Neo-Platonism is not only important because it was the philosophy which deeply influenced the first great theological system, that of Origen, but it was also the philosophy which influenced (through Dionysius the Areopagite, of whom we shall hear more later) all forms of Christian mysticism and most forms of classical Christian theology, especially with respect to the doctrine of God, world, and soul. Therefore it is impossible to understand the development of Christian theology without knowing something about this last great attempt of paganism to express itself in terms of a philosophical theology, or theological philosophy, which was both science and life for the ancient mind. The basic authority for Origen is Scripture. He introduces the famous distinction of the three meanings of the Scripture:

1) The somatic, or literal, philological sense, (from soma, "body"), which everybody can understand and which is identical with the historical truth.

2) The psychic or moral sense: "psychic" in the original sense of that which belongs to the soul. The moral sense means the application of the Biblical text to our situation. It is the existential application of the Biblical texts to ourselves.

3) The spiritual sense: it is understandable only to those who are perfect, not morally but in the sense of being completely introduced into the meaning of Christianity; it is the mystical sense. There are some cases in which the Biblical text has only a mystical sense; then this is at the same time the literal one. But ordinarily it is a literal sense distinguished from the mystical sense. The way in which the mystical sense is to be found is through the allegoric method, the method of finding the hidden sense behind the texts.

Now this doctrine of the allegorical method, or of the mystical meaning of the texts, has been strongly attacked by the Reformers, and it is something strange in our realistic philological mind. What is the reason for it? The reason for it is easily understood: it is the authority of a text, which is not adequate to our own situation but still has absolute authority. In order to make it applicable to the situation of the interpreter, it is necessary to find a meaning which is not the literal meaning. This is always done; every sermon does it with the Biblical texts, and today it is done on a large scale by some interpreters of the Old Testament who make out of it the New Testament in interpreting every word of the Old Testament as a Christological prononciamento. But this is exactly the same situation; it is something which is almost inescapable: if you have a text which is absolute authority and you know its literal meaning, and this literal meaning doesn't say anything to you, then you use, consciously or unconsciously, a method which transfers the original meaning into an actual or existential meaning. Of course this can lead to a complete undercutting of the authority of the text. And for this reason the Lutheran Reformation reestablished the genuine or philological or literal text as the genuine authority. But when we look at the dogmatic statements and their proof which has been taken from the Bible, in Orthodox or Fundamentalistic writings, we find immediately that they don't do anything else except what Origen did here: they find a method for interpreting the Bible beyond itself. Only if you are scientifically completely honest can you have the literal text and then say: "This doesn't say anything to us," or "We say something else; we recommend beyond the text, and we don't mean to express a hidden meaning of the text. 'This, I think, is the only consistent attitude. But think of another example: The American Constitution and the formulas of their Amendments: they have absolute, even legal, validity; but in order to make this tolerable, there is the Supreme Court which interprets , ultimately. And interpreting always means applying to the present situation. Now the jurists of the Supreme Court do not apply the allegoric method, but rather use a method of adequacy, and the result is exactly the same. They speak of the "spirit" of the law, and the spirit of the law may often, even in evident things, contradict the letter of the law. . .

There are two classes of Christians: 1) The many simple ones, who accept on authority the Biblical message and the teachings of the Church without understanding them fully. They take the mythological elements, – of which Origen knew as well as Bultmann – literally and primitively, or, as he said, they prefer the healing stories to the story of Jesus with three apostles going to the mountain of transfiguration. This is an allegoric, or metaphoric, expression for those who go beyond the literal interpretation to the transformed meaning of it.

He calls the attitude of the primitives. . . "only faith", "mere faith", which is a lower degree of Christian perfection. This degree is something in which first of all all participate, because all are somehow imperfect. But on this common basis, it never shall be given up – here, Origen is exactly as we found it in Clement. To some people the charisma of gnosis is given (i. e., the grace of knowledge) as a special grace. In this way the converted, educated Greek becomes the perfect Christian, but he can become the perfect Christian only on the basis of Christian conformity to what he calls "the faith."

Now if we, as Protestants, look at this concept of faith, then we must see immediately that its meaning is: acceptance of doctrines, while in Protestant faith it is: acceptance of the reuniting grace of God. Therefore the first step is authority, in which every Christian, even Origen himself, lives. And the second step, which is not a recanting of the first but which is possible only on the basis of the first step, is the autonomous rational understanding of the Biblical message.

