childish self-satisfaction in the working out of empty syllogisms. This had not been learned from Origen, who always had facts and definite ends in view when he speculated.

1

But all this might be put up with if only this doctrine were in any way designed to shew how communion with God is arrived at through Christ. This is what we must necessarily demand; for what the ancient Church understood by "redemption in part a physical redemption of a very questionable kind, and it would not necessarily have been anything to be regretted if anyone had emancipated himself from this "redemption." But one has absolutely nowhere the impression that Arius and his friends are in their theology concerned with communion with God. Their doctrina de Christo has nothing whatever to do with this question. The divine which appeared on earth is not the Godhead, but one of its creations. God Himself remains unknown. Whoever expresses adherence to the above propositions and does this with unmistakable satisfaction, stands up for the unique nature of God, but does this, however, only that he may not endanger the uniformity of the basis of the world, and otherwise is prepared to worship besides this God other "Gods" too, creatures that is; whoever allows religion to disappear in a cosmological doctrine and in veneration for a heroic teacher, even though he may call him "perfect creature,” XTÍOμа TÉZSIC, and revere in him the being through whom this world has come to be what it is, is, so far as his religious way of thinking is concerned, a Hellenist, and has every claim to be highly valued by Hellenists. 2

The admission that the Arians succeeded in getting a grasp of certain features in the historical Christ presented to us by the New Testament, cannot in any way alter this judgment. In this matter they were far superior to their opponents; but they were absolutely unable to make any religious use of what they perceived. They speak of Christ as Paul of Samosata does, but by foisting in behind the Christ who was exalted to be Lord, the half divine being, logos-creature, adyos-xtioμx, 1 See the tractate of Aëtius preserved in Epiphanius; but the older Arians had already acted in the same way.

2 There are some good remarks on Arianism in Kaufmann, Deutsche Geschichte I., Pp. 232, 234; also in Richter, Weström. Reich, p. 537.

they deprived the most valuable knowledge they had of all practical value. Paul could say in a general way: rà zpaτcúμενα τῷ λόγῳ τῆς φύσεως οὐκ ἔχει ἔπαινον· τὰ δὲ σχέσει φιλίας κρατούμενα ὑπεραινεῖται (what was accomplished by the Logos of nature deserves no praise, but what was accomplished in the state of love is to be praised exceedingly). Such a statement was made impossible for the Arians by the introduction of cosmological speculation. What dominates Paul's whole view of the question-namely, the thought that the unity of love and feeling is the most abiding unity, scarcely ever finds an echo amongst the Arians, for it is swallowed up by that philosophy which measures worth by duration in time and thinks of a half-eternal being as being nearer God than a temporal being who is filled with the love of God. We cannot therefore finally rate very high the results of the rational exegesis of christological passages as given by the Arians; they do not use them to shew that Jesus was a man whom God chose for Himself or that God was in the man Jesus, but, on the contrary, in order to prove that this Jesus was no complete God. Nor can we put a high value on their defence of monotheism either, for they adored creatures. What is alone really valuable, is the energetic emphasis they lay on freedom, and which they adopted from Origen, but even it has no religious significance.

Had the Arian doctrine gained the victory in the Greekspeaking world, it would in all probability have completely ruined Christianity, that is, it would have made it disappear in cosmology and morality and would have annihilated religion in the religion. "The Arian Christology is inwardly the most unstable, and dogmatically the most worthless, of all the Christologies to be met with in the history of dogma." Still it had its mission. The Arians made the transition from heathenism to Christianity easier for the large numbers of the cultured and half-cultured whom the policy of Constantine brought into the Church. They imparted to them a view of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity which could present no difficulty to any one at that period. The Arian monotheism was the best transition from polytheism to monotheism. It asserted the truth that there is Schultz, Gottheit Christi, p. 65.

one supreme God with whom nothing can be compared, and thus rooted out the crude worship of many gods. It constructed a descending divine triad in which the cultured were able to recognise again the highest wisdom of their philosophers. It permitted men to worship a demiurge together with the primal substance, páry ovoix; it taught an incarnation of this demiurge and, on the other hand again, a theopoiesis, and was able skilfully to unite this with the worship of Christ in the Church. It afforded, in the numerous formulæ which it coined, interesting material for rhetorical and dialectic exercises. It quickened the feeling of freedom and responsibility and led to discipline, and even to asceticism. And finally, it handed on the picture of a divine hero who was obedient even to death and gained the victory by suffering and patience, and who has become a pattern for us. When transmitted along with the Holy Scriptures, it even produced a living piety amongst Germanic Christians, if it also awakened in them the very idea to which it had originally been specially opposed, the idea of a theogony. What was shewn above-namely, that the doctrine was new, is to be taken cum grano salis; elements which were present in the teaching of the Church from the very beginning got here vigorous outward expression and became supreme. The approval the doctrine met with shews how deeply rooted they were in the Church. We cannot but be astonished at the first glance to find that those who sought to defend the whole system of Origen partly sided with Arius and partly gave him their patronage. But this fact ceases to be striking so soon as we consider that the controversy very quickly became so acute as to necessitate a decision for or against Arius. But the Origenists, moreover, had a very strong antipathy to everything that in any way suggested "Sabellianism"; for Sabellianism had no place for the pursuit of Hellenic cosmological speculation, i.e., of scientific theology. Their position with regard to the doctrine of Athanasius was thereby determined. They would rather have kept to their rich supply of musty formulæ, but they were forced to decide for Arius.

