. A debate which to most modern men is
remote and abstruse almost to the point of unintelligibility, and of
which many of the external aspects are disheartening in the extreme, is
here brought before us in something of the reasonableness which it must
have had for those who took part in it. Tertullian shaped the problem
and established the nomenclature for the Christological solution which
the Orient two hundred years later made its own. It was he who, from the
point of view of the Jurist, rather than of the philosopher, gave the
words 'person' and 'substance,' which continually occur in this
discussion, the meaning which in the Nicene Creed they bear. Most
brilliant is Harnack's characterisation of Arius and Athanasius. In
Arius the notion of the Son of God is altogether done away. Only the
name remains. The victory of Arianism would have resolved Christianity
into cosmology and formal ethics. It would have destroyed it as
religion. Yet the perverse situation into which the long and fierce
controversy had drifted cannot be better illustrated than by one
undisputed fact. Athanasius, who assured for Christianity its character
as a religion of the living communion of God with man, is yet the
theologian in whose Christology almost every possible trace of the
recollection of the historic Jesus has disappeared. The purpose of the
redemption is to bring men into community of life with God. But
Athanasius apprehended this redemption as a conferment, from without and
from above, of a divine nature. He subordinated everything to this idea.
The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation that
the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was the
possession in all fulness of the divine nature. His incarnation, his
manifestation in real human life, held fast to in word, is reduced to a
mere semblance. Salvation is not an ethical process, but a miraculous
endowment. The Christ, who was God, lifts men up to godhood. They become
God. These phrases are of course capable of ethical and intelligible
meaning. The development of the doctrine, however, threw the emphasis
upon the metaphysical and miraculous aspects of the work. It gloried in
the fact that the presence of divine and human, two natures in one
person forever, was unintelligible. In the end it came to pass that the
enthusiastic assent to that which defied explanation became the very
mark of a humble and submissive faith. One reads the so-called
Atha