Now this solves the problem with which you always have to deal in your congregations, the problem of the simple ones who take the myths literally – and you have many of them – and the educated to whom you cannot speak in terms of literalism, otherwise they will turn away from you, not because of the Christian message but because of the way you give it to them. This was the same problem with which Clement and Origen had to deal and they solved it in terms of these two forms of participation in the Christian communion.

The first doctrine in Origen's system, as in every system, is the doctrine of God. God is being-itself, and therefore beyond everything that is. He is beyond knowledge, because knowledge presupposes the cleavage between subject and object. He is beyond change. He is beyond passion. He is the source of everything. But now He has His logos, His inner word, His self-manifestation. This self-manifestation makes Him first manifest to Himself and then to the world. The Logos is the first and creative power of being. All powers of being are united in Him. The whole spiritual world is united in the Logos. The Logos is the universal principle of anything special, of anything (that has) being. This Divine Logos radiates eternally from the Ground of Being, from the Divine Abyss, as splendor radiates from the source of light. Therefore one is not allowed to say, "There was a time when the Son did not exist." To say this is to deny the eternity of the Logos. Therefore it never should be said. There never was a time in which the Son, namely the eternal Logos, did not exist..

The eternal Logos is eternally generated out of the Divine substance. He is not created; He is "out of nothing." He is not finite. Therefore He has the same substance with the Father. Here the term homoousios t patri (being equal with the Father) first arises. In spite of the eternity of the Logos the Logos is less than the Father. The Father alone has no origin. He is not even generated. He is auto theos, God by Himself, while the Son is God by the Father. The Son is the picture of the goodness or essence or nature of God, but not God Himself.

So we have two trends in this Origenistic thinking: On the one side, eternity of the Father and the Son; on the other side, a kind of lesser validity and power of being in the Son than in the Father. The Son is the highest of the generated realities, but the Son is less than the Father. The same is true of the Spirit, who is working in the souls of the saints. This is His function. Although the regula, the religious tradition, of the Congregations demand the trius (the three) as the object of adoration, the Spirit is called less than the Son and the Son less than the Father. And sometimes even the highest Spiritual beings are called gods.

Now all this means that two principles are in conflict in Origenistic thinking: the one is the Divinity of the Savior, who must be Divine in order to be able to save; the other is the scheme of emanation: the lower degrees are lower; only the Absolute, the Father, is first. The cut between the three and the other Spiritual beings is somehow arbitrary.

We can perhaps describe the whole thing in three circles. The largest circle is that of the Father, who embraces everything, who is by Himself and without genesis. Then within, this larger circle there is a narrower one, namely the Son and the Spirit, both of them generated but not created. And then there is an even narrower circle, namely all the things which are created.

The rational natures, i.e., the spirits, who are eternal but created and not generated, were originally equal and free, and fell away from their unity with God in different degrees of distance. In consequence of their revolt in Heaven against God, they have fallen into material bodies: this is their punishment and at the same time the way of their purification. The mediation between these fallen spirits and the human body is the human soul. The human soul is, so to speak, Spirit which has become cold, i. e, the intensive fire, which is the symbol for the Divine Spirituality, is reduced to a life process. The fall, which has all these consequences, is a transcendent fall. It precedes our existence in time and space. And it is a free fall, it is decided in freedom. The Freedom is not lost by the fall, but it is actual, present, in all concrete actions. In these concrete actions the transcendent fall becomes historical reality. We can say that the individual act represents the eternal nature of the fall. Or in other words, our individual existence in time and space has a prelude in Heaven. The decisive thing about what we are has already happened when we appear on earth.

This refers especially to sin. Sin is based on the transcendent fall. This doctrine of the transcendent fall is hard to understand for people who, as most of you, have grown up in nominalistic thinking. It is understandable only if you know that transcendent powers are realities and not individual things – if you take them this way, everything becomes absurd. But there is a profound meaning in this doctrine which I think makes it necessary as a symbol for all Christian theology: our human existence and the existence of reality as a whole is considered not only as creation but also as guilt and judgment.

