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 akhronôs, ‘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)