{"id":748,"date":"2009-04-02T05:50:55","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T09:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=748"},"modified":"2009-03-13T10:00:46","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T14:00:46","slug":"arius-and-athanasius-part-8-athanasius-on-begetting-the-son-jt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/arius-and-athanasius-part-8-athanasius-on-begetting-the-son-jt\/","title":{"rendered":"Arius and Athanasius, part 8 – Athanasius on begetting the Son (JT)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This
This diagram from the 1970s says it all.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last time<\/a>, I explained that Athanasius thinks human fathers procreate sons by giving a part of their substance to the mother, and that bit of substance then becomes an ingredient in the zygote, and the zygote inherits its human nature from that ingredient.<\/p>\n

Athanasius thinks this basic model applies to God too, though he is careful to make an important qualification: human fathers beget sons by giving up a part<\/em> of their substance, but God the Father gives his whole self<\/em> to his Son, not a part.<\/p>\n

The reason for this is that like Arius, Athanasius believes that the Father is simple. There are no ingredients in the Father, so anything that\u2019s in the Father is, strictly speaking, identical to the Father. (Thus, like Arius, Athanasius agrees that the Godhood is not an ingredient in the Father; rather, it just is<\/em> the Father.)<\/p>\n

As we saw before, Arius infers from this that the Father cannot break off a part of himself, and so he concludes that the Father must create the Son out of nothing. Athanasius agrees that the Father cannot break off a part of his substance, but he thinks Arius hasn\u2019t seen all the available options. The Father\u2019s simplicity entails only this: if the Father is going to give any of his substance to the Son, he\u2019s got to give the whole thing, or none at all. It\u2019s not a question of a part; it\u2019s a question of all or none.<\/p>\n

Of course, Athanasius denies that the Son is created without any ingredients, so he can\u2019t say the Father gives none of his substance to the Son. Rather, he goes with the former option: the Father gives the Son his whole self<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Like human fathers then, God the Father begets God the Son by giving his substance to the Son. But unlike human fathers, God the Father gives his whole self to the Son, and not just a part of himself. Thus, for Athanasius, the Father himself<\/em> is an ingredient in the Son.<\/p>\n

This allows Athanasius to draw some important conclusions. First of all, by saying that the Son is \u2018produced from\u2019 the Father\u2019s substance, Athanasius can say that the Son is not created. Like human sons, God\u2019s Son is produced with at least one pre-existing ingredient, namely the Father himself, and that\u2019s enough to show that the Son is not created from nothing.<\/p>\n

Second, Athanasius can say that God\u2019s Son is divine just like his Father. God\u2019s Son inherits his divine properties from the substance he gets from his Father, just as human sons inherit their human properties from the substance they get from their fathers.<\/p>\n

But since the Father\u2019s substance is not divided up, the Son is homoousios<\/em><\/a> (same in substance) with his Father in a quite literal sense. God\u2019s Son doesn\u2019t just have the same kind of substance as his Father; he has the numerically same substance.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an important point to notice here. Even though the whole Father is an ingredient in the Son, the Father is not identical<\/em> to the Son. As I explained above, an ingredient cannot be identical to the product in question, and that applies in God\u2019s case too. Further, if the Father were identical to the Son, that would be modalism, and Athanasius explicitly rejects that (as does Arius).<\/p>\n

In the next<\/a> couple of posts, I want to talk about some problems that I see in Athanasius’ account of the Son’s production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last time, I explained that Athanasius thinks human fathers procreate sons by giving a part of their substance to the mother, and that bit of substance then becomes an ingredient in the zygote, and the zygote inherits its human nature from that ingredient. Athanasius thinks this basic model applies to God too, though he is… Read More »Arius and Athanasius, part 8 – Athanasius on begetting the Son (JT)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,14,13,3],"tags":[29,26,39,24,22],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-heresy-orthodoxy","category-history","category-theologians","category-theories","tag-arius","tag-athanasius","tag-generation","tag-nicea","tag-trinity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":809,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions\/809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}