus Christ was a clearly-revealed truth of such fundamental and capital import,
Υ In the same way modern Socinians ‘believe in the Divinity of Christ.’ Channing, Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered, Works, vol. ii. p. 361. Yet they also believe that Christ ‘is a Being distinct from the one God.’ Ibid. p.510. Such a confession of Christ’s ‘Divinity’ implies of course no more than might be said of St. John, and shews how completely language may be emptied of its original value. Cf. Lect. I. p. 26.
* See the letter addressed in Constantine’s name to St. Alexander and to Arius (Soc. i. 7), in which the writer—probably Eusebius of Nicomedia— insists ‘that the points at issue are minute and trivial.’ Bright’s Hist, Ch. p.20. Neale, Hist, Alex. i. 134.
vu |
444 Practeal temper of St. Athanasius.
that, divorced from it, the creed of Christendom must perish outright. Plainly therefore it was the Church’s duty to assert this truth in such language as might be unmistakably expressive of it. Now this result was secured by the Homoousion. It was at the time of its first imposition, and it has been ever since, a working criterion of real belief in the Godhead of our Lord. It excluded the Arian sense of the word God, and on this account it was adopted by the orthodox. How much it meant was proved by the resistance which it then encountered, and by the subsequent efforts which have been made to destroy or to evade it. The sneer of Gibbon about the iota which separates the semi-Arian from the Catholic symbol* (Homoiousion from Homo- ousion) is naturally repeated by those who believe that nothing was really at stake beyond the emptiest of abstractions, and who can speak of the fourth century as an age of meaningless logo- machies. But to men who are concerned, not with words, but with the truths which they enshrine, not with the mere historic setting of a great struggle, but with the vital question at issue in it, the full importance of the Nicene symbol will be sufficiently obvious. The difference between Homoiousion and Homoousion convulsed the world for the simple reason, that in that difference lay the whole question of the real truth or falsehood of our Lord’s actual Divinity. If in His Essence He was only like God, He was still a distinct Being from God, and therefore either created, or (per tmpossibile) a second God. In a great engage- ment, when man after man is laid low in defence of the colours of his regiment, it might seem to a bystander, unacquainted with the forms of war, a prodigious absurdity that so great a sacrifice of life should be incurred for a piece of silk or cotton of a parti- cular hue; and he might make many caustic epigrams at the expense of the struggling and suffering combatants. But a soldier would tell him that the flag is a symbol of the honour and prowess of his country; and that he is not dying for a few yards of coloured material, but for the moral and patriotic idea which the material represents. If ever there was a man who was not the slave of language, who had his eye upon ideas, truths, facts, and who made language submissively do their work, that man was the great St. Athanasius. He advocated the Homoousion at Niczea, because he was convinced that it was the sufficient and necessary symbol and safeguard of the treasure
« An equally reasonable sneer might be levelled, on Pantheistic grounds, at the number of letters which distinguishes ‘Creature’ from ‘ or 7: LECT.
Value of Creeds at the present day. 445
of truth committed to the Church: but years afterwards, he would not press it upon semi-Arians whom he knew to be at heart loyal to the truth which it protected, He was sure that, if he gave them time, they would end by accepting it. And during fifteen centuries experience has not shewn that any large num- ber of real believers in our Saviour’s Godhead have objected to the Nicene statement; while its efficacy in guarding against a lapse into Arian error has amply confirmed the far-sighted wis- dom, which, full of jealousy for the rightful honour of Jesus®, and of charity for the souls of men, has incorporated it for ever with the most authoritative profession of faith in the Divinity of Christ which is possessed by Christendom.
