Scotus Academicus, Tomus tertius: De adorando divinae Trinitatis mysterio

AN UNITAS TRIUM DIVINARUM PERSONARUM CONSUBSTANTIALITATIS VOCABULO A SANCTIS PATRIBUS RECTE EXPLICATA FUERIT.

The word ὁμοούσιος, or Consubstantial, was used by the holy Fathers, above all in the Nicene Synod, to express the unity of essence and substance of the three persons; for this word condemns Sabellius as much as Arius: Sabellius indeed, because since the same thing is not consubstantial with itself, if the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were one person, they would not be consubstantial; but Arius, because if the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were distinct persons, they would not be ὁμοούσιοι, or consubstantial, but at most, according to Arius, they would be ὁμοιούσιοι, that is, of similar substance; and according to Sabellius, ὁμοούσιοι, that is, of one substance; whence Epiphanius, Haeresi 69.: As the serpent, he says, flees the smell of bitumen, as it flees the breath of the hind, or hyacinth stones, or the fumigation of storax; so Arius and Sabellius hold in abhorrence that constant truth, the profession of the consubstantial. Wherefore Marius Victorinus, in his little work on the word ὁμοούσιος, affirms that it was divinely discovered: and St. Athanasius, in the book De Synodo, divinely calls it a Column, or Pillar, in which the impiety of those, namely of the Arians, is proscribed, and as it were a trophy is set up over it, conquered and prostrated. Pope Liberius likewise agrees, Epist. 11. ad Orientales, about the middle, concerning the Nicene faith, where he speaks thus: What is comprised under the name consubstantial, like a firm and inexpugnable bulwark, beats back and represses all the onslaughts and engines of God. Not only, moreover, did Catholics use this word, but also heretics older than the Nicene Synod. For St. Athanasius relates, in the book De Synodis Ariminensi et Seleuciensi, that Paul of Samosata, who asserted that Christ was not begotten of God from eternity, but had His origin only in time, from Mary, used this argument, that unless it were so, it would follow that He was consubstantial with the Father; and so that there would be three substances, one primary and two derived from it. He interpreted consubstantiality, namely, in the way it is found in creatures and corporeal things, in which, that is, from one substance another, distinct and separate, is propagated. Whence the same St. Athanasius affirms, at the end of the same book, that the bishops, who to the number of seventy — or, as St. Hilary writes, eighty — gathered at Antioch against Paul

of Samosata decreed that the Son is not ὁμοούσιον, that is, consubstantial with the Father, namely in the sense in which Paul of Samosata had understood it: whence St. Hilary, in the book De Synodis, toward the end,

Samosatenus confessed ὁμοούσιον badly, he says; but did the Arians deny it any better? Eighty bishops once rejected it; but three hundred and eighteen recently received it. Those disapproved it against the heretic; and so, both in approving and in disapproving, both parties established one and the same thing. Why do we compare things well established?

Now that this was the cause of the sanctioning and using of the word by the Nicene Fathers, St. Athanasius relates in the book De Decretis Synodi Nicaenae that when the Catholic bishops in the Nicene Synod deliberated among themselves by what formula of words they might frame the true profession of faith, so as to extinguish the Arian treachery, first it came into their mind to say that the Son is God of God, only-begotten; but when Eusebius of Nicomedia, who defended and cherished the party of the Arians, had warned his followers that they had no reason to fear assenting to this determination, because all created things were likewise from God, the Fathers, noticing this, added that the Son is from the substance of the Father; but when this addition also pleased the Arians, they subjoined that the Son is the power and image of the Father, and like Him in all things and immutable; seeing, however, that the Arians would not decline to subscribe even to this, then, to shake and crush their heresy, they used the name ὁμοούσιον, affirming that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, so that He might be believed not only like Him, but altogether of the same nature and substance with Him.

Indeed, the occasion for using this word was furnished by Eusebius of Nicomedia himself, as St. Ambrose affirms, lib. 3. De Fide, cap. 7.: for one of his letters was brought to the Fathers, the one which he directed to his followers, in which he warned them not to confess the Son as true God, because this was to confess Him consubstantial with the Father, which he judged most contrary to his own opinion: For, says St. Ambrose, why would they be unwilling to call the Son ὁμοούσιον with the Father, unless because they are unwilling to confess Him the true Son of God? Just as their own author Eusebius of Nicomedia declared in his letter, saying: if we say that He is the true and uncreated Son of God, we begin to confess Him ὁμοούσιον with the Father. When this letter had been read in the Nicene Council, the Fathers placed this Word in the statement of the faith, because they saw that it was a terror to their adversaries, so that, as it were with a sword drawn by themselves, they might cut off the head of their nefarious Heresy. Whence St. Gregory of Nazianzus rightly notes, Orat. 49., that the Arians admitted all other words, by which they pretended to profess the Divinity of the Son, except ὁμοούσιον: They could, he says, have named ὁμοούσιον, like the rest, verbatim, if they had had a way to pervert it, according to their sense, to another meaning. But when they saw themselves caught in this word, they wanted no mention at all to be made of this matter: lest either by professing they should be believed, or by believing they should seem to profess, excusing themselves with a subtle device, that either it was not written, or that God ought not to be said to be in substance, lest He be believed corporeal, etc. Or, as St. Athanasius adds in the book De Synodo Ariminensi: The refined account of this word, he says, since it convicts the pretence of all of them, if indeed they say that He is from God, also shuts out their subtle arguments, by which they circumvent the simple. Certainly, since they can adulterate and change all things with sophistical calumnies at their pleasure, they dread this single expression alone, as the one which convicts their heresy; and this the Fathers set in writing and opposed as a bulwark and citadel against all their impious inventions.

