Homoousios and St. Athanasius

Nicaea settled the faith and settled nothing else. This file explains the word the council chose, why it was chosen despite being unscriptural and despite having been rejected by an earlier synod, what the fifty-six years between Nicaea and Constantinople actually looked like, and how St. Athanasius’ argument — which is soteriological rather than philosophical — eventually carried the day and made the Cappadocian settlement possible.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Council

The First Ecumenical Council met at Nicaea in Bithynia in 325, convened by the Emperor Constantine within a dozen years of the end of the persecutions, and presided over in substance by Hosius of Cordova. The traditional number of the fathers is 318, and that number is a theological figure rather than a headcount: it is the number of Abraham’s trained servants in Genesis 14:14, and it appears in the sources some decades after the event. [Disputed: the number of bishops at Nicaea. Eusebius, who was present, says "more than two hundred and fifty" (*Life of Constantine* III.8); Eustathius of Antioch, also present, gives about 270; the figure 318 appears later and became canonical, its scriptural resonance almost certainly being the reason (see the discussion in Hanson, *The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God*, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988, 155–156). The Church's veneration of "the 318 God-bearing Fathers" is liturgical and is not a census.]

The council produced a creed, twenty canons — among them the provisions touching the Melitian schism — and a settlement of the Paschal computation. Its dogmatic act was a single word.

Why an Unscriptural Word

The council did not want homoousios. St. Athanasius, writing thirty years later, gives the reason it was forced to it. The bishops first tried scriptural language: they proposed that the Son is “of God,” “the true power and image of the Father,” “like the Father in all things,” “unalterable.” Each time, Athanasius reports, the Eusebian party conferred among themselves and accepted the phrase — because a creature can be said to be “of God” in the sense that all things are of God, and a man can be called God’s image, and “unalterable” can mean unalterable by grace. Only when the bishops said that the Son is “of the essence” (ek tēs ousias) of the Father and “of one essence” (homoousios) with him did the evasion close (Athanasius, De decretis 19–20; trans. NPNF II/4).

This is the classic and correct account of what dogmatic definition is for. The word is not more scriptural, more beautiful, or more explanatory than the alternatives. It was chosen because it was the only one that could not be signed in bad faith.

The Word’s Problematic History

The choice carried a real cost, and conceding it is essential to understanding the next half-century.

Homoousios had a compromised record. It had been used by Gnostics in the second century of the consubstantiality of emanated aeons. More seriously, the Antiochene synod that deposed Paul of Samosata around 268 had rejected the term — apparently because Paul used it to argue that Father and Son are one and the same undifferentiated subject, so that affirming it seemed to concede modalism. And the word is materialist in its ordinary Greek associations: two coins are homoousia because they are of one stuff, which suggests a divine substance parcelled out.

The result was that a great many bishops who were not Arians, and who had no intention of calling the Son a creature, would not say homoousios. St. Athanasius has to spend a long passage of the De synodis explaining that the Antiochene fathers rejected the word in one sense while the Nicene fathers affirmed it in another, and St. Basil has to make the same argument in a letter to Apollinaris’ correspondents years later (Athanasius, De synodis 43–45; Basil, Epistle 52; trans. NPNF II/4 and II/8). The explanation is sound. But that it had to be made at all — twice, by the two greatest defenders of the council — is the measure of the difficulty.

This is why 325 did not end the controversy. It is also why the account sometimes given, in which Nicaea defines the truth and the following decades are simply a struggle between the orthodox and the wicked, is false to the sources and unnecessary to the Orthodox case. A great many faithful bishops were unconvinced by a word, not by a doctrine, and the Cappadocians’ achievement was to explain the word in a way that let them say it.

The Fifty-Six Years

What followed Nicaea was not a settlement but the longest doctrinal crisis in the Church’s history. Its shape, compressed:

The 330s and 340s. Athanasius, elected to Alexandria in 328, is deposed at the Council of Tyre (335) on charges of violence and irregularity, and exiled; the first of five exiles totalling some seventeen years. Marcellus of Ancyra, a strong Nicene, is condemned for a doctrine that looked frankly modalist — an embarrassment the Nicene party never fully lived down, and a demonstration that the fear of Sabellianism was not paranoid. The Dedication Council of Antioch (341) produces creeds that are conservative, avoid homoousios, and are not Arian.

The 350s. Under Constantius II the imperial pressure runs the other way. The so-called “Blasphemy of Sirmium” (357) forbids the use of ousia language altogether on the ground that it is unscriptural and beyond human knowledge. A radical wing emerges — Aetius and Eunomius, the Anomoians — teaching that the Son is unlike (anomoios) the Father in essence, and grounding this in the claim that agennēsia, unbegottenness, simply is the divine essence, which is therefore knowable and which the begotten Son by definition does not share. Eunomius is the sharpest opponent the Nicene party ever faced, and both Basil and Gregory of Nyssa wrote books against him.

