tion that with Athanasius homoousious meant identity of essence or substance, so that He who came "from the essence"[1] of the Father not only resembles the Father but is inseparable from the essential being of the Father. Thus he says, "We must not imagine three divided substances in God, as among men, lest we like the heathen invent a multiplicity of gods, but as the stream is born of the fountain and not separate from it although there are two forms and names," and asserts the Son's "identity with His own Father."[2]
A conviction thus deliberately stated is not to be set aside by appealing to the unquestionable fact that there are instances in which Athanasius uses the word homoousios of separate existences in the sense of identity in nature.[3] It has been asserted that he gave up insisting on his earlier rigorous use of the word and would allow any one as orthodox who would adopt it even in the sense in which it is employed of man and man. But even if that be admitted—and Athanasius had no sympathy with verbal pedantry and was really anxious for the cause of charity and peace—he must not be supposed to have agreed to the Semi-Arian position, since he no more accepted the Semi-Arians themselves than the full-fledged Arians.
Subsequently two other parties emerged. First, the extreme Arians stiffened their position and sharpened their antitheses against the mediating Semi-Arians. Thus they changed their tactics entirely. In the earlier period Athanasius had accused them of shiftiness and a vagueness of language deliberately chosen in order to throw dust into their opponents' eyes. This was their policy at the council of Nicæa when they saw themselves in a hopeless minority, and the insincerity of it was one of the heaviest accusations brought against them by Athanasius in his Orations.[4] But during the Arian ascendancy under Valens the situation was very different, and now the extreme Arians, seeing no further need of compromise, went so far as to declare that
- ↑ ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας.
- ↑ Nicene Def. 9; cf. Orat. i. 20, 22.
- ↑ e.g. de Sent. Dionys. 10; de Synodis, 51.
- ↑ e.g. Orat. i. 8, 31.
