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Exposition of the Athanasian Creed

THE history of the Quicunque vult and of its use has now been traced, and we have seen that it is not only a Creed, but also an exposition of the faith. It remains to give some explanation of it; and the most convenient plan to follow appears to be this: first to consider briefly the exposition of the Catholic faith contained in it, and then in another section to deal separately with the monitory clauses, giving in connection with them a brief account of the controversies to which they have given rise, and the objections taken to the use of the Creed.

The Creed consists of two parts: Part i., verses 1-28, expounding the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; and Part ii., verses 29-42, expounding the doctrine of the Incarnation. The form which it takes throughout is conditioned by heresies that have actually arisen and had to be met by the Church. Each clause is a battlefield, and marks the spot where, often at the cost of much suffering, the faith had to be defended from attacks made against it. In Part i. the principal heresies in view are the Sabellian and the Arian. The latter of

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these has been sufficiently described in the chapter on the Nicene Creed, and there is no need to repeat here what was then said. Sabellianism has been but briefly touched upon, and it may be convenient to give a somewhat fuller notice of it here. Its characteristic feature is the denial of the reality and the permanency of the distinctions between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So far back as the days of Justin Martyr (before A.D. 150) there were some who professed to be Christians who maintained that the Son is the Father,'1 apparently making the distinction between them merely one of character or representation; and later on in the second century this form of teaching came into prominence under the name of Patripassianism, the inference drawn from the language of some of its teachers being that they actually held that it was the Father who suffered crucifixion in the character of the Son. The chief propagators of the heresy were Noetus and Praxeas and (rather later) Sabellius, from whom the heresy has taken its name. It was a formidable danger to the Church till well on in the third century, and there appears to have been a revival of it in the extreme west in the fifth century, which may possibly have given occasion for the composition of the Athanasian Creed. It was in the course of the controversy aroused by the teaching of the Sabellians that the Church was compelled to formulate more precisely her belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and to say what she meant by direct

1 Justin Martyr, Apol., I. lxiii.

ing worship to Each as God, and yet insisting that she believed in one God. In explaining this she was compelled, however reluctantly, to make use of expressions not contained in Scripture, and to adopt the technical terms which have since become so familiar to us, and which we find employed in the early verses of the Athanasian Creed, viz. the terms Trinity, Person, and Substance. Of these terms Trinity is the first to appear in ecclesiastical writings. The Greek form Tpiás is found as early as A.D. 180 in the works of Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch. The Latin equivalent Trinitas occurs a little later in the works of Tertullian, almost, if not quite, the first of the Latin Fathers. While the Church believed emphatically in one God,' she had yet learned from the New Testament that there were distinctions of some sort within the Godhead, so that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost could be spoken of as in some sense Three, or a Trinity. But this was not enough. So long as the Church spoke only of a Trinity, or of the Three,' room was left for the teaching of Sabellius and his followers within her borders. The Three' might be only three aspects or characters. The Church was therefore compelled to take a further step, and to answer the question what was meant by speaking of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as Three? Three what? was the obvious question, and when once it was asked, after Sabellianism had proved itself a real danger, it could not remain unanswered. Thus the Church

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was driven to find some term to express what

she understood the teaching of Scripture to be. She saw that our Lord spoke of the Father,' and 'My Father,' and that He called Himself the Son,' and such titles would be misleading if they merely described distinction of aspects or character. The distinction

which they imply must be real and eternal, something that we can only describe as personal. So also with our Lord's teaching on the Holy Spirit: in the great revelation of the Upper Chamber in S. John xiii.-xvi., language is used which freely attributes personal actions to the Holy Spirit, and which clearly implies that He is personally distinct from both the Father and the Son, e.g. The Comforter whom I will send to you from the Father.' He shall 'teach,' 'guide you into all the truth,' convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.' With her eye on such passages as these, the Church could only answer the question, "Three what?' by saying 'Three Persons,' and thus adding another term to her ecclesiastical terminology.

But while Sabellianism was thus excluded, there was a danger on the other side to which the use of the term Person was exposed. It might lead men to think of the Three Persons as so separate as to be Three Gods, and thus endanger the great central truth of revelation, viz. the doctrine of the Divine Unity. The Church was consequently compelled to take yet one more step, and find some other term that would guard against this danger, and, saving her from the charge of worshipping three Gods, express her belief

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in the unity of God. For this purpose it was that the term Substance (i.e. essence or nature) was employed, it being said that the Son was of one substance with the Father,' and therefore, though personally distinct, not separated from Him so as to be a Second God. Both this word substance' and 'Person' appear for the first time in the writings of Tertullian about the close of the second century. But it was not without hesitation and obvious reluctance that they were employed; and it was only after prolonged controversy that experience taught the Church the absolute necessity of them, if the revealed truths of Scripture were to be faithfully taught, and protected from the perversions of heresy. Indeed, it was not till the latter part of the fourth century that, under the stress of the Arian controversy, these terms became generally accepted by the Church as the best ones for expressing the unity of the Godhead, and the distinctions within it as taught in Scripture; the Latin Una Substantia, Tres Persona, being taken as the equivalents for the terms which, after much hesitation and some variety of usage, the Greeks had come to use, μία οὐσία, τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις, and hence we derive our English formula, 'Three Persons of one substance.'

This brief sketch of the growth of the Church's technical phraseology will enable the reader the better to understand the terms of the Athanasian Creed.

Verses 1 and 2 form the introduction. Their exact significance will be the subject of some remarks in the