(2) It may indeed be urged that freedom from creeds is ideally and in the abstract the highest state of Christian com- munion. It may be pleaded that a public confession of faith will produce in half-earnest and superficial souls a formal and mechanical devotion; that the exposure of the most sacred truth in a few condensed expressions to the scepticism and irreverence of those who are strangers to its essence will lead to inevitable ribaldry and scandal. But it is sufficient to reply that these liabilities do not outweigh the necessity for a clear ‘form of sound words,’ since formalists will be formal, and sceptics will be irreverent, with or without it. And those who depreciate creeds among us now, do not really mean to recom- mend that truth should be kept hidden, as in the first centuries, in the secret mind of the Church: they have far other purposes in view. Rousseau might draw pictures of the superiority of simple primitive savage life to the enervated civilization of Paris; but it would not have been prudent in the Parisians at the end of the last century to have attempted a return to the barbaric life of their ancestors, who had roamed as happy savages in the great forests of Europe. The Latitudinarians who suggest that the Church might dispense with the Catholic
> De Synod. 41: Πρὸς δὲ τοὺς ἀποδεχομένους τὰ μὲν ἄλλα πάντα τῶν ἐν Νικαίᾳ γραφέντων, περὶ δὲ μόνον τὸ μοούσιον ἀμφιβάλλοντας, χρὴ μὴ ὡς πρὸς ἐχθροὺς διακεῖσθαι... . GAA’ ὡς ἀδελφοὶ πρὸς ἀδελφοὺς διαλεγόμεθα, τὴν αὐτὴν μὲν ἡμῖν διάνοιαν ἔχοντας, περὶ δὲ τὸ ὄνομα μόνον διστάζοντας... .. οὐ μακράν εἰσιν ἀποδέξασθαι καὶ τὴν τοῦ “Ομοουσίου λέξιν. He repeatedly declares that the Homoousion in its Nicene sense is intended to guard the reality of the Divine Sonship as being uncreated. Ibid. 39, 45, 48, 54.
¢ St. Athanasius’ ‘zeal for the Consubstantiality had its root in his loyalty to the ConsuBSTANTIAL. He felt that in the Nicene dogma were involved the worship of Christ and the life of Christianity.’ Bright’s Hist. Ch. p. 149. Vil
46 Especial claims of the Nicene Creed.
creeds, advise us to revert to the defencelessness of ecclesiastical childhood. But, alas! they cannot guarantee to us its innocence, or its immunities. We could not, if we would, reverse the thought of centuries, and ignore the questions which heresy has opened, and which have been cecumenically decided. We might not thus do despite to the kindly providence of Him, Who, with the temptations to faith that came with the predestined course of history, has in the creeds opened to us such ‘a way to escape that we may be able to bear them.’
Certainly if toil and suffering confer a value on the object which they earn or preserve; if a country prizes the liberties which were baptized in the blood of her citizens; if a man rejoices in the honour which he has kept unstained at the risk of life; then we, who are the heirs of the ages of Christendom, should cling with a peculiar loyalty and love to the great Nicene confession of our Lord’s Divinity. For the Nicene definition was wrung from the heart of the agonized Church by a denial of the truth on which was fed, then as now, her inmost life. In the Arian heresy the old enemies of the Gospel converged as for a final and desperate effort to achieve its destruction. The carnal, gross, external, Judaizing spirit, embodied in the frigid literalism of the school of Antioch; the Alexandrian dialectics, substituting philosophical placita for truths of faith; nay, Paganism itself, vanquished in the open field, but anxious to take the life of its conqueror by private assassination ;—these were the forces which reappeared in Arianism 4, It was no mere exasperation of rhetoric which saw Porphyry in Arius, and which compared Constantius to Diocletian. The life of Athana- sius after the Nicene Council might well have been lived before the Edict of Milan. Arianism was a political force; it ruled at court. Arianism was a philosophical disputant, and was at home in the schools. Arianism was, moreover, a proselytizer ; it had verses and epigrammatic arguments for the masses of the people; and St. Gregory of Nyssa, in a passage® which is
4 St. Greg. Nyssa, contr. Eunom. xii. p. 728. Arianism is 7 τῆς ᾿Ιουδαϊκῆς ἀπάτης συνήγορυς, ἐχουσά τι καὶ τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς ἀθεΐας. So St. Gregory Nazianz. (Orat. i. vol. i. p. 16) describes the Arian conception of the Divine Nature as marked by an ᾿Ιουδαϊκὴ πενία, meaning the hard abstract mono- theism of the later Jewish creed. Quoted by Baur, Lehre von der Drei- einigkeit. i. pp. 352, 353, note.
