Son (v. 23). It implies the entire post-Nicene or Augustinian development of the doctrine of the Trinity, and even the Christological discussions of the fifth century, though it does not contain the anti-Nestorian test-word SeoTókos, mother of God. It takes several passages verbally from Augustine's work on the Trinity, which was not completed till the year 415, and from the Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lerinum, 434; works which evidently do not quote the passages from an already existing symbol, but contribute them as stones to the building. On the other hand it contains no allusion to the Monophysite and Monothelite controversies, and cannot well be placed after the sixth cecumenical council, which condemned the Monotheletic heresy (680).

ry,

It probably originated during the sixth or seventh centuin the school of Augustine, and in Gaul, where it makes its first appearance, and acquires its first ecclesiastical authority. But the precise author or compiler cannot be discovered, and the various views of scholars concerning him are mere opinions. From Gaul the authority of this symbol spread over the whole of Latin Christendom, and subsequently made its way into some portions of the Greek church in Europe. The various Protestant churches have either formally adopted the Athanasian Creed together with the Nicene and the Apostles', or at all events agree, in their symbolical books, with its doctrine of the trinity and the person of Christ.'

'Wherever the creed has come into use in the Greek churches, this verse has been omitted as a Latin interpolation.

Comp. the catalogue of opinions in Waterland, vol. iii. p. 117; in Köllner; and in my own treatise. The majority of voices have spoken in favor of Vigilius of Tapsus in Africa, A. D. 484; others for Vincentius of Lerinum, 434; Waterland for Hilary of Arles, about 430; while others ascribe it indefinitely to the North African, or Gallic, or Spanish church in the sixth or seventh century. Harvey recently, but quite groundlessly, has dated the composition back to the year 401, and claims it for the bishop Victricius of Rouen (Hist. and Theol. of the Three Creeds, vol. ii. p. 583 f.). He thinks that Augustine quotes from it, but this father nowhere alludes to such a symbol; the author of the Creed, on the contrary, has taken sev. eral passages from Augustine, De Trinitate, as well as from Vincentius of Lerinum and other sources. Comp. the notes to the Creed above, and my treatise, p. 596 ff.

• On this agreement of the symbolical books of the Evangelical churches wit the Athanasianum, comp. my treatise, L. c. p. 610 ff. Luther considers this Creed

The Athanasian Creed presents, in short, sentent.ous articles, and in bold antitheses, the church doctrine of the Trinity in opposition to Unitarianism and tritheism, and the doctrine of the incarnation and the divine-human person of Christ in op position to Nestorianism and Eutychianism, and thus clearly and concisely sums up the results of the trinitarian and Chris tological controversies of the ancient church. It teaches the numerical unity of substance and the triad of persons in the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, with the perfect deity and perfect humanity of Christ in one indivisible person. In the former case we have one substance or nature in three persons; in the latter, two natures in one divine-human person.

On this faith eternal salvation is made to depend. By the dammatory clauses in its prologue and epilogue the Athanasianum has given offence even to those who agree with its contents. But the original Nicene Creed contained likewise an anathema, which afterwards dropped out of it; the anathe ma is to be referred to the heresies, and may not be applied tc particular persons, whose judge is God alone; and finally, the whole intention is, not that salvation and perdition depend on the acceptance and rejection of any theological formulary or human conception and exhibition of the truth, but that faith in the revealed truth itself, in the living God, Father, Son, and Spirit, and in Jesus Christ the God-Man and the Saviour of the world, is the thing which saves, even where the understanding may be very defective, and that unbelief is the thing which condemns; according to the declaration of the Lord: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." In particular actual cases Christian humility and charity of course require the greatest caution, and leave the judgment to the all-knowing and just God.

The Athanasian Creed closes the succession of ecumenical symbols; symbols which are acknowledged by the entire

the weightiest and grandest production of the church since the time of the ApostlesIn the Church of England it is still sung or chanted in the cathedrals. The Protes tant Episcopal church in the United States, on the contrary, has excluded it from the Book of Common. Prayer.

orthodox Christian world, except that Evangelical Protestant ism ascribes to them not an absolute, but only a relative author ity, and reserves the right of freely investigating and further developing all church doctrines from the inexhaustible fountain of the infallible word of God.

