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Translated by Cardinal Newman.
St Athanasius the Great Resources Online and in Print
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This Part: 130 Pages
Page 98
Such is the course of the argument in the Fourth Oration; and with the exception of S:S:6, 7, and again possibly S:25, it forms a homogeneous, if not a finished and elaborated piece of argument. Its date and composition may be left an open question; but its purpose as an appendix to Orat. i.-iii., is we think open to little doubt (supr. p. 304). Of Sabellius, who left no writings [3274] , the age of Athanasius knew little, except that he identified Father and Son (huiopator), and denied the Trinity of Persons. Most that is told us of Sabellius from the fourth century onwards requires careful sifting, in order to eliminate what really belongs to Marcellus, Photinus, or others who were taxed with Sabellianism, and combated as 'Sabellians.' But with the simple patri-passianism which is the one undoubted element in the teaching of Sabellius, Marcellus had little or nothing in common. The criticism of Marcellus that Sabellius 'knew not the Word' reveals the true difference between them. To Sabellius, creation and redemption were the work of the one God under successive changes of manifestation; to Marcellus, they were the realisation of a process eternally latent in God; but both Marcellus and apparently Sabellius referred to the divine Nature what the theology of the Church has consistently referred to the divine Will.
The following table will make the foregoing scheme clear.
S:1. Introductory. Thesis: the co-eternal personality of the Son or Word.
S:S:2-5. Those who, while rejecting Arianism, would avoid Sabellianism, must accept the eternal divine Generation of the Son.
S:S:6, 7. [Digression: the humiliation of the Word explained against the Arians.]
S:8. The eternity of Christ's Kingdom and of His Person implied each in the other.
S:S:9-12. In what sense Christ and the Father are, and are not, one. The divine gennesis.
S:S:13, 14. The doctrine of divine dilatation and contraction denies true personal distinctions in the Godhead.
S:S:15-24. The Son and the Word identical. Refutation of the three alternative suppositions, and of the argument alleged from the O.T. in support of them.
S:25. Final refutation of the doctrine of dilatation.
S:S:26-36. The Scriptural identification of Son and Word refutes the restriction of the former title to the man Jesus.
[3274] The Articles Sabellianism and Sabellius (both sub. fin.) in D.C.B. vol. iv., state the contrary, but the present writer follows the standard discussion of Zahn, of which the learned articles in question do not seem to take account.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/athanasius/discourses-against-arians-2.asp?pg=98