1 The figure of Ulfilas vouches for this; his confession of faith (Halm, § 126) is the only Arian one which is not polemical.

II. Nothing can more clearly illustrate the perverse state of the problem in the Arian-Athanasian controversy than the notorious fact that the man who saved the character of Christianity as a religion of living fellowship with God, was the man from whose Christology almost every trait which recalls the historical Jesus of Nazareth was erased. Athanasius undoubtedly retained the most important feature-namely, that Christ promised to bring men into fellowship with God. But while he subordinated everything to this thought and recognised in redemption a communication of the divine nature, he reduced the entire historical account given of Christ to the belief that the Redeemer shared in the nature and unity of the Godhead itself, and he explained everything in the Biblical documents in accordance with this idea.' That which Christ is and is for us, is the Godhead; in the Son we have the Father, and in what the Son has brought, the divine is communicated to us. This fundamental thought is not new, and it corresponds with a very old conception of the Gospel. It is not new, for it was never wanting in the Church before the time of Athanasius. The Fourth Gospel, Ignatius, Irenæus, Methodius, the so-called Modalism and even the Apologists and Origen-not to mention the Westerns-prove this; for the Apologists, and Origen too, in what they say of the Logos, emphasised not only His distinction from the Father, but also His unity with the Father. The Samosatene had also laid the whole emphasis on the unity, although indeed he was not understood. But not since the days in which the Fourth Gospel was written do we meet with any.

1 Anyone, on the other hand, who, like Arius, held to the idea of a developing and struggling Christ was not able to conceive of Him as Redeemer, but only as teacher and example. This was the situation: the Bible accounts of Christ did not favour and establish the sole idea which was held at the time regarding fellowship with God and redemption, but, on the contrary, they interfered with it.

2 Athanasius always appealed to the collective testimony of the Church in support of the doctrine which he defended. In the work, de decret, 25 sq., he shews that the words Ex Tйs ovcía; and óμooúσios were not discovered by the Nicene Fathers, but, on the contrary, had been handed down to them. He appeals to Theognostus, to the two Dionysii and Origen, to the latter with the reservation that in his case it is necessary to distinguish between what he wrote yuμvaσTIxãs and what he wrote of a positive character. It is one of the few passages in which he has thought of Origen.

one with whom the conviction is so definite, thought out with such an assurance of victory, expressed so strongly and so simply, and of such an absolute kind, as it is with Athanasius. All the rest by introducing qualifying thoughts in some way or other, brought an element of uncertainty into their feeling of its truth, and impaired its strength. That in the age of Constantine during the greatest revolution which the Church has experienced and which was so fraught with consequences, the faith represented by Athanasius was confessed with such vigour, is what saved the Christian Church. Its faith would probably have got entirely into the hands of the philosophers, its confession would have become degraded or would have been turned into an imperial official decree enjoining the worship of the clear-shining Godhead", if Athanasius had not been there and had not helped those who shared his views to make a stand and inspired them with courage.

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But at the beginning of the Fourth Century the form of expression for the belief in the unity of the eternal Godhead and its appearance in Jesus Christ was already sketched out. It was as little allowable to think of a unity of living feeling, of will and aim alone, as of the perfect identification of the persons. The doctrines of the pre-existing Son of God, of the eternal Logos, but, above all, the view that everything valuable is accomplished in the nature only, of which feeling and will are an annex, were firmly established. Athanasius in making use of these presuppositions in order to express his faith in the Godhead of Christ, i.c., in the essential unity of the Godhead in itself with the Godhead manifested in Christ, fell into an abyss of contradictions.

Unquestionably the old Logos doctrine too, and also Arianism, strike us to-day as being full of contradictions, but it was Athanasius who first arrived at the contradictio in adjecto in the full sense of the phrase. That the Godhead is a numerical unity, but that nevertheless Son and Father are to be distinguished within this unity as two-this is his view. He teaches that there is only one unbegotten principle, but that nevertheless the Son has not come into being. He maintains that the Divine in Christ is the eternal "Son", but that the Son