Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J. F.

Buch: The Way to Nicea

Titel: The Way to Nicea

Stichwort: Entwicklung im Verstehen 4: Arius

Kurzinhalt: Arius did three main things: 1) by ruling out all anthropomorphic or metaphorical language ...

Textausschnitt: 134c Arius did three main things: 1) by ruling out all anthropomorphic or metaphorical language he took the ground from under naive realism; 2) setting aside the Platonic categories introduced by Origen, he posed the question at issue in the Christian categories of Creator and creature; 3) having thus set up the problem, he resolved it by arguing, in a more or less rationalistic manner, to the conclusion that the Son was a creature. (Fs) (notabene)

135a The Council of Nicea employed dogmatic realism. While it did not explicitly repudiate naive realism, it did so implicitly.1 The council Fathers considered those phrases that might suggest Platonic participation, as for example that the Son is without difference most similar to the Father, but when they saw how the Arians could get around all such phrases, they rejected them.2 Then, in direct opposition to the Arians, they laid down that the Son is not a creature, that he is not temporal, and that he is not mutable. Finally, in order to issue a positive statement of Catholic doctrine, they declared that the Son is both born of the Father and consubstantial with him. (Fs)

135b The subsequent controversies show how inevitable all of this was. Within the council itself there were those who held that it was impossible for anything that was not a material, corporeal thing to be consubstantial with anything else; by parity of reasoning they would have said that it is impossible for anything that is not a material, corporeal thing to be a son; and the very use of the category of impossibility reveals a rationalistic turn of mind, with too little appreciation of the fact that there are mysteries in God. (Fs)

135c Equally rationalistic were the Eusebians and Homoeousians, who could understand the Son's consubstantiality with the Father only in a Sabellian sense; more seriously so were the Anomoeans who, by fallacious syllogisms, attempted to demonstrate the impossibility of the Blessed Trinity. (Fs)