Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Arius; Monarchie; Rationalist; Problem ders Ursprungs, d. Zeugung des Sohns vom Vater

Kurzinhalt: Given that the Son is from the Father, is the Son of the order of the Creator, who is God, or of the order of the creature, who is not God?

Textausschnitt: 38b As a matter of fact, the issue of the alternatives, which is essential to the notion of a problem, had not yet been stated with precision. This was finally done by Arius, a priest of Alexandria and director of the school of exegesis there, an able dialectician, a disciple of Lucian of Antioch, trained in Lucian's famous school. His greatest historical significance was that he ruthlessly clarified the problem of the Logos and set it in its proper terms. (Fs)

38c The new clarity is evident to anyone who reads Arius' profession of his personal faith, written about 318 in a letter to Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, which has been preserved for us by Athanasius. Arius impatiently discards all metaphor and all anthropomorphism; he dismisses all Platonist speculation. Instead, he posits the question in categories completely alien to all the philosophical and religious systems of the ancient world. He asks his question in the Hebraic-Christian categories of Creator and creature. Arius' question was luminously clear. Given that the Son is from the Father, is the Son of the order of the Creator, who is God, or of the order of the creature, who is not God? And to the question thus put, in altogether decisive form, he returns an unequivocal answer. The Son, he says, is from the Father as the "perfect creature." He came to be as all creatures come to be, through a making, through an act of the Father's will. When he thus became, he came to be out of nothing. And before he came to be, he was not. Therefore "there was when he was not" (this last phrase is the celebrated Arian tessera that shocked the Christian world). (Fs) (notabene)

39a This was Arius' answer to the problem of the Logos within the Monarchy. He rescues the Monarchy by extruding the Logos from it. It was the answer of the rationalist who eliminates the seeming contradictions within the Christian statement of the mystery of God by evacuating the mystery itself. In the end, for Arius, the Logos-Son has only the status of a creature; he is no more a mystery than you or I. (Fs) (notabene)

39b We need not be concerned here with the case Arius made for his view. It was essentially a dialectical, not a scriptural, case. It was based on the notion of God as the Unoriginate and on the conclusion that what originates from God, as the Son from the Father, must necessarily be created. It is more to our purpose here to note the mode of thought in which Arius raised the problem of the Son. His question asked whether the Son is God or not. The correlative questions were, what does it mean to say that the Son is-from the Father as Son, that is, what is his mode of origin from the Father and what therefore is his relation to the Father? I add emphasis to illustrate the fact that these were ontological questions. They raised the issue of the being and substance of the Son as he is, in himself and in relation to the Father. Moreover, the alternative answers which Arius presented and from which he chose were cast in ontological categories, God or creature. These are categories of being and substance. They transcend the Stoic materialist categories, the idealist categories of Platonist devising, and the intersubjective categories of Hebraic thought. (Fs) (notabene)