Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/355

Rh subsisted before time and before ages, as perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable" (Letter of Arius to Eus. of Nic. preserved by Theodoret, i. 5). They agreed that He was "God of God," "Light of Light," and worthy of all honour and worship. The orthodox went further, and in order to affirm that the Deity of the Son of God was absolute and not relative, infinite and not finite, asserted that He was of the same οὐσία with the Father. There Arius and Eusebius stopped, and, pressing the significance of the image of Father and Son by materialistic analogies into logical conclusions, argued that "generation" implied that "there was [a period, rather than a 'time'] when He was not," that "He was not before He was begotten." The one element, said they, which the Son did not possess by His generation was the eternal, absolute οὐσία of the Father. "We affirm," said Eusebius, in his one extant authentic letter, addressed to Paulinus of Tyre (Theod. i. 6), that "there is one Who is unbegotten, and that there also exists Another, Who did in truth proceed from Him, yet Who was not made out of His substance, and Who does not at all participate in the nature or substance of Him Who is unbegotten."

If we follow out the logical conclusions involved in the denial of the orthodox statement on this transcendental theme, it is more easy to understand the abhorrence with which the dogmatic negations of the Arians were regarded by the Catholic church. The position of Arius and Eusebius involved a virtual Ditheism, and opened the door to a novel Polytheism. After Christianity had triumphed over the gods of heathendom, Arius seemed to be reintroducing them under other names. The numerical unity of God was at stake; and a schism, or at least a divarication of interests in the Godhead, shewn to be possible. Moreover, the "Divinity" of the Incarnate Word was on this hypothesis less than God; and so behind the Deity which He claimed there loomed another Godhead, between Whom and Himself antagonism might easily be predicated. The Gnosticism of Marcion had already drawn such antagonism into sharp outline, and the entire view of the person of the Lord, thus suggested, rapidly degenerated into a cold and unchristian humanitarianism.

The exigencies of historic criticism and of the exegesis of the N.T. compelled the Arian party to discriminate between the Word, the power, the wisdom of God, and the Son. They could not deny, since God could never have been without His "Logos," that the Logos was in some sense eternal. So they took advantage of the distinction drawn in the Greek schools between λόγος ἐνδιάθετος, identifiable with the wisdom, reason, and self-consciousness of God, and λόγος προφορικός, the setting forth and going out at a particular epoch of the divine energy. The latter they regarded as the λόγος which was made flesh and might be equated with the Son. "The external (prophoric) word was a created Being made in the beginning of all things as the visible emblem of the internal (endiathetic) word, and (used as) the instrument of God's purposes towards His creation" (Newman, l.c. 199; cf. Athan. Hist. Conc. Arim. et Seleuc. cap. ii. § 18).

The orthodox party admitted the double use of the word λόγος, allowed that it answered to the eternal wisdom and also to the eternal manifestation of God, and discarding the trammels of the figurative expression by which the internal relations of the Godhead can alone be represented to us, declared that they could not carry the materialistic or temporal accompaniments of our idea of Father and Son into this "generation," and boldly accepted the sublime paradox with which Origen had refuted Sabellianism—viz. the "eternal generation of the Son." To suppose the relation between the Father and Son other than eternal was to be involved in the toils of a polytheistic emanation and Gnostic speculation. Compelled to formulate expressions about the infinite and eternal God, they concluded that any formula which divided the essence of God left infinity on the one side, and the finite on the other, i.e. that there would be, on this hypothesis, an infinite difference even in majesty and glory between the Father and the Son. This was blasphemy in the eyes of those who held the Divinity of the Son of God.

The controversy was embittered by the method in which Arius and Eusebius appealed to Holy Scripture. They urged that Godhead and participation in the divine nature were attributed to Christ in the same terms in which similar distinctions are yielded by God to other creatures, angelic, human, or physical (Theod. H. E. i. 6, 8). Thus Christ's rank in the universe might be indefinitely reduced, and all confidence in Him ultimately proved an illusion. The argument had a tone of gross irreverence, even if the leaders can be quite acquitted of blasphemous levity or intentional abuse.

One of the tactics of the Arian or Eusebian party was to accuse of Sabellianism those, like Athanasius, Eustathius, and Marcellus of Ancyra, who refused their interpretation of the relation between the Father and the Son. Doubtless many not versed in philosophical discussion were incapable of discriminating between the views of Sabellius and an orthodoxy which vehemently or unguardedly condemned the Arian position. Eusebius repudiated violently the Pantheistic tendency of the Sabellian doctrine. He is the most prominent and most distinguished man of the entire movement, and it has been plausibly argued that he was the teacher rather than the disciple of Arius. Athanasius himself made the suggestion. We learn on good authority, that of Arius himself, that they were fellow-disciples of Lucian of Antioch (ib. 5). Lucian afterwards modified his views and became a martyr for the faith, but his rationalizing spirit had had a great effect on the schools of Antioch. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, Eusebius was a distant relative of the emperor Julian, and therefore possibly of Constantine.

It may have been through the wife of Licinius and sister of Constantine that he received his first ecclesiastical appointment. This was the bishopric of Berytus (Beirout) in