359–360. The twin councils of Ariminum (for the West) and Seleucia (for the East), followed by the council of Constantinople in 360, impose a homoian formula: the Son is “like the Father according to the Scriptures,” with all ousia language forbidden. This is the settlement St. Jerome had in mind in his famous line: “the whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian” (Jerome, Dialogue against the Luciferians 19; trans. NPNF II/6). The remark is rhetorical — the formula was not Arius’ — but it accurately conveys what it felt like.

362 and after. Julian’s brief reign recalls the exiles; Athanasius holds the Council of Alexandria (362), on which see below. Under Valens the pressure returns in the East and Basil spends his episcopate under it. The reversal comes with Theodosius’ accession in 379.

Through the whole period the parties were more than two: homoousians (of one essence), homoiousians (of like essence — the “iota” party, whom Athanasius came to regard as brothers differing in words), homoians (like, without further specification), and anomoians. Treating them as “Arians” against “the orthodox” flattens the history and, more importantly, obscures how the resolution was actually reached.

Athanasius’ Argument

St. Athanasius’ case for homoousios is not, in the first place, a metaphysical argument. It is an argument about what has to be true if the Church’s worship and the Christian’s salvation are not illusions.

The soteriological argument. “He was made man that we might be made God” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54; trans. Behr, PPS 44a). If deification is what salvation is, then the one who deifies must have divinity to communicate. A creature can pass on only what it received, and what it received is created. Therefore either the Son is God by nature, or no one is deified (Orations against the Arians II.67–70). Athanasius later applies the identical argument to the Holy Spirit in the Letters to Serapion: if the Spirit is a creature, then we are not made partakers of God when we receive him, and baptism initiates us into a creature (Letters to Serapion I.22–27; trans. NPNF II/4; see Letters to Serapion).

The argument from worship. The Church adores Christ. Either that adoration terminates in God, or the Church is committing precisely the sin the martyrs refused (Orations against the Arians II.14–15; III.16).

The argument from the Father’s name. If there was when the Son was not, then there was when God was not Father — so that “Father” names an acquired relation and God changes. The Son’s eternity is required by the Father’s own immutability (Orations against the Arians I.14, 20–22).

None of these arguments requires a theory of how essence is shared. That is exactly their strength, and it is why the position could eventually be held by people who could not yet say what ousia meant.

The Council of Alexandria, 362

The pivot toward resolution is a small synod. In 362 Athanasius, briefly returned from exile, convened a council at Alexandria whose Tomus ad Antiochenos addressed the schism at Antioch, where two Nicene factions were divided over whether to say “three hypostases” or “one hypostasis.”

The council’s ruling was to ask each party what it meant. Those who said three hypostases were asked whether they meant three principles or three gods; they said they did not, and were received. Those who said one hypostasis were asked whether they meant it in the Sabellian sense; they said they did not, and were received. Both were required to confess the Nicene faith, and no further verbal uniformity was imposed (Athanasius, Tomus ad Antiochenos 5–6; trans. NPNF II/4; see Tomus ad Antiochenos).

This is the hinge of the century. It established that the two vocabularies could carry one faith, and it made room for the settlement in which ousia and hypostasis would be assigned distinct and stable meanings — which is the achievement of the next section. Athanasius himself never adopted the Cappadocian terminology; he did something more useful, which was to decline to make his own terminology a test.

What Nicaea Left

By Athanasius’ death in 373 the situation was this. The Nicene faith had a champion, a soteriological argument that could not be answered, and imperial hostility. It did not have a vocabulary in which the confession of three could be stated without inviting the charge of tritheism, or the confession of one without inviting Sabellianism. The Holy Spirit had barely been discussed: the Creed of 325 said only “and in the Holy Spirit,” full stop.

Both gaps were filled within a decade, in Cappadocia.

References

Council of Nicaea I (325). Creed, anathemas, and canons. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, 1990.
Athanasius of Alexandria. De decretis 19–20; De synodis 43–45; Orations against the Arians I–III; Tomus ad Antiochenos; Letters to Serapion I. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4; Letters to Serapion also trans. Mark DelCogliano, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, and Lewis Ayres, Works on the Spirit, Popular Patristics 43. Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2011.
Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation 54. Trans. John Behr, Popular Patristics 44a. Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2011.
Basil the Great. Epistle 52. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Jerome. Dialogue against the Luciferians 19. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 6.
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004.