II. THE ORIGENISTIC CONTROVERSIES.

I. EPIPHANIUS: Hæres. 64. Several Epistles of EPIPHANIUS, THEOPHILU of Alex., and JEROME (in Jerome's Epp. 51 and 87-100, ed. Vallarsi) The controversial works of JEROME and RUFINUS on the orthodoxy of Origen (RUFINI Præfatio ad Orig. mepì apxov; and Apologia s. invectivarum in Hieron.; HIERONYMI Ep. 84 ad Pammachium et Oceanum de erroribus Origenis; Apologia adv. Rufinum libri iii, written 402-403, etc.). PALLADIUS: Vita Johannis Chrysostomi (in Chrysost. Opera, vol. xiii. ed. Montfaucon). SOCRATES: II. E. vi. 8-18. SoZoMENUS: H. E. viii. 2-20. THEODORET: H. E. v. 27 sqq. PHOTIUS: Biblioth. Cod. 59. MANSI: Conc. tom. iii. fol. 1141 sqq. IL HUETIUS: Origeniana (Opera Orig. vol. iv. ed. De la Rue). DOUCIN: Histoire des mouvements arrivés dans l'église au sujet d'Origène. Par. 1700. WALCH: Historie der Ketzereien. Th. vii. p. 427 sqq. SCHROECKH: Kirchengeschichte, vol. x. 108 sqq. Comp. the monographs of REDEPENNING and THOMASIUS on Origen; and NEANDER: Der heil. Joh. Chrysostomus. Berl. 1848, 3d ed. vol. ii. p. 121 sqq. HEFELE (R. C.): Origenistenstreit, in the Kirchenlexicon of Wetzer and Welte, vol. vii. p. 847 sqq., and Conciliengeschichte, vol. ii. p. 76 sqq. O. ZÖOKLER: Hieronymus. Gotha, 1865, p. 238 ff; 391 ff.

8138. The Origenistic Controversy in Palestine. Epipha nius, Rufinus, and Jerome, A. D. 394-399.

Between the Arian and the Nestorian controversies, and in indirect connection with the former, come the vehement and petty personal quarrels over the orthodoxy of Origen, which brought no gain, indeed, to the development of the church doctrine, yet which have a bearing upon the history of theology, as showing the progress of orthodoxy under the twofold aspect of earnest zeal for the pure faith, and a narrow-minded intolerance towards all free speculation. The condemnation of Origen was a death blow to theological science in the Greek church, and left it to stiffen gradually into a mechanical traditionalism and formalism. We shall confine ourselves,

possible, to the points of general interest, and omit the extremely insipid and humiliating details of personal invective and calumny.

It is the privilege of great pioneering minds to set a mass of other minds in motion, to awaken passionate sympathy and antipathy, and to act with stimulating and moulding power even upon after generations. Their very errors are often more useful than the merely traditional orthodoxy of unthinking men, because they come from an honest search after truth, and provoke new investigation. One of these minds was ORIGEN, the most learned and able divine of the ante-Nicene period, the Plato or the Schleiermacher of the Greek church. During his life-time his peculiar, and for the most part Platonizing, views already aroused contradiction, and to the advanced orthodoxy of a later time they could not but appear as dangerous heresies. Methodius of Tyre († 311) first attacked his doctrines of the creation and the resurrection; while Pamphilus († 309), from his prison, wrote an apology for Origen, which Eusebius afterwards completed. His name was drawn into the Arian controversies, and used and abused by both parties for their own ends. The question of the orthodoxy of the great departed became in this way a vital issue of the day, and rose in interest with the growing zeal for pure doctrine and the growing horror of all heresy.

Upon this question three parties arose: free, progressive disciples, blind adherents, and blind opponents.'

1. The true, independent followers of Origen drew from his writings much instruction and quickening, without committing themselves to his words, and, advancing with the demands of the time, attained a clearer knowledge of the spo cific doctrines of Christianity than Origen himself, without thereby losing esteem for his memory and his eminent serv ices. Such men were Pamphilus, Eusebius of Cæsarea, Didymus of Alexandria, and in a wider sense Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa; and among the Latin fathers, Hilary, and at first Jerome, who

'Similar parties have arisen with reference to Luther, Schleiermacher, and other great theologians and philosophers.

afterwards joined the opponents. Gregory of Nyssa, and perhaps also Didymus, even adhered to Origen's doctrine of the final salvation of all created intelligences.

2. The blind and slavish followers, incapable of comprehending the free spirit of Origen, clave to the letter, held all his immature and erratic views, laid greater stress on them than Origen himself, and pressed them to extremes. Such mechanical fidelity to a master is always apostasy to his spirit, which tends towards continual growth in knowledge. To this class belonged the Egyptian monks in the Nitrian mountains; four in particular: Dioscurus, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Enthymius, who are known by the name of the "tall brethren," and were very learned.

3. The opponents of Origen, some from ignorance, others from narrowness and want of discrimination, shunned his speculations as a source of the most dangerous heresies, and in him condemned at the same time all free theological discussion, without which no progress in knowledge is possible, and without which even the Nicene dogma would never have come into existence. To these belonged a class of Egyptian monks in the Scetic desert, with Pachomius at their head, who, in opposition to the mysticism and spiritualism of the Origenistic monks of Nitria, urged grossly sensuous views of divine things, so as to receive the name of Anthropomorphites. The Roman church, in which Origen was scarcely known by name before the Arian disputes, shared in a general way the strong prejudice against him as an unsound and dangerous writer.

The leader in the crusade against the bones of Origen was the bishop EPIPHANIUS of Salamis (Constantia) in Cyprus (†403), an honest, well-meaning, and by his contemporaries highly respected, but violent, coarse, contracted, and bigoted monastic saint and heresy hunter. He had inherited from the monks in the deserts of Egypt an ardent hatred of Origen as an arch-heretic, and for this hatred he gave documentary justification from the numerous writings of Origen in his Panarion, or chest of antidotes for eighty heresies, in which he

''Adeλpol μaxpoí, on account of heir bodily size.