6 See Dr. Newman’s translation of it in Athan. Treatises, i. 213, note a: ‘Men of yesterday and the day before, mere mechanics, off-hand dogmatists in theology, servants too, and slaves that have been flogged .... are solemn with us and philosophical about things incomprehensible. t . Ask
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classical, has described its extraordinary success among the lower orders. Never was a heresy stronger, more versatile, more endowed with all the apparatus of controversy, more sure, as it might have seemed, of the future of the world. It was a long, desperate struggle, by which the original faith of Christ conquered this fierce and hardy antagonist. At this day the Creed of Nicwa is the living proof of the Church’s victory’; and as we confess it we should, methinks, feel somewhat of the fire of our spiritual ancestors, some measure of that fresh glow of thankfulness, which is due to God after a great deliverance, although wrought out in a distant age. To unbelief this creed may be only an ecclesiastical ‘ test,’ only an additional ‘incubus,’ weighing down ‘honest religious thought.’ But to the children of faith, the Nicene confession must ever furnish the welcome expression of their most cherished conviction. Let us hence- forth repeat it, at those most solemn moments when the Church puts it into our mouths, with a renewed and deepened sense of gratitude and joy. Not as if it were the mere trophy of a con- troversial victory, or the dry embodiment of an abstract truth in the language of speculation, should we welcome this glorious creed to our hearts and lips. Rather let us greet it, as the intellectual sentinel which guards the shrine of faith in our inmost souls from the profanation of error; as the good angel who warns us that since the Incarnation we move in the very ante-chamber of a Divine Presence; as a mother’s voice re- ‘minding us of that tribute of heartfelt love and adoration, which is due from all serious Christians to the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour and our God. about pence, and he will discuss the Generate and Ingenerate; inquire the price of bread, he answers, ‘‘Greater is the Father, and the Son is sub- ject ;” say that a bath would suit you, and he defines that the Son is out of nothing.’ See also St. Athan. Orat. Ari. i. 22, on the profane questions put to boys and women in the Agora; and Ibid. 4 sqq. on the ‘ Thalia’ of Arius, Cf, also St. Greg. Nyssen, De Deitate Filii et Sp. Sancti, Opp. iii. 466, _ | The stress here laid upon the Nicene Creed will not be supposed to imply forgetfulness of the great claims, ‘in its due place, of the symbol Quicunque. Coleridge, indeed, has said that the Athanasian Creed is, in his judgment, ‘heretical in the omission or implicit denial of the Filial subordination in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed.’ (Table-Talk, p. 41.) But when the Athanasian Creed asserts that the Son is ‘of the Father,’ it virtually affirms the Subordination; and when the Nicene Creed calls the Son ‘Very God’ and ‘Consubstantial,’ it em- phatically confesses the Coequality. Coleridge’s judgment can only be sustained by supposing that the Nicene Creed teaches a doctrine of Sub- ordination in which the Nicene Council would assuredly have detected Ge Sce Bright, Sermons of St. Leo, note 99. vil ἢ
LECTURE VIII.
SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE DOCTRINE OF OUR LORD’S DIVINITY.
He That spared not His Own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things ?—Rom. viii. 32.
