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Translated by Cardinal Newman.
St Athanasius the Great Resources Online and in Print
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56 Pages
Page 29
(6.) And those who say that the Father and Son and Holy Ghost are the same, and irreligiously take the Three Names of one and the same Reality and Person, we justly proscribe from the Church, because they suppose the illimitable and impassible Father to be limitable withal and passible through His becoming man: for such are they whom Romans call Patripassians, and we Sabellians [3562] . For we acknowledge that the Father who sent, remained in the peculiar state of His unchangeable Godhead, and that Christ who was sent fulfilled the economy of the Incarnation.
(7.) And at the same time those who irreverently say that the Son has been generated not by choice or will, thus encompassing God with a necessity which excludes choice and purpose, so that He begat the Son unwillingly, we account as most irreligious and alien to the Church; in that they have dared to define such things concerning God, beside the common notions concerning Him, nay, beside the purport of divinely inspired Scripture. For we, knowing that God is absolute and sovereign over Himself, have a religious judgment that He generated the Son voluntarily and freely; yet, as we have a reverent belief in the Son's words concerning Himself (Prov. viii. 22), 'The Lord created me a beginning of His ways for His works,' we do not understand Him to have been originated like the creatures or works which through Him came to be. For it is irreligious and alien to the ecclesiastical faith, to compare the Creator with handiworks created by Him, and to think that He has the same manner of origination with the rest. For divine Scripture teaches us really and truly that the Only-begotten Son was generated sole and solely [3563] . Yet [3564] , in saying that the Son is in Himself, and both lives and exists like the Father, we do not on that account separate Him from the Father, imagining place and interval between their union in the way of bodies. For we believe that they are united with each other without mediation or distance [3565] , and that they exist inseparable; all the Father embosoming the Son, and all the Son hanging and adhering to the Father, and alone resting on the Father's breast continually [3566] . Believing then in the All-perfect Triad, the most Holy, that is, in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and calling the Father God, and the Son God, yet we confess in them, not two Gods, but one dignity of Godhead, and one exact harmony of dominion, the Father alone being Head over the whole universe wholly, and over the Son Himself, and the Son subordinated to the Father; but, excepting Him, ruling over all things after Him which through Himself have come to be, and granting the grace of the Holy Ghost unsparingly to the saints at the Father's will. For that such is the account of the Divine Monarchy towards Christ, the sacred oracles have delivered to us.
Thus much, in addition to the faith before published in epitome, we have been compelled to draw forth at length, not in any officious display, but to clear away all unjust suspicion concerning our opinions, among those who are ignorant of our affairs: and that all in the West may know, both the audacity of the slanders of the heterodox, and as to the Orientals, their ecclesiastical mind in the Lord, to which the divinely inspired Scriptures bear witness without violence, where men are not perverse.
[3562] See vol. i. of this series, p. 295, note 1. In the reason which the Confession alleges against that heretical doctrine it is almost implied that the divine nature of the Son suffered on the Cross. They would naturally fall into this notion directly they gave up our Lord's absolute divinity. It would naturally follow that our Lord had no human soul, but that His pre-existent nature stood in the place of it:--also that His Mediatorship was no peculiarity of His Incarnation. vid. S:23, note 2. S:27, Anath. 12, note.
[3563] The Confession still insists upon the unscripturalness of the Catholic positions. On the main subject of this paragraph the thelesei gennethen, cf. Orat. iii. 59, &c. The doctrine of the monogenes has already partially come before us in de Decr. S:S:7-9. pp. 154 sq. Monos, not as the creatures. vid. p. 75, note 6.
[3564] The following passage is in its very form an interpolation or appendix, while its doctrine bears distinctive characters of something higher than the old absolute separation between the Father and the Son. [Eusebius of Caes. had] considered Them as two ousiai, homoiai like, but not as homoousioi; his very explanation of the word teleios was 'independent' and 'distinct.' Language then, such as that in the text, was the nearest assignable approach to the reception of the homoousion; [and in fact, to] the doctrine of the perichoresis, of which supr. Orat. iii.
[3565] De Decr. S:8.
[3566] De Decr. S:26.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/athanasius/councils.asp?pg=29
