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| Extracts from the Thalia of Arius. Arius maintains that God became a Father, and the Son was not always; the Son out of nothing; once He was not; He was not before his generation; He was created; named Wisdom and Word after God's attributes; made that He might make us; one out of many powers of God; alterable; exalted on God's foreknowledge of what He was to be; not very God; but called so as others by participation; foreign in essence from the Father; does not know or see the Father; does not know Himself.
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Chapter
II.—Extracts from the Thalia of
Arius. Arius maintains that God became a Father, and the Son
was not always; the Son out of nothing; once He was not; He was not
before his generation; He was created; named Wisdom and Word after
God’s attributes; made that He might make us; one out of many
powers of God; alterable; exalted on God’s foreknowledge of what
He was to be; not very God; but called so as others by participation;
foreign in essence from the Father; does not know or see the Father;
does not know Himself.
5. Now the commencement of Arius’s Thalia
and flippancy, effeminate in tune and nature, runs thus:—
‘According to faith of
God’s elect, God’s prudent ones,
Holy children, rightly dividing,
God’s Holy Spirit receiving,
Have I learned this from the
partakers of wisdom,
Accomplished, divinely taught,
and wise in all things.
Along their track, have I been
walking, with like opinions.
I the very famous, the much
suffering for God’s glory;
And taught of God, I have
acquired wisdom and knowledge.’
And the mockeries which he utters in it,
repulsive and most irreligious, are such as these1839
| 1839 de
Syn. §15. [where the metre of the Thalia is discussed in a
note.] | :—‘God was not always a
Father;’ but ‘once God was alone, and not yet a Father, but
afterwards He became a Father.’ ‘The Son was not
always;’ for, whereas all things were made out of nothing, and
all existing creatures and works were made, so the Word of God Himself
was ‘made out of nothing,’ and ‘once He was
not,’ and ‘He was not before His origination,’ but He as others ‘had
an origin of creation.’ ‘For God,’ he says,
‘was alone, and the Word as yet was not, nor the Wisdom. Then,
wishing to form us, thereupon He made a certain one, and named Him Word
and Wisdom and Son, that He might form us by means of Him.’
Accordingly, he says that there are two wisdoms, first, the attribute
co-existent with God, and next, that in this wisdom the Son was
originated, and was only named Wisdom and Word as partaking of it.
‘For Wisdom,’ saith he, ‘by the will of the wise God,
had its existence in Wisdom.’ In like manner, he says, that there
is another Word in God besides the Son, and that the Son again, as
partaking of it, is named Word and Son according to grace. And this too
is an idea proper to their heresy, as shewn in other works of theirs,
that there are many powers; one of which is God’s own by nature
and eternal; but that Christ, on the other hand, is not the true power
of God; but, as others, one of the so-called powers, one of which,
namely, the locust and the caterpillar1840
,
is called in Scripture, not merely the power, but the ‘great
power.’ The others are many and are like the Son, and of them
David speaks in the Psalms, when he says, ‘The Lord of
hosts’ or ‘powers1841
.’ And by
nature, as all others, so the Word Himself is alterable, and remains
good by His own free will, while He chooseth; when, however, He wills,
He can alter as we can, as being of an alterable nature. For
‘therefore,’ saith he, ‘as foreknowing that He would
be good, did God by anticipation bestow on Him this glory, which
afterwards, as man, He attained from virtue. Thus in consequence of His
works fore-known1842
| 1842 de
Syn. 26, note 7, de Decr. 6, note 8. | , did God bring it
to pass that He being such, should come to be.’
6. Moreover he has dared to say, that ‘the
Word is not the very God;’ ‘though He is called God, yet He
is not very God,’ but ‘by participation of grace, He, as
others, is God only in name.’ And, whereas all beings are foreign
and different from God in essence, so too is ‘the Word alien and
unlike in all things to the Father’s essence and
propriety,’ but belongs to things originated and created, and is
one of these. Afterwards, as though he had succeeded to the
devil’s recklessness, he has stated in his Thalia, that
‘even to the Son the Father is invisible,’ and ‘the
Word cannot perfectly and exactly either see or know His own
Father;’ but even what He knows and what He sees, He knows and
sees ‘in proportion to His own measure,’ as we also know
according to our own power. For the Son, too, he says, not only knows
not the Father exactly, for He fails in comprehension1843
| 1843 Vid.