Or late years we have been familiarized with cautions and protests against what has been termed by way of disparagement ‘Inferential Theology. And no one would deny that in all ages of the Church, the field of theology has been the scene of hasty, unwarrantable, and misleading inferences. False con- clusions have been drawn from true premisses ; and very doubt- ful or false premisses have been occasionally assumed if not asserted to be true. Moreover, some earnest believers have seemed to forget that in a subject-matter such as the creed of Christendom, they are confessedly below truth and not above it. They have forgotten that it is given us here to see a part only, and not the whole. In reality we can but note the outskirts of a vast economy, whose body and substance stretch far away from our gaze into infinitude. Many an intercepting truth, not the less true because unseen and unsuspected, ought to arrest the hardy and confident logic, which insists upon this or that particular conclusion as following necessarily upon these or those premises of which it is already in possession. But this caution has not always been kept in view. And when once pious affection or devout imagination have seized the reins of religious thought, it is easy for individuals or schools to wander far from the beaten paths of a clear yet sober faith, into some theological wonderland, the airiest creation of the liveliest fancy, where, to the confusion and unsettlement of souls, the wildest fiction and the highest truth may be inextricably intertwined in an entanglement of hopeless and bewildering disorder. LECT.
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But if this should be admitted, it would not follow that theology is in no sense ‘inferential.’ Within certain limits, and under due guidance, ‘inference’ is the movement, it is the life of theology. The primal records of revelation itself, as we find them in Scripture, are continually inferential; and it is at least the business of theology to observe and marshal these revealed inferences, to draw them out, and to make the most of them. The illuminated reason of the collective Church has for ages been engaged in studying the original materials of the Christian revelation. It thus has shaped, rather than created, the science of theology. What is theology, but a continuous series of ob- served and systematized inferences, respecting God in His Nature and His dealings with mankind, drawn from premises which rest upon God’s authority? Do you say that no ‘in- ference’ is under any circumstances legitimate; that no one truth in theology necessarily implies another ; that the Christian mind ought to preserve in a jealous and sterile isolation each proposition that can be extracted from Scripture? Do you suppose that the several truths of the Christian creed are so many separate, unsuggestive, unfruitful dogmas, having no traceable relations towards each other? Do you take it for granted that each revealed truth involves nothing that is not seen plainly to he on the very surface of the terms which express it? In short, are the doctrines of the Church to be regarded now as only so many barren abstractions, which a merely human speculation on divine things has from age to age drawn out into form and system? If so, of course it is natural enough to deprecate any earnest scrutiny of the worth and consequences of these abstractions; you deprecate it as in- terfering with moral and practical interests; you deem an inferential theology alike illusory and mischievous. If I here touch the secret of your thought, at least, my brethren, I admit its consistency; but then your governing premise is of a character to put you out of all relations with the Christian Church, except those of fundamental opposition. The Christian Church believes that God has really spoken; and she assumes that no subject can have a higher practical interest for man than a consideration of the worth and drift of what He has said. Of course no one would waste his time upon systematizing what he believed to be ouly a series of abstract phantoms. And if a man holds a doc- trine with so slight and doubtful a grasp that it illuminates nothing within him, that it moves nothing, that it leads on to nothing beyond itself, he is in a fair way to forfeit it altogether. vu | 68
450 What does faith in Christ's Divinity tnvolve?
We scan anxidusly and cross-question keenly only that which we really possess and cherish as solid truth: a living faith is pretty certain to draw inferences. The seed which has not shrivelled up into an empty husk cannot but sprout, if you place it beneath the sod; the living belief, which has really been implanted in the soil of thought and feeling, cannot but bear its proper flower and fruit in the moral and intellectual life of a thoughtful and earnest man. If you would arrest the growth of the seed, you must cut it off from contact with the soil, and so in time you must kill it: you may, for awhile, isolate a religious conviction by some violent moral or intellectual process; but be sure that the conviction which cannot germinate in your heart and mind is already condemned to death 8,
if theology is inferential, she infers under guidance and within restricted limits. If the eccentric reasonings of individual minds are to be received with distrust, the consent of many minds, of many ages, of many schools and orders of thought, may com- mand at least a respectful attention. 1 we reject conclusions drawn professedly from the substance of revelation, but really enlarging instead of explaining it, it does not follow that we should reject inferences which are simply explanatory, or which exhibit the bearing of one revealed truth upon another. This indeed is the most fruitful and legitimate province of inference in theological enquiry. Such ‘inference’ brings out the meaning of the details of revelation. It raises this feature to pro- minence; it throws that into the shade. It places language to which a too servile literalism might have attributed the highest force, in the lower rank of metaphor and symbol; it elicits pregnant and momentous truths from incidents which, in the absence of sufficient guidance or reflection, may have been thought to possess only a secondary degree of significance.
