THE SOURCE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FOURTH ORATIO CONTRA ARIANOS ATTRIBUTED TO ATHANASIUS

BY

R. P. C. HANSON

That the fourth of the Orations against the Arians attributed to Athanasius cannot be from his hand has long been recognised. There is not a single quotation of it in the writings of Fathers or acts of synods. The manuscript evidence for it is not as full as for the other three Ora- tions. Severus of (465-538) in his references to the Orations im- plies three discourses and three only (though the third is called by different names) and he does not know of a fourth. The text of Orat. IV (as it shall henceforth be called) is more learned and better ac- quainted with philosophy than one would expect of a work by Athanasius, and the style is different from his. The work is not a deliberately planned treatise in its form, like the first three, though it is not a mere collection of notes. It is a plain setting out without intro- duction of the arguments against a short list of heresies, , and two forms of Sabellianism, one taught by a group of people unnamed and the other, dealt with in the last seven chapters only, spread by peo- ple called the followers of Paul of Samosata. Orat. IV has no gene about using hypostasis in Trinitarian contexts, a practice unknown in the first three Orations. It uses homoousios twice, whereas there is only one occurrence of the word in the first three. The first three use 6voioq 1 'to 1tCx'tpC('like the Father') frequently, the fourth never.' External evidence, therefore, is useless for determining the date and provenance of Orat. IV. There is however plenty of internal evidence which should make it possible to fix the date at least within approximate limits. But this evidence has to be analysed carefully so as to fit the document satisfactorily into the history of the . We must first note that the treatise contains some language which is very like the kind of theological language used by Athanasius. The Son is one with the Father, the author says 'because he is the Son of the substance of the Father by nature, and is his own Logos' .2 God, he says, 'has the 258

Logos as a progeny according to the nature of his own substance'.' The Son is in the Father by nature, whereas created beings cleave to him ex- ternally (5). Against the Arian practice of pointing to the weaknesses and imperfections of Jesus Christ, the author argues that these apply only to his human nature (èív9pw1toç)which he assumed and bore and ex- alted for our sakes, and he offered our human experiences to God, mediating for us, so that they might be abolished in him.' But the Logos did not change nor was he first humbled and then exalted (7). This is doctrine exactly like that of Athanasius and expressed in the kind of language which he used in the first three Orations. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the author knew of these. The author attacks Arianism occasionally, though the main burden of the treatise is not directed against Arianism, and the Arianism which he attacks is not that of the later Neo-Arians, Aetius and Eunomius, of which he appears to be ignorant. He rejects the view that the Father made the Son and then named him (3), and the concept of a Christ who is not truly Logos and is created (4). He describes people who hold these views as 'the party of ' and as 'Arian lunatics'.5 They accuse the writer's party of teaching that the Son had no origin (&px1¡),and they hold that the Son was given a beginning (&px1¡) of existence by the Father. They also teach that 'there was a time when he (the Son) did not exist'.6 They also teach that the Son was created for the sake of the rest of creation, or for our sakes (11), and later once again the Arian slogans 'out of non-existence' (l1; o?x ovTwv) and 'there was a time when he did not exist' are brought up (25). And the opponents of the writer's view- point who accuse his school of teaching that in the Incarnation Jesus Christ was 'a mere man' èív9pw1toç)(and nothing more) are prob- ably Arians (33), because they alleged that the pro-Nicenes tended to channel all the human experiences onto Christ's human nature without properly involving the Godhead in redemption. These Arian sentiments do not betray any great knowledge of Arianism and suggest a relatively early period of the Controversy, before about the year 360, by which time almost all Arians had ceased to use the term 'out of non-existence' and were, in the Greek-speaking world at any rate, beginning to deploy a more rigorously argued and more radical form of Trinitarian doctrine. The greater part of Orat. IV is in fact devoted to an attack on a quite different form of heresy from Arianism, one which seems to occupy the writer's mind more fully, and one with which he is better acquainted than he is with Arianism. This heresy is the doctrine of Marcellus of An-