When we look at the fallen world, we see that the fallen character is universal, and penetrates through everything, penetrates even through the nature outside of man. When we ask where did it come from? – of course every individual is guilty, but why is this universally so? Why are there no exceptions? – then the answer is: because the Fall precedes the Creation, as the Fall follows the Creation. Origen has two myths of the Fall: one transcendent, which is not, mythologically, in space, etc... but which is the eternal transition from union with God to separation from God; and the immanent inner-historical in which in special acts this transcendent Fall becomes reality. Sin is spiritual, but the bodily and social existence strengthen sin. It is transcendent and is a destiny which, as every destiny, is united with freedom.

As in Plotinus, sin is in Origen a turning away from God. It is not something positive. Malum esse, bonum carere, (being evil means being without goodness.) Sin, therefore, has a double relation to creation: With respect to the creation of the free and equal spirits, creation precedes the Fall. With respect to the bodily world, creation follows the Fall and follows the freedom of the spirits. Because of the freedom of the spirits, even in eternity it is possible that the Fall may happen again. The end of this world process is not necessarily the end of history. The Fall may repeat itself, and then the whole thing starts again. You see in these ideas the cyclical thinking of Greek philosophy with respect to history has not yet been overcome, This was done by Augustine.

Now we come to the most difficult part: his christological system. The Logos unites itself with the soul of Jesus, who is an eternal spirit as everybody is. He is pre-existent, as all souls are. But He unites Himself just with this soul. The soul of the man Jesus has received the Logos completely. The soul of Jesus has merged into its power and light. This is a mystical union which, however, can be repeated in all saints. In this the soul mediates between the Logos of God and the body of man. In this way there are two sharply separated natures united in Jesus. The word of the Fourth Gospel that he became flesh. is a bodily, i. e., a literal, kind of speaking. But the truth is that He took on flesh so much so that He became it. This is more (like) adoptionistic thinking. Popular feeling in the East wanted a God on earth who walks with us; it didn't want a Divine transcendent Power who takes on flesh only. and returns after He has taken on flesh. But for Origen this was an impossible idea because the Logos never can cease to be also outside of Jesus. He is the form of all forms in everything. Homo esse cessavit. He ceased to be a man; but this is somehow the case with all Spiritual beings, who for this reason are called gods. But if they are gods, where is the cut between them and God? What does the cut after the third Person of the Trinity mean? This problem was never solved. and could not be solved on the basis of the doctrine of emanation. If we have a doctrine of emanation. then there is a continuous going down and returning. But Christianity belonged to monotheism. This often-abused term, the "Judeo-Christian tradition," has at least this in common: that monotheism must be maintained in all circumstances. How can this be done if there are two emanations which are lower than God and at the same time Divine? Men, when they follow the example of the Logos-God. .. , become 1ogokoi themselves, determined by meaning, reason and creative power. Then they are led back to deification. But something more had to be done by Jesus in order to give us this possibility. He had to give His body as a sacrifice. To whom does He give it? To Satan. as ransom. Satan demands that price for letting the others go free, but Satan was betrayed. He couldn't keep Jesus because He was pure. and therefore not under the power of Satan.

This idea of the betrayal of Satan is not only a theological idea which appears in such a high place as in Origen's thought, but it is also a popular idea. The Middle Ages is abundant with stories of how the peasants. and especially their wives. betrayed the Devil when he came, and he had to let them alone. This seems for us to be a grotesque mythology and certainly it is, if taken literally. But it is a religious idea of profound insight behind it. namely that the negative never can ultimately prevail, and it cannot prevail because it lives from the positive. When Satan takes Jesus into his power. he cannot keep in his power that from which he lives. namely. the Divine nature. Thus the ultimate futility of everything sinful: it cannot keep indefinitely the positive power of being, because this power of being is derived from the good, and good and power of being are one and the same thing. So if you laugh at this doctrine of Origen, you had better go behind it and see what he means. It means the impossibility of Satan to prevail ultimately. because he lives from that against which he wants to prevail.

Origen introduced an idea into the practical piety. which idea had a tremendous effect on the whole of Christian history after him, namely the interpretation of The Song of Songs, in terms of the mystical love of the soul and Christ. The human soul is the bride of the Logos – that is what this love song means. The soul receives the bridegroom in itself. It is sometimes visited by the Logos, i. e., the Divine Spirit is sometimes experienced by us; sometimes the soul is left alone. no one visits her from the eternal.

This is the first mystical interpretation of The Song of Songs. related to an individual.

