$126. Revived Sabellianism. Marcellus and Photinus.

L EUSEBIUS CÆSAR.: Two books contra Marcellum (karà Mapkéλλov), and three books De ecclesiastica theologia (after his Demonstratio evang.). HILARY: Fragmenta, 1-3. BASIL THE GREAT: Epist. 52. EPIPHANIUS: Hæres. 72. RETTBERG: Marcelliana. Gött. 1794 (a collection of the Fragments of Marcellus).

IL MONTFAUCON: Diatribe de causa Marcelli Ancyr. (in Collect. nova Patr. tom. ii. Par. 1707). KLOSE: Geschichte u. Lehre des Marcellus u. Photinus. Hamb. 1837. MÖHLER: Athanasius der Gr. Buch iv. p. 818 sqq. (aiming to vindicate Marcellus, as Neander also does). BAUR: 1. c. vol. i. pp. 525–558. DORNER: 1. c. i. pp. 861-882. (Both against the orthodoxy of Marcellus.) HEFELE: Conciliengesch. i. 456 sq. et passim. WILLENBORG: Ueber die Orthodoxie des Marc. Münster, 1859

Before we pass to the exhibition of the orthodox doctrine, we must notice a trinitarian error which arose in the course of the controversy from an excess of zeal against the Arian subordination, and forms the opposite extreme.

MARCELLUS, bishop of Ancyra in Galatia, a friend of Athanasius, and one of the leaders of the Nicene party, in a large controversial work written soon after the council of Nicæa against Arianism and Semi-Arianism, so pushed the doctrine of the consubstantiality of Christ that he impaired the personal distinction of Father and Son, and, at least in phraseology, fell into a refined form of Sabellianism. To save the full divinity of Christ and his equality with the Father, he denied his hypostatical pre-existence. As to the orthodoxy of Marcellus, however, the East and the West were divided, and the diversity continues even among modern scholars. A Sem: Arian council in Constantinople, A. D. 335, deposed him, anc Intrusted Eusebius of Cæsarea with the refutation of his work;

(l. iv. 4, 8, vol. v. pars ii. p. 779), "et semi-Deus, et semi-creatura perinde monstra et portenta sunt, quæ sani et pii omnes merito exhorrent. Filius Dei aut verus omnino Deus, aut mera creatura statuatur necesse est; æternæ veritatis axioma est, inter Deum et creaturam, inter non factum et factum, medium esse nihil." Quite similarly Waterland: A Defence of some Queries relating to Dr. Clarke's Scheme of the Holy Trinity, Works, vol. i. p. 404.

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1 In his work wept óæoтayîs, De subjectione Domini Christi, founded on 1 Cor T. 28.

while, on the contrary, pope Julius of Rome and the orthodox council of Sardica (343), blinded by his equivocal declarations, his former services, and his close connection with Athanasius, protected his orthodoxy and restored him to his bishopric. The counter-synod of Philippopolis, however, confirmed the condemnation. Finally even Athanasius, who elsewhere always speaks of him with great respect, is said to have declared against him.' The council of Constantinople, A. D. 381, declared even the baptism of the Marcellians and Photinians invalid.'

Marcellus wished to hold fast the true deity of Christ without falling under the charge of subordinatianism. He granted the Arians right in their assertion that the Nicene doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son involves the subordination of the Son, and is incompatible with his own eternity. For this reason he entirely gave up this doctrine, and referred the expressions: Son, image, firstborn, begotten, not to the eternal metaphysical relation, but to the incarnation. He thus made a rigid separation between Logos and Son, and this is the πрŵτоν yeûdos of this system. Before the incarnation there was, he taught, no Son of God, but only a Logos, and by that he understood,—at least so he is represented by Eusebius,—an impersonal power, a reason inherent in God, inseparable from him, eternal, unbegotten, after the analogy of reason in man. This Logos was silent (therefore without word) in God before the creation of the world, but then went forth out of God as the creative word and power, the Spaorin évéρyela πρáčews of God (not as a hypostasis). This power is the principle of creation, and culminates in the incarnation, but after finishing the work of redemption returns again into the repose of God. The Son, after completing the work of redemption, resigns his kingdom to the Father, and rests again in God as in the beginning. The sonship, therefore, is only a

1 Hilary, Fragm. ii. n. 21 (p. 1299, ed. Bened.), states that Athanasius as early as 849 renounced church fellowship with Marcellus.

