Talk:Athanasius of Alexandria

Athanasius' Theology

The person responsible for the recent edits to this entry's Theology section has elsewhere rhetorically asked if Athanasius was Sabellian in theology. Both here and there, there aren't any direct citations of Athanasius' actual words, and there, this lack of direct citation (or mis-citation) of Athanasius' works is pointed out. I've found multiple other errors in this section, also indicating what appears to be a poor use of one of the section's predominant sources:

• The doctrine of Sabellius, normally understood to be synonymous with modalism, may in reality be considered the heresy of "partialism" (going off of Von Mosheim's exposition) in that it asserts that the Son and Spirit are "sections" or parts of the Father ("....Hence, fourthly, it is manifest, that Sabellius considered that divine thing, which dwelt in the man Christ, as being a part or portion of God; so that the Son differed from the Father, as the part differs from the whole.") Regardless of which is properly termed as the doctrine of Sabellius, Athanasius' "Statement of Faith" contradicts either conception in saying: "For neither do we hold a Son-Father, as do the Sabellians, calling Him of one but not of the same essence, and thus destroying the existence of the Son. Neither do we ascribe the passible body which He bore for the salvation of the whole world to the Father. Neither can we imagine three Subsistences separated from each other, as results from their bodily nature in the case of men, lest we hold a plurality of gods like the heathen. But just as a river, produced from a well, is not separate, and yet there are in fact two visible objects and two names. For neither is the Father the Son, nor the Son the Father. For the Father is Father of the Son, and the Son, Son of the Father. For like as the well is not a river, nor the river a well, but both are one and the same water which is conveyed in a channel from the well to the river, so the Father’s deity passes into the Son without flow and without division.
• It is asserted that Athanasius was a "one-hypostasis" theologian. However, Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318-381, which is repeatedly cited in this section, makes clear that Athanasius conflated "hypostasis" and "ousia": "Apparently Athanasius thought that hypostasis in theological contexts always meant ousia, and that if any spoke of three hypostases they must mean three ousiai, and probably different ouisiai at that, and so must be well on the way to Arianism.... But the evidence that for Athanasius hypostasis was the same as ousia was unmistakable." (p. 445). On multiple occasions the authors exposit the lack of distinction both terms had in this time period (e.g. chapter 7.1), so it's improper to term Athanasius as a "one-hypostasis theologian" as though his conception of "hypostasis" is identical to later theologians.
• It's written that Athanasius' use of "idios" in referring to the Son's relation to the Father is meant to convey that He is one of the Father's faculties (and that this means that He is part of the Father), but the link provided to define the term does not indicate this.
• That the Son is the Logos of the Father, according to Athanasius' assertion, does not indicate that he is a part of the Father. That the Son is the Logos is asserted by the Gospel of John, and Trinitarians along with and following Athanasius simultaneously assert the Son is the Logos of the Father without indicating that this makes him a "section" of the Father, as Sabellius did.
• It's written that Athanasius rejected the idea that the Logos was the mediator between God and creation, with the citation: "He said: 'He (the Father) was no remote God who required a lesser god (the Logos) to reveal Him.' (Hanson, p. 423)" This glosses over the context that the "Mediator" that Athanasius refutes is that of the Greek philosophers, according to the authors of the book: "Though Athanasius’ thought is deeply indebted to philosophy and he defends constantly what is a philosophical principle, the ontological unity of the Father and the Son, his philosophical language is all devoted to what was ultimately a Scriptural argument. He is no favourer of Greek philosophy; he decries it in the Contra Gentes, though he can occasionally refer to philosophical doctrines which are apparently like Christian teaching, as when he compares the Stoic doctrine of the Logos dwelling immanent in the whole world to the doctrine of the Incarnation. But the main and paramount source of his doctrine is the Bible.... He was capable, perhaps alone among his contemporaries, of freeing himself from the enticing but damaging tendency to speculation about the relation of the pre-existent Son to the Logos of the philosophers.... For him both skopos and content of Scripture, in Old and New Testaments, are the two modes of existence of Christ, as Son/Logos and as incarnate. For him, too, God’s relation to the world was not static but dynamic; he was no remote God who required a lesser god to reveal him. The divine ousia, he says, is ‘productive’ (καρπογόνος). As has been frequently observed, Athanasius approaches the central theological problem of his day from a soteriological, not from a cosmological, viewpoint. He removed altogether the problem raised and apparently solved by borrowing from Middle Platonism, viz how God or the Supreme Reality can come into contact with the world, with transitory, human affairs, at all. He refused to use the pre-existent Christ as a convenient philosophical device. ‘For the Father creates everything through the Logos in the Spirit’: 'God needed no mediator to create the world. So the concept of the Deity who has redeemed mankind is to be separated from the concept of the world . . . the Logos/Son is a redemptive, not a cosmic principle.'"
  • This is not a "limitation of Christ's role as Mediator to the Incarnation", because the "mediation" that Athanasius does not bother with in regards to speaking of Christ as Logos is the mediation of the Greek philosophers who thought it necessary for a supreme being to create a lower deity to intervene in creation. Elsewhere in the book, speaking of the Homoian Arians, the authors assert: "The Homoian Arians, in contrast to the followers of Aetius and Eunomius, were not particularly interested in philosophy. They do not therefore specially emphasize, as Arius and his early followers certainly did, the role of the Son as a convenient philosophical device whereby an unapproachable, remote God is connected with transience and human affairs." (p. 568). Later still, the writers assert: "The [Cappadocian Fathers] were responsible, building on the foundation which Athanasius had laid, for establishing finally that the Son (and ultimately the Holy Spirit too) must not be in any sense subordinated to the Father. They thereby extinguished a long tradition of theological thought. The pre-existent Christ or Logos could no longer be used as a convenient means of envisaging how the metaphysically remote high god or supreme good could come into contact with this transient, corruptible, passible world in which we live." (p. 730)

Arsenic-03 (talk) 21:07, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

wrong searche engine abstract

when i searched this article the text snipped says 20th pope of alexandria but in the text it says 20th patriarch 212.92.104.243 (talk) 18:19, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Lewis Ayres

Ayres is cited by last name only, I assume from his Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology, but I don't have access to the book to check it. Somebody got it? Thx. Snigblitz (talk) 00:45, 14 September 2024 (UTC)