Orations Against the Arians

St. Athanasius’ Orationes contra Arianos (c. 339–343) are the central theological monument of the anti-Arian struggle. This file covers the work’s composition and the disputed authenticity of its fourth oration, its structure and argument, the great exegetical battles fought over Proverbs 8:22, Philippians 2:9–10, and Mark 13:32, the soteriological core of the whole case — that only God can save — and the development that led to the reconciling Council of Alexandria (362) and its Tomus ad Antiochenos.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Work and Its Date

The Orationes contra Arianos (Orations, or Discourses, Against the Arians) is Athanasius’ most sustained and systematic refutation of Arian theology. It was composed during the years of his second exile and the surrounding period of intense controversy.

[Disputed: the precise dating and the unity of composition. The work is conventionally placed c. 339–343. Charles Kannengiesser argued that Athanasius first drafted a shorter treatise (c. 340) which was then expanded into the Orations (c. 342–343); Kannengiesser’s reconstruction has not won general acceptance and is treated as tentative. A range of c. 339–343 is the safe consensus (Anatolios, Athanasius, Routledge ECF, 2004).]

[Disputed: the authenticity of the fourth oration. Three orations (commonly numbered I–III) are accepted as genuine and as forming a single connected work. A fourth oration (Oratio IV) was transmitted with them and printed alongside them in the older editions (and in NPNF II/4), but its authenticity is widely doubted: many scholars, following Kannengiesser and others, regard Oratio IV as a separate composition, not part of the original three and possibly not by Athanasius at all. This guide treats the three orations as the core authentic work and flags the fourth as disputed.]

Structure and Argument

The three authentic orations proceed less as a linear treatise than as a cumulative assault on Arianism from successive angles:

Oration I opens by characterizing the Arian heresy and its watchwords (above all “there was once when he was not”), then mounts the central positive argument: the Son is the Father’s own eternal Word and Wisdom, “proper” (idios) to the Father’s essence, eternally begotten, and therefore truly God — not a creature made out of nothing.
Oration II turns to the great battleground of scriptural exegesis, and in particular to the texts the Arians pressed as proof that the Son is made or created — pre-eminently Proverbs 8:22. A very large portion of the work is devoted to wresting these passages from the Arian reading.
Oration III treats the unity of Father and Son (“I and the Father are one”; “he who has seen me has seen the Father”), the mutual indwelling (perichoresis in substance, though not yet the later technical term), and the texts that seem to show the Son’s ignorance or weakness, which the Arians cited as evidence of an inferior nature.

Throughout, Athanasius’ method is to insist on context (skopos, the overall “aim” or scope of Scripture) against the Arian habit of isolating individual verses: a passage about the Son must be read in light of the whole biblical witness and, crucially, in light of the distinction between what is said of the Word as God and what is said of him as incarnate man.

The Exegetical Battles

Proverbs 8:22

This was the single most contested text of the whole controversy. The Septuagint of Proverbs 8:22 has Wisdom say, “The Lord created me (ektisen me) a beginning of his ways for his works” — and the Arians, identifying Wisdom with the Son, read it as Scripture’s own admission that the Son is a creature. Athanasius’ reply, which occupies a great part of the Orations, is twofold. First, the verse is read in context with 8:25 (“before all the hills he begets me”): the Son is begotten, not made, and the language of “creating” cannot be allowed to override the language of begetting. Second, “he created me” is to be referred not to the Word’s eternal being but to the Incarnation — to the Word’s taking of created human nature “for his works,” that is, for the economy of salvation. “He created” thus means “he set me over the works” or marks the Word’s entry into the created order as man, not the bringing of the Son into existence (Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians II [PG 26]; trans. NPNF II/4).

Philippians 2:9–10

The Arians pressed the hymn of Philippians — “therefore God has highly exalted him and given him the name above every name” — as proof that the Son received, by grace and as reward, an honor he did not possess by nature: what can be given and exalted must have been lacking and lower. Athanasius answers, again, by the distinction of natures within the one Christ: the Word as God lacks nothing and receives nothing, for he is the giver of all; the “exaltation” and the “giving” belong to the economy of the Incarnation, to the Word made flesh, so that what is received is received for us and in our humanity, which the Word has made his own. The exaltation of the incarnate Word is the exaltation of the human nature he assumed, not the promotion of a creature to divinity (Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians I [PG 26]; trans. NPNF II/4).

