Arius and Athanasius, part 1 — How is the Son produced? (JT)

This series is extracted from a paper I delivered at the APA in Chicago last month. I’ve basically just cut up the paper into smaller chunks.

As we all know, the doctrine of the Trinity states that God is three persons: the Father, Son, and Spirit. Further, two of these persons, the Son and the Spirit, are produced. According to both East and West, the Son is produced by the Father, but the East holds that the Spirit is also produced by the Father, while the West holds that the Spirit is produced by the Father and Son together. But that’s by the by. The point is that some of the divine persons are produced.

The question that interests me is this: how, exactly, does one divine person produce another? In this series, I want to look at two 4th century attempts to explain how the Father produces the Son: that of Arius, and that of Athanasius.

As is well known, Arius was a priest in Alexandria during the early decades of the 4th century, and he preached that the Father creates the Son out of nothing (ex nihilo). Arius’ teaching was quickly absorbed in a controversy that was spreading all over the Eastern Roman Empire, and eventually the Council of Nicea met in 325 CE to settle the dispute.

For a variety of complicated reasons, Nicea didn’t really solve the problem, and debate continued throughout the remainder of the century. In the middle of the 4th century, Athanasius emerged as one of the most outspoken opponents of Arius’ teaching. According to Athanasius, the Son is not created out of nothing. Rather, he is begotten by the Father; God’s Son is a real son, produced in much the same way that human sons are begotten by their fathers.

I want to try to explicate the theories of Arius and Athanasius with as much philosophical precision as I can. Arius and Athanasius are not always consistent, and they frequently speak in rather vague ways, so the precise details of their claims are not always clear. But nevertheless, I will try to extract from each author as clear a theory as I can.

Now, certain specialists (and non-specialists) might find my approach inappropriate. They might say that I am using philosophical tools and distinctions that are too modern, or too rigorous, or too whatever. After all, Arius and Athanasius were not 20th century analytic philosophers, and so we need to attend to their style and concerns, not our own, if we want to do them justice.

There may be something to this, but I should say at the outset that I do not mean to provide an account of Arius and Athanasius that completely and fully represents their views and concerns in all their historical detail. My purpose here is to look at their writings and extract theories that are philosophically interesting. In doing so, I hope to highlight certain issues that are important for any account of how one divine person produces another.

Next time, we’ll get into the details of ‘creating something from nothing’.