A Defense of the Nicene Definition (De Decretis) by St. Athanasius

Author:St. Athanasius
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Assumption Press
Published: 2014-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5.

26. Now the Eusebians were at that former time examined at great length, and passed sentence on themselves, as I said before; on this they subscribed; and after this change of mind they kept in quiet and retirement; but since the present party, in the wantonness of impiety, and in their wild vagaries about the truth, are full set upon accusing the Council, let them tell us, I repeat, what is the sort of Scriptures from which they have learned, or who is the Saint by whom they have been taught, to heap together their phrases, “Out of nothing,” and “He was not before His generation,” and “Once He was not,” and “Alterable,” and the “Pre-existence,” and “At God’s will;” which are their fables in mockery of the Lord. Considering then that they on their part have made use of phrases not in Scripture, and that with a view thereby of expressing impious notions, it does not become them to find fault with those who for a pious purpose go beyond Scripture. Disguise it as you will by artful terms and plausible sophisms, impiety is a sin; but represent the truth under ever so strange a formula, while it is truth, it at least is piety. That what these Christ-opposers advanced was impious falsehood, I have proved both now and formerly; that what the Council defined was pious truth is equally clear, as will be granted by any careful inquirer into the occasion of the definition. It was as follows:—

27. The Council wishing to condemn the impious phrases of the Arians, and to use instead the received terms of Scripture, namely, that the Son is not from nothing, but from God, and is the Word and Wisdom and not a creature or work, but the proper Offspring from the Father, the party of Eusebius, out of their inveterate heterodoxy, understood the phrase from God as common to Him and to us, as if in respect to it the Word of God differed nothing from us, and this, because it is written, There is One God from whom all things;[52] and again, Old things are passed away, behold all things are new, and all things are from God.[53] But the Fathers, perceiving their craft and the cunning of their impiety, were forced thereupon to express more distinctly the sense of the words from God. Accordingly, they wrote “from the substance of God,” in order that from God might not be considered common and equal in the Son and in things which are made, but that all others might be acknowledged as creatures, and the Word alone as from the Father. For though all things be said to be from God, yet this is not in the sense in which the Son is from Him; for as to the creatures, “from God” is said of them, in that they exist not at random or spontaneously, nor come into being by chance, according to those philosophers who refer them to the combination

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