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Document Details : Title: Reassessing Arianism in Light of the Council of Antioch 268 Author(s): GIULEA, Dragoş Andrei Journal: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Volume: 95 Issue: 1 Date: 2019 Pages: 63-96 DOI: 10.2143/ETL.95.1.3285813 Abstract : Harnack’s thesis on the connection between Arianism and Paul of Samosata was criticized and is no longer held today. The present study proposes a new methodological approach by reconsidering the Council of Antioch 268 which condemned Paul. The study, however, does not associate Arianism with Paul but with the doctrine of the synodals who deposed him, and made a theological position official which most likely dominated the Eastern Roman Empire in the late third and early fourth centuries. This study first demonstrates the remarkable fact that Arians preserved a few Antiochene tenets, such as the understanding of ousia and hypostasis as synonyms indicating an individual substance and its main consequences: the refutation of the homoousion (for entailing modalism) and a certain subordination of the Son. Secondly, the study argues that Arianism distanced itself from the Antiochene trajectory while pushing subordinationism to the point of conceiving of the Son as a creature without existence before its generation from the Father (or pre-existing only 'in germ', as Aetius expressed it). Because these assumptions can be found in Arius, Asterius, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Aetius, and Eunomius, they actually created a new and distinct theological trajectory, Arianism. The study also states that the cause of the separation between Arian and Antiochene theology was philosophical reasoning. Yet, it was a philosophical reasoning within the same Antiochene metaphysical matrix of understanding ousia and hypostasis as individual substance. Because a second individual ousia sharing the genuine divine attributes of the Father would certainly have implied a second first-principle – which is both a metaphysical impossibility and a serious challenge of the idea of monotheism – they introduced the aforementioned radical ontological distance between Father and Son. |
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