But, notwithstanding this unity, there is a true numerical duality of Person. Sabellius, we must remember, had held for two generations the pre-eminence among heretics. To the Greek-speaking world outside Egypt the error which he and Paul of Samosata had taught, that God is one Person, was still the most dangerous of falsehoods; the supreme victory of truth had not been won in their eyes when Arius was condemned at Nicæa, but when Paul was deposed at Antioch. The Nicene leaders had certainly counted the cost when they adopted as the test of orthodoxy the same word which Paul had used for the inculcation of error. But the homoousion, however great its value as a permanent safeguard of truth, was the immediate cause of alienation and suspicion. And not only did it make the East misunderstand the West, but it furnished the Arians with the most effective of instruments for widening the breach between the two forces opposed to them. They had an excuse for calling their opponents in Egypt and the West by the name of Sabellians, the very name most likely to engender distrust in Asia. Hilary, who could enter with sympathy into the Eastern mind and had learnt from his own treatment at Seleucia how strong the feeling was, labours with untiring patience to dissipate the prejudice.
There is no Arian plea against which he argues at greater length. The names ‘Father’ and ‘Son,’ being parts of the revelation, are convincing proofs of distinction of Person as well as of unity of nature. They prove that the nature is the same, but possessed after a different manner by Each of the Two; by the One as ingenerate, by the Other as begotten. The word ‘Image,’ also a part of the revelation, is another proof of the distinction; an object and its reflection in a mirror are obviously not one thing. Again, the distinct existence of the Son is proved by the fact that He has free volition of His own; and by a multitude of passages of Scripture, many of them absolutely convincing, as for instance, those from the Gospel of St John. But these two Persons, though one in nature, are not equal in dignity. The Father is greater than the Son; greater not merely as compared to the incarnate Christ, but as compared to the Son, begotten from eternity. This is not simply by the prerogative inherent in all paternity; it is because the Father is self-existent, Himself the Source of all being. With one of His happy phrases Hilary describes it as an inferiority generatione, non genere; the Son is one in kind or nature with the Father, though inferior, as the Begotten, to the Unbegotten. But this inferiority is not to be so construed as to lessen our belief in His divine attributes.
For instance, when He addresses
the Father in prayer, this is not because He is subordinate, but because He
wishes to honour the Fatherhood; and, as Hilary argues at great length,
the end, when God shall be all in all, is not to be regarded as a surrender of
the Son’s power, in the sense of loss. It is a mysterious final state of
permanent, willing submission to the Father’s will, into which He enters by the
supreme expression of an obedience which has never failed. Again, our Lord’s
language in St. Mark xiii. 32, must not be taken as signifying ignorance on the
part of the Son of His Father’s purpose. For, according to St. Paul (Col. ii.
3), in Him are hid all the lxvii treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and
therefore He must know the day and hour of judgment. He is ignorant relatively
to us, in the sense that He will not betray His Father’s secret. Whether or
no it be possible in calmer times to maintain that the knowledge and the
ignorance are complementary truths which finite minds cannot reconcile, we
cannot wonder that Hilary, ever on the watch against apparent concessions to
Arianism, should in this instance have abandoned his usual method of balancing
against each other the apparent contraries. His reasoning is, in any case, a
striking proof of his intense conviction of the co-equal Godhead of the Son.
Such is Hilary’s argument, very briefly stated. We may read
almost all of it, where Hilary himself had certainly read it, in the Discourses
against the Arians and elsewhere in the writings of Athanasius. How far,
however, he was borrowing from the latter must remain doubtful, as must the
question as to the originality of Athanasius. For the controversy was
universal, and both of these great writers had the practical purpose of
collecting the best arguments out of the multitude which were suggested in
ephemeral literature or verbal debate. Their victory, intellectual as well as
moral, over their adversaries was decisive, and the more striking because it
was the Arians who had made the attack on ground chosen by themselves. The
authority of Scripture as the final court of appeal was their premise as well
as that of their opponents; and they had selected the texts on which the
verdict of Scripture was to be based. Out of their own mouth they were
condemned, and the work done in the fourth century can never need to be
repeated. It was, of course, an unfinished work. As we have seen, Hilary
concerns himself with two Persons, not with three; and since he states the
contrasted truths of plurality and unity without such explanation of the
mystery as the speculative genius of Augustine was to supply, he leaves, in
spite of all his efforts, a certain impression of excessive dualism. But these
defects do not lessen the permanent value of his work.. Indeed, we may even
assert that they, together with some strange speculations and many instances of
which interpretation, which are, however, no part of the structure of his
argument and could not affect its solidity, actually enhance its human and
historical interest. The De Trinitate remains ‘the most perfect literary
achievement called forth by the Arian controversy.’
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