|
HOME | GREEK LANGUAGE |
LIBRARIES |
BLOG | HELP | SEARCH | BOOKSTORE | FREEWARE |
|
|
By Archibald Robertson.
St Athanasius the Great Resources Online and in Print
|
76 Pages (Part II)
Page 28
3. Fundamental Ideas of God, the World, and Creation.
The Athanasian idea of God has been singled out for special recognition in recent times; he has been claimed, and on the whole with justice, as a witness for the immanence of God in the universe in contrast to the insistence in many Christian systems on God's transcendence or remoteness from all created things. (Fiske, Idea of God, discussed by Moore in Lux Mundi (ed. 1) pp. 95-102.) The problem was one which Christian thought was decisively compelled to face by the Arian controversy (supra, p. xxix. sq.). The Apologists and Alexandrians had partially succeeded in the problem expressed in the dying words of Plotinus, 'to bring the God which is within into harmony with the God which is in the universe,' or rather to reconcile the transcendence with the immanence of God. But their success was only partial: the immanence of the Word had been emphasised, but in contrast with the transcendence of the Father. This could not be more than a temporary resting-place for the Christian mind, and Arius forced a solution. That solution was found by Athanasius. The mediatorial work of the Logos is not necessary as though nature could not bear the untempered hand of the Father. The Divine Will is the direct and sole source of all things, and the idea of a mediatorial nature is inconsistent with the true idea of God (pp. 87, 155, 362, comparing carefully p. 383). 'All things created are capable of sustaining God's absolute hand. The hand which fashioned Adam now also and ever is fashioning and giving entire consistence to those who come after him.' The immanence, or intimate presence and unceasing agency of God in nature, does not belong to the Word as distinct from the Father, but to the Father in and through the Word, in a word to God as God (cf. de Decr. 11, where the language of de Incarn. 17 about the Word is applied to God as such). This is a point which marks an advance upon anything that we find in the earliest writings of Athanasius, and upon the theology of his preceptor Alexander, to whom, amongst other not very clear formulae, the Word is a mesiteuousa phusis monogenes (Thdt. H. E. ii. 4; Alexander cannot distinguish phusis from hupostasis or ousia; Father and Son are duo achorista pragmata, but yet te hupostasei duo phuseis). This is indeed the principal particular in which Athanasius left the modified Origenism of his age, and of his own school, behind. If on the other hand he resembled Arius in drawing a sharper line than had been drawn previously between the one God and the World, it must also be remembered that his God was not the far off purely transcendent God of Arius, but a God not far from every one of us (Orat. ii. p. 361 sq.).
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/athanasius/athanasius-life-arianism-2.asp?pg=28