To-day we reach the term of those narrow limits within which some aspects of a subject in itself exhaustless have been so briefly and imperfectly discussed. And it is natural for any earnest man to ask himself—‘If I believe in Christ’s Divinity, what does this belief involve? Is it possible that such a faith can be for me a dead abstraction, having no real influence upon my daily life of thought and action? If this great doctrine be true, is there not, when I am satisfied of its truth, still some- thing to be done besides proving it? Can it be other than a
@ See, on this point, University Sermons, by Rev. R. Scott, D.D., Master of Balliol College, pp. 174-176. The rejection of ‘inferential theology” was a characteristic feature of Sadduceeism.
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Fruitfulness of the Doctrineof Christ's Divinity. 451
practical folly, to have ascertained the truth that Jesus is God, and then to consign so momentous a conclusion to a respectful oblivion in some obscure corner of my mind, as if it were a well- bound but disused book that could only ornament the shelves of a library? Must I not rather enshrine it in the very centre of my soul’s life? Must I not contemplate it, nay, if it may be, penetrate it, feed on it by repeated contemplation, that it may illuminate, sustain, transfigure my whole inward being? Must I not be reasonably anxious till this great conviction shall have moulded all that it can bear on, or that can bear on it—all that I hold in any degree for religious truth? Must not such a faith at last radiate through my every thought? Must it not in- vigorate with a new and deeper motive my every action? If Jesus, Who lived and died and rose for me, be indeed God, can my duties to Him end with a bare confession of His Divinity ἢ Will not the greatness of His Life and of His Death, will not the binding force of His commands, will not the nature and reality of His promises and gifts, be felt to have a new and deeper meaning, when I survey them in the light of this glo- rious truth? Must not all which the Divine Christ blesses and sanctions have in some sense about it, the glory and virtue of His Divinity ?’
Undoubtedly, brethren, the doctrine of Christ’s Godhead is, both in the sphere of belief and in that of morals, as fruitful and as imperious as you anticipate. St. Paul’s question in the text is in substantial harmony with the spirit of your own. St. Paul makes the doctrine of a Divine Christ, given for the sins of men to a Life of humiliation and to a Death of anguish, the premise of the largest consequences, the warrant of the most unbounded expectations. ‘He That spared not His Own Son, but gave Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?’ Let us then hasten to trace this somewhat in detail; and let us remark, in passing, that on the present oc- casion we shall not be leaving altogether the track of former lectures. For in studying the results of a given belief, we may add to the number of practical evidences in its favour; we may approach the belief itself under conditions which are more favourable for doing justice to it than those which a direct argument supplies. To contemplate such a truth as the God- head of our Lord in itself, is like gazing with open eyelids at the torturing splendour of the noon-day sun. We can best admire the sun of the natural heavens when we take note of the beauty which he sheds over the face of the world, when we mark vit | 6 8 2
452 The doctrine protects Theistic truth.
the floods of light which stream from him, and the deep shadows which he casts, and the colours and forms which he lights up and displays before us. In like manner, perchance, we may most truly enter into the meaning of the Divinity of the Sun of Righteousness, by observing the truths which depend more or less directly on that glorious doctrine,—truths on which it sheds a significance so profound, so unspeakably awful, so unspeakably consoling.
There are three distinct bearings of the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity which it is more especially of importance to consider. This doctrine protects truths prior to itself, and belonging both to natural and to revealed theology. It also illuminates the meaning, it asserts the. force of truths which depend upon itself, which are, to speak humanly, below it, and which can only be duly appreciated when they are referred to it as justifying and explaining them. Lastly, it fertilizes the Christian’s moral and spiritual life, by supplying a motive to the virtues which are most characteristically Christian, and without which Christian ethics sink down to the level of Pagan morality.