In Judaism it was interpreted for God and the synagogue. Here you see again an important example of the necessity for allegoric interpretation. The Song of Songs itself is nothing more than a Jewish love song perhaps a wedding song which was performed at weddings or festivals. It is in the canon; it has Divine authority; what to do with it? The answer of the Jews was: It is the relationship between God and the nation. And in my oId Luther Bible – which I love dearly, because I got it when I was born, for my baptism – there is always something said in the "head-lines"" of The Song of Songs about the relationship between God and the Church.

Here we have a third, the mystical, interpretation from Origen: the relationship between the Logos and the soul, the mystical marriage between Christ and the soul All this of course is mystical, but it is a very important transformation of non-Christian mysticism. It is concrete mysticism, The soul, being grasped by the Spirit of God, does not go beyond itself into the abyss of the Divine, but the Logos, the form, the concreteness, of the Divine comes into the soul, This was the first step for what I have called in my seminar on the theology of Christian mysticism, in former years, the "baptising" of mysticism. And this certainly is an important event – mysticism introduced into the Church by becoming concrete. If Origen and later on Bernard of Clairvaux, speaks of the mystical marriage between the Logos and the soul, then the centered personality is not destroyed, it is preserved, as in a marriage there is a complete union and nevertheless the person is not destroyed, Now this is the imagery in which the pious life, in mystical terms, is described by Origen.,

The last important point in his theology is eschatology, the doctrine of the final end of history and the world, He interprets it Spiritualistically. The rough descriptions, with their primitive imagery, are interpreted in Spiritual terms. The Second Coming of Christ is the Spiritual appearance of Christ in the souls of the pious. He comes back to earth again and again. but into our souls. not in a dramatic appearance in physical terms such as with clouds, thunder, etc. The pious people are fulfilled in a Spiritual experience, This Spiritual body, of which Paul speaks, is the essence or the idea of the "material body" It is that which is painted by a great portrait painter – that is what is meant with the participation of the body in the eternal It isn't this body here, and especially not in this moment, but it is a body which is our body during all our life – it is its essence, its idea (i.e., originally meaning "image"). The punishment for sin – Hell, in traditional eschatology – is the fire which burns in our conscience, the fire of despair because of our separation from God, But this is a temporary status, a status of purging our soul Finally everybody and everything will become Spiritualized; the bodily existence will vanish, Origen called this famous doctrine the apokatastasis paton, the restitution of everything, with the possibility that the whole thing starts again because freedom is never denied, Origen was thoroughly a philosopher of freedom, and this is what distinguishes him from Augustine, his great rival in greatness of theological thought/

But this spiritualization of eschatology was the reason why he became, partly at least, a heretic in the Christian Church although he was their greatest theologian. The simple ones revolted against this greatest system of scientific theology – the monks and others, who couldn't and didn't want to get away from their literalism with respect to the future life, the end0catastrophe, the eternal judgment, etc, The motives for the simple ones were partly realistic, in the Jewish sense of realism of bodily existence: anti-Greek, dualistic And partly they were something else: they were ideas of revenge against those, who were better off on earth, and now they wanted to be better off than they, but how can, this be without bodily 'existence? So they fought for it, and for a very realistic and literalistic idea of judgment, final catastrophe, and heaven, The Church took their side and condemned not the whole of Origen, but the heretic side of. him,

