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Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion Vigiliae Christianae Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 brill.com/vc Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion Mark Edwards Christ Church, Oxford, OX1 1DP, United Kingdom: [email protected] Abstract This paper responds to recent publications which play down the role of Bishop Alex- ander of Alexandria in securing the adoption of the term homoousion at the Nicene Council of 325. It argues that, while the term is not employed in any surviving work from his hand, there is some reason to believe that he sanctioned the use of it by his colleagues. There is no doubt that before the Council he had already declared the Son to be “from the Father’s essence”, and it is all but certain that when this phrase was challenged, together with the homoousion at Nicaea, it was he who produced a concil- iatory exegesis of both innovations, relying on the theology that had already been expounded in his letters Philostorgius’ story that he and Hosius of Cordoba had con- certed a plan to introduce the homoousion is not implausible, and it should not be assumed that the author of an anonymous life of Constantine, which corroborates this narrative, is merely paraphrasing Philostorgius. Their testimony is consistent with that of Ambrose of Milan, who can be shown to have been acquainted both with docu- ments and with witnesses of the proceedings at the Council. Keywords Nicaea, Alexander of Alexandria, homoousion, creed, Trinity, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius To whom do we owe the presence in the Nicene Creed of the adjective homoousios? There was a time when everyone would have held the opinion, lately endorsed again by Henry Chadwick, that “anti-Arian leaders” had already resolved to press it upon the Council of 325 before its opening.1 The parties to this compact were always assumed to have been Alexander 1) H. Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society from Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: OUP, 2001), 198. J.W.C. Wand, A History of the Early Church (London: Methuen, 1937), 149 was confident enough to affirm that Alexander employed thehomoousion in a charge to the clergy of Egypt, though he offers no documentary proof of this. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/157007212X613410 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion 483 of Alexandria and his Spanish confederate Hosius of Cordova. B.J. Kidd expressed the common view when he opined that, although it was Hosius who was “really responsible for the homoousion”, he did not act without securing the assent of Alexander.2 The historian A.H.M. Jones agrees that Hosius may have sought Alexander’s sanction for recommending the “acceptance of the term” at the Nicene Council, and does not feel obliged to show evidence that Alexander himself would have endorsed it.3 In more recent years, however, a chaste review of the evidence has persuaded many historians that he evinced no partiality for the word, and fails to make use of it even where it was eminently suited to his purpose.4 In contrast to G.C. Stead, who argues merely that it was “not the initial focus of controversy”,5 Timothy Barnes appears to doubt that the homoousion gave rise to a conversation of any note before the Council,6 while P.F. Beatrice holds the extreme position that even Alexander subscribed to it only at the Emperor’s behest.7 Scholars have arrived at this consensus by discounting ancient testimo- nies to the currency of the homoousion in the Egyptian church before the Council of Nicaea in 325. I shall argue here that while the evidence, taken piece by piece, may be almost weightless, its cumulative force is not so trifling. I shall not maintain that Alexander openly embraced thehomoou- sion before the council; it does, however, appear to me highly probable that he sanctioned its use by others, and that when he became its champion at Nicaea he added nothing but the word itself to his earlier pronounce- ments. I shall begin by noting the evidence, in the letters of Arius and in his own, that Alexander made his case before Nicaea without appeal to the 2) B.J. Kidd, History of the Church to AD 461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 26. 3) A.H.M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (London 1949), 162. 4) See M. Simonetti, Studi sull’ arianesimo (Rome: Editrice Studium, 1960), 125n.76, and R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T. And T. Clark, 1988), 140. 5) G.C. Stead, Divine Substance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 223. (My italics). 6) T.D. Barnes, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14 (2007), 197, reviewing N. Lenski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Since, however, Barnes inclines to believe the report of a pact between Hosius and Alexander before the Council, he is not refuting but amplifying the statements in that volume to which he purports to take exception. 7) I shall reply in detail below to some of the propositions of P.F. Beatrice, “TheHomoousion from Hellenism to Christianity”, Church History 74 (2002), 243-272. I shall not contest his history of the term before the Council, and his case for an Egyptian provenance seems to me more tenable than many of its rivals. Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access 484 M. Edwards / Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012) 482-502 homoousion; I shall then show, from the testimony of Eusebius of Nicome- dia, that he already believed the Son to be “from the essence” of the Father. Next I shall demonstrate that it is most likely to have been he who con- vinced Eusebius of Caesarea that the homoousion signified nothing more than perfect likeness to the Father. Finally, I shall urge that we have no good reason to disbelieve those witnesses who inform us that Alexander took up the term homoousios at the Nicene Council in order to disarm his chief antagonist, Eusebius of Nicomedia. I do not mean to deny that in his own eyes this political success was also the vindication of a solemn and eternal truth. The Homoousion in Arius When the term homoousion enters the controversy in the letter addressed by Arius to his bishop Alexander of Alexandria, he assumes that Alexander will recognise it as a plain diagnostic of heresy. Except for the affirmation that the Son is “out of nothing”, which he reserves for his appeal to his fellow-Lucianist Eusebius of Nicomedia,8 this document contains all the rudiments of the theology that came to be known as “Arian”. The scrip- tures, it argues, prove that the Father alone is wise and good, that he alone possesses immortality, that he alone is without beginning, but furnishes a beginning for all other subjects of existence. These subjects include the Son, who could not be called Son unless we can say that “before he was begotten he was not”. Though timeless in origin he is not eternal; and while there is no more authority for speaking of his creation than of his being begotten, founded or established, it is a fact that all four terms are employed in the scriptures. We therefore have no reason to award a seman- tic priority to any of them, or to dwell upon its literal corollaries. Those who do so will totter into one of the infamous heresies which have made the Godhead subject to schism, change or perturbation:9 Offspring, but not as one of the things that are generated, nor in the way that Valentinus affirmed the Father’s offspring to be an emanation, nor in the way that Manichaeus ventured to call the offspring a ὁμοούσιον μέρος [consubstantial part] of the Father, nor in the way that Sabellius spoke of a “son-Father”, dividing 8) Theodoret,Church History 1.5.4, p. 27.4 Parmentier and Hansen. 9) Athanasius Werke. Erster Band, ed. H.H. Opitz (Berlin: De Gruyter 1934), 243.32-244.2. Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:58:49PM via free access Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion 485 the monad, nor as Hieracas said a torch from a torch or a lamp made into two. (Athanasius, Synods 16). No equivalent to the term homoousios has been adduced from the surviving corpus of Manichaean texts in any language. Nevertheless, the phrase homoousion meros, which implies the abscission of part of the Godhead, indicates that Arius was acquainted with a salient premiss of Mani’s gospel, at least as this was construed within the Church. According to the “epistle called Fundamental”, which Augustine ascribes to Mani himself, the God- head before the origin of the world was an extended realm of light, lying adjacent to an extended realm of darkness. The untimely desire of the darkness to embrace the light precipitated a conflict, which resulted on the one hand in the superimposition of form on darkness, but on the other in the incarceration of splinters of light within the material cosmos. The busi- ness of the Manichaean elect was to amass as many particles of light as could be ingested by the consumption of plants, in which a larger quantity of light inhered than in animals. A voracious Manichee might thus be said to become a ὁμοούσιον μέρος of the divine, one the entirety of his sub- stance had been converted by the alimentary process into light. Arius’ juxtaposition of the Manichaean tenet with the fissiparous con- ception of Sabellius and the emanationism of Valentinus reveals that in his eyes the greatest heresy was the attribution of material properties to God.
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