Historicals

"Again Origen, with Arius, can be said to have subordinated the Son to the Father. But to say this is to say little. There is no theologian in the Eastern or the Western Church before the outbreak of the Arian Controversy, who does not in some sense regard the Son as subordinate to the Father."

"Alexander who accepted virtual Sabellianism in order to ensure the defeate or arianism"

"To say that the Son was "of the substance" of the Father and that he was "cosubstantial" with him was certainly STARTLING INNOVATIONS. NOTHING comparable to this had been said in any creed or profession of faith before"

"It is much more likely that the great majority of western bishops did not know what all the fuss created by the arian controversy was about and saw no strong reason to make a long journey to a greek-speaking city for so uncertain a purpose"

"The presence of the emperor Constatine was inevitable. He was not baptised, it is doubtful if he was even a christian catechumen. But he had summoned the Council, had paid all its expenses. He was a highly interested spectator. The bishops could not have kept him out"

"IT MADE SOME DECISIONS ABOUT SETTLING REGULARLY EACH YEAR THE DATE OF EASTER AND IT LAID DOWN THE TERMS UPON WHICH THE MELITIAN SCHISM WAS TO BE HEALED (TERMS WHICH NEITHER ATHANSIUS NOR THE MELITIANS WERE UTLIMATELY TO REGARD AS SATISFACTORY"

"For nearly twenty years after Nicaea nobody mentions homoousios not even Athansius. This may be because it was much less significant than either later histrians or the ancient church or modern scholars tthought that it was"

"It [homoousios] was a word occasionally used by pagan writers"

"For many people at the beginning of the forth century the word hypostasis and the word ousia had pretty well the same meaning. They DID NOT MEAN and SHOULD NOT BE TRANSLATED, 'person' and 'substance', as they were used when at last the confunsion was cleared up and those two distinct meanings were permanently attached to these words"

"In fact for most (but not all) writers in Greek at the beginning od the controversy and for a long time after it had begun, THERE WAS NO SINGLE AGREED WORD AVILABLE AND WIDELY USED FOR WHAT GOD IS AS THREE IN DSTINCTION FROM WHAT HE IS AS ONE"

"For at least the first half of the period of 318-381, and in some cases considerably later, ousia and hypostasis are used as virtual synonyms, not in one sense only but in two"

"For him (Tertullian) God consisted of a spirit (Spiritus), a king of thinking gas. God therefore had a body and indeed was located at the outder boundaries of space. He is apparently immeasurable but not infinite…. Tertullian's materialism is, when seen at all closely, A TOTALLY DIFFRENT THING from any ideas of ousia or homoousios canvassed during the fourth century"

"The state of affaris as regards the use of hypostasis and ousia at outest of the search for the doctrine of God occasioned by the Arian Controversy can therefore be stated thus: several alternative ways of treating these terms were prevalent. They could be regarded as synonymous and used either to describe what God is as Three or what he is as One, or hypostasis could be used to describe the "Persons" of the Godhead and ousia either ignored or rejected, or hypostasis could be used for 'distinct existence' and ousia for nature, or a general state of idecision and uncertainty as to how either of them could be used could exist in a writer's mind"

"Alexander of Alexandria is no less ambiguous in his use of terms than others. He does not use the word ousia, but instead uses hypostasis for both 'person' and 'substance' or, to be more accurate, he does not make a distinction between hypostasis = 'person' and hypostasis = 'substance' … "

"… The Emperor breaks off in disgust. The translation can only be approximate because of the clumsiness and vagueness of Constatine's laguage. If it means anything it means that there is only hypostasis in the Godhead and indeed the anathema in N would fit well with this view… like Oussius, his agent, he was defeated by the semantic confusion"

"Even those who distinguished hypostasis, meaning distinct reality, from ousia, meaning 'nature' or even 'substance' most not be thought to have anticipated the later meanings of those terms gien to them in the second half of the century by the great Cappacodician theologians"

"The concept of what each Person of the Trinity is in his existence and proper form distinct from the others had not yet been distinguished from the concept of what all of them were as full and equal (or even as partial and unequal) sharers of the Godhead. Later theology would not have said that the Son was a mirror of the Person (hypostasis) of the Father, i.e. of the Father qua Father. Not only had no universally accepted term been achieved for the concept of what we would now call the 'Persons' of the Trinity (unsatisfactory though that word in certain respects is), but the concept itself had barcly dawned on the consciousness of theologians."

"In feburary 380, when he [Theodosius] was residing in Thessalonica, he issued an edict known as CUNCTOS POPULOS which delared the pro-nicene doctrine of the trinity to be the offical doctrine of the ROMAN EMPIRE and named DAMSUS OF ROME and PETER OF ALEXANDRIA as the two episcopal norms of doctrine… heretics would be punished… he faced the Arian bishop of the city with the choice of either accepting the Nicene faith or being ejected from his see. Demophilus chose exile rather than recantation and was driven out of the city… at the same time Arian Lucius was chased out of Alexandria…. "

"Only about 150 bishops attended and they appear to have been carefully chosen from areas which would be friendly to Meletius who was its president, that is areas under the influence of the see of Antioch…. one might describe the Council of Antioch two years before as a dress rehersal for this one. "

"The first question to decide about C is whether or not it was produced by the council which met in the capital city of the Roman Empire in 381. No church historian mentions the production of a creed at this council nor gives a text of it. No surviving document reproduces C until it is produced by the archdeacon of Constantinople and read out at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451, seventy years after the date at which it was supposed to have been composed. Almost no authors during those seventy years make any allusion to it nor quote a line from it."