These are meant by the οἱ ἀπὸ τῆς Γαλατῶν χώρας ερχόμενοι in the 7th canon of the second ecumenical council. Marcellus and Photinus were both of Ancyra u Galatia. Comp. Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, vol. ii. p. 26.

temporary state, which begins with the human advent of Christ, and is at last promoted or glorified into Godhead. Marcellus reaches not a real God-Man, but only an extraordinary dynamical indwelling of the divine power in the man Jesus. In this respect the charge of Samosatenism, which the council of Constantinople in 335 brought against him, has a certain justice, though he started from premises entirely different from those of Paul of Samosata.' His doctrine of the Holy Spirit and of the Trinity is to a corresponding degree unsatisfactory. He speaks, indeed, of an extension of the indivisible divine monad into a triad, but in the Sabellian sense, and denies the three hypostases or persons.

PHOTINUS, first a deacon at Ancyra, then bishop of Sirmium in Pannonia, went still further than his preceptor Marcellus. He likewise started with a strict distinction between the notion of Logos and Son,' rejected the idea of eternal generation, and made the divine in Christ an impersonal power of God. But while Marcellus, from the Sabellian point of view, identified the Son with the Logos as to essence, and transferred to him the divine predicates attaching to the Logos, Photinus, on the contrary, quite like Paul of Samosata, made Jesus rise on the basis of his human nature, by a course of moral improvement and moral merit, to the divine dignity, so that the divine in him is a thing of growth.

Hence Photinus was condemned as a heretic by several councils in the East and in the West, beginning with the SemiArian council at Antioch in 344. He died in exile in 366.'

' Dorner (1. c. 880 sq.) asserts of Marcellus, that his Sabellianism ran out to a Bort of Ebionitism.

* He called God Moyonárop, because, in his view, God is both Father and Logos. Sabellius had used the expression vio#drwp, to deny the personal distinction between the Father and the Son. Photinus had to say instead of this, λoyorárwp, because, in his view, the Xoyos, not the viós, is eternally in God.

Comp. on Photinus, Athanas., De syn. 26; Epiph., Hær. 71; Hilary, De trinit. vii. 3-7, etc.; Baur, L. c. vol. i. p. 642 sqq.; Dorner, 1. a. p. 881 sq.; and Hefe Lc. i. p. 610 sqq.

8127. The Nicene Doctrine of the Consubstantiality of the Son with the Father.

Comp. the literature in §§ 119 and 120, especially the four Orations of ATHANASIUS against the Arians, and the other anti-Arian tracts of this "father of orthodoxy."

The NICENE, HOMO-OUSIAN, or ATHANASIAN doctrine was most clearly and powerfully represented in the East by Atha nasius, in whom it became flesh and blood;' and next to him, by Alexander of Alexandria, Marcellus of Ancyra (who however strayed into Sabellianism), Basil, and the two Gregories of Cappadocia; and in the West by Ambrose and Hilary.

The central point of the Nicene doctrine in the contest with Arianism is the identity of essence or the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and is expressed in this article of the (original) Nicene Creed: "[We believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God; who is begotten the only-begotten of the Father; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God, and Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.""

The term oμoavolos, consubstantial, is of course no more a biblical term,' than trinity; but it had already been used,

356.

Particularly distinguished are his four Orations against the Arians, written in

* Καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν, τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ· γεννηθέντα ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς μονογενῆ· τοῦτ ̓ ἐστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρὸς, Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ καὶ φῶς ἐκ φωτός, Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ· γεννηθέντα, οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί, κ.τ.λ.