But there were other reactions against the Logos Christology, which was introduced by the Apologists – and already, somehow, by the Fourth Gospel – and which found in Origen its greatest and most important expression. Again the laymen were the ones who revolted, not only against Origen but against the whole Logos Christology. The laymen, the simple ones were not interested in the cosmological implications of the Logos concept; they wanted to have God Himself on earth in Christ. This group was called the monarchianists, from monarchia, meaning one man's rule. They wanted to have only one ruler, one God, not three, as they felt the Logos Christology would make it. They emphasized, against the Logos as a second God, the "monarchy" of the Father. We can say that this movement was a monotheistic reaction against the tri- or duo-theistic danger of the Logos doctrine. The Logos doctrine was dangerous because it hypostasized the Son beside God, and the Spirit a God beside all of them. A man named Theodotus, a craftsman from Rome, thought that Jesus was a man upon whom the Divine Spirit came in baptism, giving him the power of his Messianic vocation. But this did not make him God. Therefore these people from the school of Theodotus were very much interested – as were many later, especially Protestants of the 19th century – in those passages of the Gospel dealing with Jesus as man. There is perhaps a connection (Theodotus) and a group in Asia Minor called the Alogoi, who denied the doctrine of the Logos. And since the doctrine of the Logos appeared in the Fourth Gospel, they rejected it. They tried to find the true text and emphasized the literal interpretation against the allegoric. They were predecessors of many later movements, of the Alexandrian school which fought against some issues, at least, of the high Christology; and they were predecessors of some trends in Rome which always were on the side of the Antiochean school; and they were predecessors of modern liberal theology. They all emphasized the humanity of Jesus over against the Logos becoming God. We call this the adoptionistic or the dynamic Christology, where the man Jesus is adopted and the Logos or the Spirit fills him--but that is all; he is not God Himself. This is the one wing of the Monarchic monotheistic reaction against the Logos Christology. And this is not something of the past; it is something which we have to face always in the whole history of Christianity. Even in the east these ideas found a representative, Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch, and was in the same line. He says: Logos and Spirit are qualities of God, but they are not persons. They are eternal powers, they are potentialities in God, but they are not persons in the sense of independent beings. Jesus is a man who was inspired by this power from above. The Logos power inhabited in Jesus as in a vessel, or as we live in houses. The Logos is the inner man in Jesus. The unity this man Jesus has with God is the unity of will and love, but it is not a unity of nature, because nature has no meaning with respect to God. The more Jesus developed his own being, the more he received. (Finally), he was eternally put into union with God and then he became the judge and received the Divine dignity. Now he is God, but somehow he had to deserve to become God.

This of course is the negation of the Divine nature of the Savior. This shows what made him a heretic, although many people of that time and perhaps even of today would prefer to follow him.

We finished yesterday with a special type of reaction against the Logos Christology, namely what is called dynamic monarchianism. I know that these lectures are the most difficult in the whole course, and so I will not shy away from repetition.

The Logos Christology, as invented by the Apologists and carried through to a full victory by Clement and Origen, is a method of making the universality and uniqueness of the event Jesus understandable to the Greek mind. The only way in which this could be done at that time was to establish a Divine power within God Himself which appears in the historical Jesus. We find this early in the Fourth Gospel, we find it in all Gnostic literature, and we find it in a most philosophical form in the Apologetic attempt to defend Christianity. Then we find it in the context of a universal philosophical system derived from the Alexandrian scheme of emanation and return of the soul, by Origen.

This was one line of thought in the early Christian Church It was a line of thought which, as many Christians believed, is more "Athens" than "Jerusalem." For this reason they resisted it, and they did so in the name of what is called the Divine monarchy: God alone rules and God alone must be seen in Christ. This is the meaning of the Monarchianistic reaction against the Logos Christology. It is in some way a reaction in which Old Testament feelings react against Greek ideas. But this is too simple, as the subject of the Forum is too simple in its formulation, and perhaps for this very reason most interesting.

The Monarchianistic movement itself was split. There was one (movement) which followed the adoptionistic Christology, which says that God, or the Logos, or the Spirit, has adopted a fully human being and made him into the Christ, and gave him the possibility of becoming fully deified in his resurrection. But this adoptionist Christology, which we find especially in the West – Theodotus of Rome – and which influenced the basic Roman feeling to a great extent, also had a representative in the East, Paul of Samosata. This Christology started with human existence, tried to understand humanity and to emphasize the Biblical words in which the humanity is emphasized, and then to show that this man was driven by the Divine Spirit and was finally elevated into the Divine sphere.

But there was another type of this Monarchianistic thinking which became more and more influential because it was much more in the line of the basic feeling of the masses of the Christians. This is modalistic Monarchianism. Modalism means God Himself appears in different modes, different ways. It was also called patripassionism a word you must learn – the Father Himself has suffered. It was also called Sabellianism, from its main representative Sabellius. This was a very widespread movement in the East as well as in the West. It was a real danger for the Logos Christology.

The fight between these two types was going on in the East and West In the West there was a man, Praxeas, with whom Tertullian was fighting. The idea was that God the Father Himself was born through the Virgin Mary; that God the Father Himself, who is the only God, has suffered and died. To be God means to be the universal Father of everything. If we say that God was in Jesus, this means the Father was in him. Therefore these people attacked the so-called ditheoi ,those who believed in two Gods, and the tritheoi , those who believed in three Gods, and they fought for the monarchy of God and or the full Divinity of Christ in whom God the Father Himself has appeared. Both ideas had very large popular support because what the popular mind wanted – and what the popular mind perhaps still wants today – was to have God Himself present on earth, a walking God, a God who is with us, who participates in our fate, whom we can see and hear when we see and hear Jesus.