de Syn. 15, note 6. κατάληψις
was originally a Stoic word, and even when considered
perfect, was, properly speaking, attributable only to an imperfect
being. For it is used in contrast to the Platonic doctrine of
ἴδεαι, to express the
hold of things obtained by the mind through the senses; it being a
Stoical maxim, nihil esse in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu. In
this sense it is also used by the Fathers, to mean real and certain
knowledge after inquiry, though it is also ascribed to Almighty God. As
to the position of Arius, since we are told in Scripture that none
‘knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in
him,’ if κατάληψις
be an exact and complete knowledge of the object of
contemplation, to deny that the Son comprehended the Father, was to
deny that He was in the Father, i.e. the doctrine of the περιχώρησις, de Syn. 15, ἀνεπιμικτοί, or to maintain that He was a distinct, and therefore a
created, being. On the other hand Scripture asserts that, as the Holy
Spirit which is in God, ‘searcheth all things, yea, the deep
things of God,’ so the Son, as being ‘in the bosom of the
Father,’ alone ‘hath declared Him.’ vid. Clement.
Strom. v. 12. And thus Athan. speaking of Mark xiii. 32, ’If the
Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son, and the Father knows
the day and the hour, it is plain that the Son too, being in the
Father, and knowing the things in the Father, Himself also knows the
day and the hour.” Orat. iii. 44. | , but ‘He knows not even His own
essence;’—and that ‘the essences of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Ghost, are separate in nature, and estranged, and
disconnected, and alien1844
| 1844 de
Decr. 25, note 2. | , and without
participation of each other1845
;’ and, in his
own words, ‘utterly unlike from each other in essence and glory,
unto infinity.’ Thus as to ‘likeness of glory and
essence,’ he says that the Word is entirely diverse from both the
Father and the Holy Ghost. With such words hath the irreligious spoken;
maintaining that the Son is distinct by Himself, and in no respect
partaker of the Father. These are portions of Arius’s fables as
they occur in that jocose composition.
7. Who is there that hears all this, nay, the
tune of the Thalia, but must hate, and justly hate, this Arius jesting
on such matters as on a stage1846
| 1846 Ep.
Encycl. 6; Epiph. Hær. 73. 1. | ? who but must
regard him, when he pretends to name God and speak of God, but as the
serpent counselling the woman? who, on reading what follows in his
work, but must discern in his irreligious doctrine that error, into
which by his sophistries the serpent in the sequel seduced the woman?
who at such blasphemies is not transported? ‘The heaven,’
as the Prophet says, ‘was astonished, and the earth shuddered1847
’ at the transgression of the Law. But
the sun, with greater horror, impatient of the bodily contumelies,
which the common Lord of all voluntarily endured for us, turned away,
and recalling his rays made that day sunless. And shall not all human
kind at Arius’s blasphemies be struck speechless, and stop their
ears, and shut their eyes, to escape hearing them or seeing their
author? Rather, will not the Lord Himself have reason to denounce men
so irreligious, nay, so unthankful, in the words which He has already
uttered by the prophet Hosea, ‘Woe unto them, for they have fled
from Me; destruction upon them, for
they have transgressed against Me; though I have redeemed them, yet
they have spoken lies against Me1848
.’ And
soon after, ‘They imagine mischief against Me; they turn away to
nothing1849
.’ For to turn away from the Word
of God, which is, and to fashion to themselves one that is not, is to
fall to what is nothing. For this was why the Ecumenical1850
| 1850 de
Decr. 27, note 1. | Council, when Arius thus spoke, cast him
from the Church, and anathematized him, as impatient of such
irreligion. And ever since has Arius’s error been reckoned for a
heresy more than ordinary, being known as Christ’s foe, and
harbinger1851
| 1851 Ib.
3, note 1, §1, note 3. | of Antichrist. Though then so great a
condemnation be itself of special weight to make men flee from that
irreligious heresy1852
| 1852 And
so Vigilius of the heresies about the Incarnation, Etiamsi in erroris
eorum destructionem nulli conderentur libri, hoc ipsum solum, quod
hæretici sunt pronunciati, orthodoxorum securitati sufficeret.
contr. Eutych. i. p. 494. | , as I said above,
yet since certain persons called Christian, either in ignorance or
pretence, think it, as I then said, little different from the Truth,
and call its professors Christians; proceed we to put some questions to
them, according to our powers, thereby to expose the unscrupulousness
of the heresy. Perhaps, when thus caught, they will be silenced, and
flee from it, as from the sight of a serpent.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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