'Though John's eds hy d λóyos (John i. 1), and Paul's rò elvai loa Deŷ (Phil. ii. 6), are akin to it. The latter passage, indeed, since foa is adverbial, denotes rather divine existence, than divine being or essence, which would be more correctly expressed by τὸ εἶναι ἴσον Θεῷ, or by ισόθεος. But the latter would be equally in harmony with Paul's theology. The Jews used the masc. Yoos, though in a polemical sense, when they drew from the way in which he called himself preeminently and exclusively the Son of God the logical inference, that he made himself equal with God, John v. 18: Ότι . . . πατέρα ἴδιον ἔλεγε τὸν Θεὸν, ἴσον kautdy TUIŵv T &e. The Vulgate translates: æqualem se faciens Deo.

...

• The word "piás and trinitas, in this application to the Godhead, appears first in Theophilus of Antioch and Athenagoras in the second century, and in Tertullian in the third. Confessions of faith must be drawn up in language different from the

though in a different sense, both by heathen writers' and by heretics, as well as by orthodox fathers.' It formed a bulwark against Arians and Semi-Arians, and an anchor which moored the church during the stormy time between the first and the second ecumenical councils. At first it had a negative meaning against heresy; denying, as Athanasius repeatedly says, that the Son is in any sense created or produced and change

Scriptures-else they mean nothing or everything—since they are an interpretation of the Scriptures and intended to exclude false doctrines.

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1 Bull, Def. fidei Nic., Works, vol. v. P. i. p. 70: "'Quoobσion a probatis Græcis scriptoribus id dicitur, quod ejusdem cum altero substantiæ, essentiæ, sive natura est." He then cites some passages from profane writers. Thus Porphyry says, De abstinentia ab esu animalium, lib. i. n. 19: Είγε ὁμοούσιοι αἱ τῶν ζώων ψυχαὶ ἡμετέ pais, i. e., siquidem animæ animalium sunt ejusdem cum nostris essentiæ. Aristotle (in a quotation in Origen) speaks of the consubstantiality of all stars, dμoovσia nárta korpa, omnia astra sunt ejusdem essentiæ sive naturæ.

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* First by the Gnostic Valentine, in Irenæus, Adv. hær. 1. i. cap. 1, § 1 and §5 (ed. Stieren, vol. i. 57 and 66). In the last passage it is said of man that he is SAIKós, and as such very like God, indeed, but not consubstantial, wapawλhotor pèn, àλλ' oùx ¿μoovalov Tŷ e. The Manichæans called the human soul, in the sense of their emanation system, dμooúσiov TÊ ✪eŶ. Agapius, in Photius (Bibl. Cod. 179), calls even the sun and the moon, in a pantheistic sense, duoovσia Oey. The Sabellians used the word of the trinity, but in opposition to the distinction of persons. Origen deduces from the figurative description awayarμa, Heb. i. 3, the Sμoovσion of the Son. His disciples rejected the term, indeed, at the council at Antioch in 264, because the heretical Paul of Samosata gave it a perverted meaning, taking ovala for the common source from which the three divine persons first derived their being. But towards the end of the third century the word was introduced again into church use by Theognostus and Dionysius of Alexandria, as Athanasius, De Decr. Syn. Nic. c. 25 (ed. Bened, i. p. 230), demonstrates. Eusebius, Ep. ad Cæsarienses c. 7 (in Socr. H. E. i. 8, and in Athan. Opera i. 241), says that some early bishops and authors, learned and celebrated (τῶν παλαιῶν τινὰς λογίους καὶ ἐπιφανεῖς ἐπισκόπους καὶ συγγραφεῖς), used ὁμοούσιον of the Godhead of the Father and Son. Tertullian (Adv. Prax.) applied the corresponding Latin phrase unius substantia to the persons of the holy Trinity.

• Cunningham (Hist. Theology, i. p. 291) says of dμoobσios: "The number of these individuals who held the substance of the Nicene doctrine, but objected to the phraseology in which it was expressed, was very small [?]-and the evil thereof, was very inconsiderable; while the advantage was invaluable that resulted from the possession and the use of a definite phraseology, which shut out all supporters of error, combined nearly all the maintainers of truth, and formed a rallying-point around which the whole orthodox church ultimately gathered, after the confusion and distraction occasioned by Arian cunning and Arian persecution had passed away."