Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Mark Edwards on Aristotle's Influence on the Nicene and Post-Nicene Theology

  

Aristotle and Nicaea

 

The adjective homoousios, ‘of one being’, is applied to Christ as Son of God in the creed which was imposed upon the bishops at Nicaea in 325. It was none the less regarded with suspicion for half a century, even by otherwise Catholic theologians, because it lacked biblical warrant and because it had hitherto been favoured only by authors with Platonizing sympathies and of dubious orthodoxy. At the same time, it was universally held that God is that subject who possesses being in its highest sense, existing only by virtue of his own existence, since he himself had vouchsafed this truth to Moses when he styled himself ‘I am’ and ‘He who is’. [Exodus 3:14 (Septuagint translation)] Hence, the Christian Trinity cannot be equated with the Plotinian triad whose first member is superior to all ousia; on the other hand, the coalescence of nous, the second member of this triad, with the god of Aristotle, and hence with the plenitude of ousia and energeia (‘essence’ and ‘actuality’), enabled Victorinus, as we shall see, to conceive of God’s threefold unity as an eternal interplay of energeia and dunamis within the triad of being, life and mind. A timeless translation of dunamis into energeia is also presupposed in the Neoplatonic understanding of nous as, on the one hand, the actuality to which all potentiality aspires in the lower cosmos and, on the other, as a concrete determination of the superabounding dunamis of the One. That the Son is the dunamis of his Father was a biblical tenet, [See 1 Corinthians 1:24] but exegetes before Nicaea concurred in understanding this word to mean ‘power’ rather than ‘potentiality’. This power, however, is exercised over a cosmos that is not (as the logic of Platonism seems to dictate) eternal: indeed, the same Moses who teaches that God is being also implies that the entire history of this world is to be reckoned in millennia rather than Platonic eons. Amongst the parties present at Nicaea, we can distinguish at least three attempts to reconcile the eternity of the Father with the temporal activity of the Son:

 

1 The most patently Aristotelian theory was that of Marcellus, Bishop of Ancyra, who opined that Christ was not always one of three persons in a Trinity, but acquired a distinct hypostasis only when he was born of Mary; before this, we can speak only of his eternal potentiality for existence, just as before its utterance a human word is potentially existent in the speaker’s mind. As doctrine this is not new – it was orthodoxy for most of the second-century apologists – but hitherto those who had chosen to express it in philosophical terms had employed the Stoic antithesis between logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos [Logos endiathetos is latent speech, or thought, peculiar to human beings; logos prophorikos is vocal utterance, which is articulate in humans but inarticulate in brutes.] rather than the Aristotelian watchwords dunamis and energeia.

 

2 Arius, like Marcellus, denied the eternity of the Son, but entertained no notion of a potential existence before he came forth ‘out of nothing’ by an act of the Father’s will. Whether the Scriptures style this event a creating or a begetting, it takes place akhronĂ´s, ‘without time’. Scholars who take this word to mean ‘timelessly’ struggle to draw a line between the timeless and the eternal; its other meaning, already known to Galen, is ‘instantaneously’, [Athanasius, On Synods 16. For an objective, though sympathetic, reconstruction of Arius’ teaching, see Wiles (1996: 9–26). On the controversy to which it gave rise, see Behr (2004), 123–149] and that, as we shall see in a later chapter, is the one accorded to it by Philoponus when he argues that the act of will which brought the world into existence out of nothing entailed no change in God. He acknowledges a transition from the potential to create to the activity of creation; the following chapter examines the Cappadocian rejoinder to Eunomius, who ascribes the begetting of Christ to the same transition, but does not admit that the Father’s potentiality for begetting or creating the Son implies the potential existence of the latter before this event. Here, the terms are more Aristotelian than their application, but the notion that acts of will are instantaneous is foreshadowed in the practical syllogism of the Nicomachean Ethics: a man grasps the major and the minor premise, ‘and straightway he walks’.

 

3 The position of Alexander of Alexandria, the victor at the Council, is subsequently expounded at length in the writings of his lieutenant and successor Athanasius. Just as Aristotle had maintained the perpetuity of the cosmos against those Platonists who subscribed to a literal reading of the Timaeus, so Athanasius urged that the Son is a product not of the Father’s will but of his nature and therefore one with him both eternally and in substance. In pursuit of this argument, Athanasius reminds his adversaries that the term ‘ingenerate’ has more than one sense; the polysemic character of the term genesis had been noted before him both by Aristotle and by Calvisius Taurus, though his own discussion is not a mere echo of either. Rather than postulate dependence, therefore, we may say that he was playing a role analogous to that of Aristotle in a controversy that mirrored the old debate on the temporality of the world. [See further Stead (1964)] (Mark Edwards, Aristotle and Early Christian Thought [Studies in Philosophy and Theology in Late Antiquity; London: Routledge, 2019], 78-80)

 

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