Therefore the Arians employed all their engines and onslaughts to abolish that distinction; for they objected first that this word was a new invention, unknown to the ancient Fathers and Apostles, and not found in Sacred Scripture; and therefore to be rejected, since the Sage admonishes, Proverbiorum 22.: Do not transgress the ancient boundaries; and the Apostle, 1. ad Timoth. 6.: Keep the deposit, avoiding profane novelties of words: therefore, etc.

To which the holy Fathers answered 1. that this argument must be turned back against the Arians:

For if they think that all words not written in Scripture are to be wholly excluded, says St. Athanasius, lib. De Synodis, why did they not contradict Arius, who heaped up so great a mass of expressions which nowhere occur in the Scriptures, such as: from non-existent things; and the Son was not before He was begotten; and He was when He was not; and the Father is changeable, and is ineffable, and is invisible to His own Son; and the Son does not know even His own substance; and the rest, which Arius vomited forth in his ridiculous and impious commentary, from his own opinion?

Or as Hilary elegantly wrote in the book Contra Constantium Augustum, who was himself an Arian:

The Apostle commands that not novelties of words but profane ones be avoided; why do you exclude pious ones, especially since it was said by him: all Scripture divinely inspired is useful? Do you nowhere read 'unbegotten' written? Will this too have to be denied, because it is new? You decree that the Son is like the Father: the Gospels do not preach this. How is it that you do not shrink from this word? In one case novelty is chosen, in another it is set aside. Where an occasion of impiety lies open, novelty is admitted. But where the greatest and only safeguard of religion is concerned, it is excluded.

They answered 2. that in truth the name ὁμοούσιον and consubstantial is not new; since it had been used by the ancient Fathers, namely by Tertullian, lib. 4. Contra Marcionem; by Prochorus in the Vita S. Ioannis: by St. Martial, Epist. 1. ad Burdigalenses, cap. 10., etc. This the Arians themselves acknowledged; for St. Athanasius relates, in the Epistola ad Africanos Episcopos, that Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, although he had earlier favored the Arian Sect, nevertheless later subscribed to the decrees of the Nicene Council, and affirmed the same thing among his own people in his own letters; of which these are the words: We know that certain learned and renowned Prelates of old, and other writers, when they spoke of the Deity of the Father and the Son, used the word consubstantial; a copy of this letter, moreover, is found in Theodoret, lib. 1. Historiae Ecclesiasticae, cap. 12. Add that this name is inserted even in the sacred Scriptures, inasmuch as the sacred Scriptures expressly affirm that the Father and the Son are one; and that the Son is begotten from the womb of the Father, and equal, etc. Whence St. Augustine, lib. 3. Contra Maximinum, cap. 14.: What is ὁμοούσιον, except I and the Father are one?

They answered 3. that as new diseases arise, new remedies must be applied, and that against new dogmas new formulas of faith must also be written down; for, as the holy Athanasius rightly replied in the disputation held at Laodicea before Probus: It is always the custom of ecclesiastical discipline that, whenever a new doctrine of heretics arises, against the insolent novelties of questions, while things remain immutably the same, the words of names be changed, and the natures of things be expressed more significantly — words which nevertheless show that their existence corresponds to the powers of the causes, and that they were the same in antiquity rather than new.

They objected 2. that the most pious Emperor Constantine reproved the word ὁμοούσιον as new and useless, in the letter which he wrote through Hosius of Corduba to Alexander and Arius, in which he says: It is a very trifling matter, and by no means worthy of so great contention: and after a few words: You will make inquiry about a certain empty particle of a question: and a little below: Concerning matters of this kind, neither ask at all, nor answer when asked: for such questions as no law or Ecclesiastical Canon prescribes of necessity, but an empty contest of dissolute idleness proposes.

The holy Fathers answered that an excessive zeal for composing the tumults excited in the Churches impelled the pious Emperor to believe readily the deceivers who affirmed that the dissension of the Arians from the Catholics was about a single word; but, as we read written in lib. 2. Concilii Nicaeni, a little before the subscriptions, in a fragment, once he had been informed of the definition of the Nicene Council, he praised God when he had heard these divine dogmas, and rejoicing at the concord of our bishops, he exulted in spirit: for he strove that no one, neither great nor small, should dissent from this confession; whence he wrote orthodox letters against Arius, which are related in book 4. Concilii Nicaeni.

Finally they object that the word ὁμοούσιον and consubstantial was proscribed and condemned by the Councils of Ariminum and Sirmium.

But I answer that although very many reject the authority of the Synod of Ariminum, as one favoring the Arian heresy, nevertheless in the Synod of Ariminum, insofar as it had the character of a Synod, not only was nothing decreed against the name or the reality of the consubstantial, but rather the Catholic truth on this matter was defined anew, and Valens and Ursacius, the supporters of the Arians, with their fifty or eighty followers who were present at the Synod, were condemned by three hundred and more Fathers, and in this way the Synod was dissolved: but when its definition had been sent to the Emperor Constantius, devoted to the Arians, he forced and compelled some of those Fathers to subscribe to the confession fabricated by the Arians; wherefore the Synod of Ariminum is condemned by some: although only that subscription should be condemned, which was made after the Synod by the Fathers lingering at Ariminum and awaiting the response of the Emperor. As for the Council of Sirmium, it is certain that nothing at all was done in it freely and rightly; but only under compulsion and by force; as the Arian Emperor Constantius was present and pressing; nor does it matter that Liberius and Hosius subscribed to it, for they did this out of weariness of exile, as we will show at greater length in the Tractatu de Conciliis.