"Immediately after the council ended, at the very end of July 381, Theodosius issued an Edict confirming its conclusions. This Edict is known as Episcopis tradi. 115 The first words are: 'We now order that all churches are to be handed over to the bishops who profess Father, Son and Holy Spirit of a single majesty, of the same glory, of one splendour, who establish no difference by sacrilegious separation, but the order of the Trinity by recognizing the Persons and uniting the Godhead. It will be clear that these are united in communion with Nectarius bishop of the Church of Constantinople, and also Timothy bishop of the city of Alexandria in Egypt. It would be clear that they will communicate also in the regions of Oriens with Pelagius bishop of Laodicea and Diodore bishop of Tarsus; in both pro-consular Asia and the diocese of Asia with Amphilochius bishop of Iconium and Optimus bishop of [Pisidian) Antioch; in the diocese of Pontus with Helladius bishop of Caesarea and Gregory bishop of Nyssa, Terennius bishop of Scythia, Marmarius bishop of Marcianopolis.' Anyone who refused to communicate with these is declared to be an heretic and is to be refused office in the church. By this Edict Theodosius finally and decisively rendered the pro-Nicene version of the Christian faith the official religion of the Roman Empire. It is to be noted that his norms of doctrine have changed a little since he issued Cunctos populos more than a year before. The bishop of Rome is not mentioned, though there is no reason to think that Theodosius no longer regarded Damasus as a norm of doctrine."

"In fact all greek-speaking writers in the fourth century were to a greater or lesser degree INDEBTED TO GREEK PHILOSOPHY"

"If we ask the question, what was considered to constitute the ultimate authority in doctrine during the period reviewed in these pages, there can be only one answer. THE WILL OF THE EMPEROR WAS THE FINAL AUTHORITY"

"When Constatine is represented by Athanasius as saying brusquely to the pro-Nicenes at Milan who alleged that he was transgressing ecclesiastical law, "BUT WHAT I WISH, THAT MUST BE REGARDED AS CANON" he summarizes in a sentence the situation which did in fact prevail over most of this time"

"Simonetti remarks that the Emperor was in fact the head of the church"

"EVERYBODY RECOGNISED THE RIGHT OF AN EMPEROR TO CALL A COUNCIL OR EVEN TO VETO OR QUASH ITS BEING CALLED… Constatine TOOK PART IN THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA and ensured that it reached the kind of conclusion which he thought best."

"Constantius [not to be confused with Constatine] interfered continually in the councils, threatening, arguing, manipulating either in person or by his agents."

"THEODOSIUS DID NOT IMITATE CONSTATINE BECAUSE HE REFRAINED FROM PERSOANLLY ATTEDNING…. BUT HE WATCHED IT CAREFULLY AND MADE SURE THAT IT DID NOT MOVE IN ANY DIRECTION OF WHICH HE DISAPPROVED"

"CONSTATINE IN OTHER RESPECTS BEHAVED DESPOTICALLY TOWARDS THE CHURCH WHEN HE THOUGHT IT NECCESARY. HE WRITS TO THE CHURCHES AFTER NICAEA LIKE A MEDIAEVAL POPE. HE DETACHES A BRIEF, BRUTAL MESSAGE TO THEODOTUS OF LAODICEA THAT IF HE DOES NOT ACCEPT THE DECISIONS OF NICAEA HE WILL SUFFER THE FATE OF EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDKIA AND THEOGNIS OF NICAEA - DEPOSITION AND EXILE…. "

"CONSTANTINUS REGARDED HIMSELF AS THE RULER OF THE CHURCH"

"And if the Pope could provide no authority to rival that of the Emperor, far less could any council. The history of the period shows time and time again that local councils were manipulated by, overawed or the very invention and creation of the Emperor. General councils, or councils aspiring to be general, were the children of imperial policy, and the Emperor was expected to dominate and control them."

"Even Damasus [i.e. the bishop of Rome] would have admitted that he could not call a general council on his own authority."

"Constatine… whom Eusebius of Caesarea treated almost as a god, was unable to IMPOSE the creed of Nicaea on his subjects for more than a short time"

"There is an extraordinary contrast, for example, between the versions of the Church's teaching given by the second-century Apostolic Fathers and by an accomplished fifth-century theologian like Cyril of Alexandria"

"Philosophy was the deeper religion of most intelligent people, what is more important for our purpose, its concepts provided thinkers, Christian and non-Christian alike, with an intellectual framework for expressing their ideas"

"But if there are three revealed in the economy, there is in fact only one God, since it is the Father Who commands, the Son who obeys and the Spirit who makes us understand… Judged by post Nicene standards, his [Hippolytus'] language has a subordinationist ring"

"We believe in one only God, yet subject to this dispensation, which is our word for economy, that the one only God has also a Son"

"Tertullian can say that 'The Father is the WHOLE SUBSTANCE, while the Son is a DERIVATION FROM AND PORTION OF THE WHOLE"

"Hippolytus and Tertullian were at one with Irenacus in regarding the Three revealed in the economy as **manifestations** of the plurality which they apprehended, however obscurely, in the immanent life of the Godhead. Where they were in advance of him was (a) in their attempts to make explicit the oneness of the divine power or substance of which the Three were **expressions or forms**, and (b) in their recognition of Them (Hippolytus applied the word to Father and Son only) as Persons (**personae**)… The primary sense of persona was 'mask'"