Mark 13:32

“But of that day and that hour knows no one… neither the Son, but the Father” — the text in which the Son professes ignorance of the last day. The Arians took it as plain proof of an inferior, non-divine nature: the true God cannot be ignorant. Athanasius applies the same hermeneutical key: as God and as the Word through whom all things were made, the Son knows all things, for he is the Father’s own Wisdom; the ignorance is predicated of him as man, in the human nature he assumed for our sake. What Scripture ascribes to the Son’s weakness, lowliness, or ignorance belongs to the flesh he took, while his power, eternity, and omniscience belong to his Godhead — the one Christ being the subject of both (Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians III [PG 26]; trans. NPNF II/4).

The Soteriological Core: Only God Can Save

Beneath every exegetical move lies a single, controlling conviction that is the true engine of Athanasius’ anti-Arianism: only God can save, and the Son saves, therefore the Son is God. This is the same axiom that drives the early De Incarnatione, where the Word becomes man “so that we might become god” (De Incarnatione 54.3 [PG 25:192B]; trans. NPNF II/4; see Contra Gentes – De Incarnatione).

The logic is decisive. Salvation, for Athanasius, is deification — the real lifting of the human creature into the life of God, the restoration of incorruption and the knowledge of God lost in the Fall. But a creature cannot deify creatures; only God can give a share in God. If the Son were himself a creature, however exalted, he could not bridge the absolute gap between Creator and creation; he would himself stand on the creaturely side of that gap and would need saving rather than be able to save. The whole reality of redemption therefore depends on the Son’s being not a creature but truly and fully God, of one essence with the Father. Arianism, in Athanasius’ eyes, is not an abstract error about metaphysics; it is a denial of the gospel, because it leaves humanity unsaved by placing the Mediator on the wrong side of the line between God and what God has made (Anatolios, Athanasius, Routledge ECF, 2004; Behr, The Nicene Faith, SVS, 2004).

Toward the Council of Alexandria (362)

By the time Athanasius wrote the Orations, the simple opposition of “Nicene versus Arian” had given way to a more complex landscape. A large body of bishops affirmed the full divinity of the Son and yet hesitated over homoousios, preferring homoiousios (“of like essence”), often because they heard in the Nicene word a Sabellian collapse of the distinct persons. These homoiousians were not Arians; they were, in substance, potential allies who had been kept apart from the Nicene cause by the genuine ambiguity of the vocabulary — especially the unsettled relation of ousia and hypostasis (see Arius and Nicaea).

The decisive step toward reconciliation came at the Council of Alexandria in 362, which Athanasius convened on his return from exile and whose results he set out in the Tomus ad Antiochenos (Letter to the Antiochenes). The council’s achievement was to recognize that the dispute between those who spoke of “one hypostasis” (treating hypostasis as equivalent to ousia, the essence) and those who spoke of “three hypostaseis” (treating hypostasis as the distinct person) was, when each side’s meaning was examined, often a dispute over words rather than over faith. Provided both sides confessed the genuine divinity and distinct subsistence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and rejected Arianism and Sabellianism alike, the difference of terminology need not divide them. The Tomus thus extended a hand to the orthodox-minded among the homoiousians and pointed the way toward the settlement that the Cappadocian Fathers would complete in the 370s and the Second Ecumenical Council would ratify in 381 (Athanasius, Tomus ad Antiochenos 3–7, PG 26; trans. NPNF II/4; Behr, The Nicene Faith, SVS, 2004). In this mature flexibility — a fierce defense of the substance of Nicaea joined to a generous patience with its vocabulary — lies much of Athanasius’ lasting greatness as a theologian of the Church’s unity.

References

Athanasius. Orationes contra Arianos (Orations Against the Arians) I–III. PG 26; trans. NPNF II/4. (The transmitted Oratio IV is of disputed authenticity.)
Athanasius. On the Incarnation (De Incarnatione) 54.3 [PG 25:192B]; trans. NPNF II/4 (and SVS Popular Patristics 44a, trans. Behr).
Athanasius. Tomus ad Antiochenos (Council of Alexandria, 362). PG 26; trans. NPNF II/4.
Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2004.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Kannengiesser, Charles. Athanase d’Alexandrie, évêque et écrivain: une lecture des traités Contre les Ariens. Paris: Beauchesne, 1983 (on the dating and the authenticity of Oratio IV).