The main representative of this whole development. was Sabellius. This name plays a tremendous role in all Christian theology, and I know of Christian theologians who even today accuse other Christian theologians of Sabellianism. So you see this is not a dated issue but is something very important.

Sabellius says: "The same is the Father, the same is the Son, the same is the Holy Spirit. They are three names, but names for the same reality. Do we have one or three Gods?" (meaning, of course, that we have only one God, the Divine monarchy). Father, Son, and Spirit are names, they are prosopa (countenances, faces), but they are not independent beings. They cannot be applied in the same way; they are effective in consecutive energies. One follows the other, but they are always the same in different faces. It is God in three countenances, acting in history in different faces and in different acts. The prosopon (countenance) of the Father appears in His work as creator and law-giver. The prosopon of the Son appears from the birth to the ascension of Jesus. The countenance of the Spirit appears, since the ascension of Jesus, as the life-giver. But it is always the same monarchic Father-God. Therefore it is not adequate to speak of a trius in Heaven. There is no transcendent, no heavenly Trinity. The Father is equal with the two others. But it is always the same. And something else happens in this way of thinking: the Trinity is historical, instead of being transcendent; it is "economical," in the sense of oikumene , building a house – the Trinity is "built up" in history. It is a very important idea for the future, where we often have the idea of a historical Trinity.

If Sabellius says that the same God is essentially in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and that there are only differences of faces, of appearances, of manifestations, then of course he means to say, with this, that they are all homo-ousios, they have the same essence, the same Divine power of being, as one could call it. They are not three beings, but they have the same power of being, and three manifestations. This trend was strong, although it was finally condemned, but it never disappeared. And it reappears as a strong monotheistic trend, even in Augustine, and through him in the whole of Western theology. This was the opposition to the Logos Christology. If you are able to distinguish these two basic trends, then you have an insight into what was going on in these seemingly incomprehensible and sophisticated fights about an iota in homoousios and homoiousios. There was much more than abstract concepts behind it There was a monotheistic trend against a trend to establish Divine hierarchies between God and man. The East, very much dependent on Plato, Plotinus, and Origen, was interested all the time in hierarchical essences between God and man. (This of course would make Christ a half-God, as we shall see,) The West, and some groups in the East, were interested in the Divine monarchy on the one side, and the humanity of Jesus on the other. These two tendencies fought – the Trinitarian struggle and the Christological struggle. We, as bearers of the Western attitude, feel immediately nearer to the Western type of thinking, and the whole difficulty for you in these lectures on the history of Christian thought in understanding what is really going on, is largely based on the fact that we are Westerners and not Easterners, in this sense; that for us the problem of hierarchies is an abstract one, and not a problem of living realities. But in order to understand what was going on in these fights, we must understand first of all the Eastern world-view, the hierarchical world-view.

Now I come to the Trinitarian struggle itself. First we must see how the Trinitarian problem developed after Origen in the sphere of Origenistic thinking. Origen was so great in his constructive power that he conquered all competitors, also the Monarchianistic and Sabellian theologians. But more than this, his Christology was so much impregnated with mystical piety that his formulas could become formulas of a creed. This is very important to understand. Don't forget that when the Greek thinkers produced a confession, a creed, this seems to us abstract philosophy, but for them it was the mystical intuition of essences, of powers of being. For instance, in Caesarea in Asia Minor a creed was already used which added to the symbol used in baptism Origenistic mystical formulas This confession stated: "We believe in Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, God from God, Light from Light, Life from Life, first-born of all creatures, generated out of the Father before all generations." Now this is philosophy and at the same time mysticism. It is that way of philosophy which was ruling at the end of the ancient period. It is Hellenistic and not classical Greek philosophy. And Hellenistic philosophy is united with the mystical traditions of the East. Therefore such seemingly abstract philosophical concepts could become mystical confessions.

This combination was endangered when the emanation system of Origen became questioned from the point of view of Christian conformism. For instance, the eternity and the pre-existence of all spirits, or the idea of the transcendent fall, or the idea of the spiritual bodyless resurrection and of the spiritualized eschatology. In this moment the whole Logos Christology, especially the place of the Logos, became questioned. Common sense and conformism, supported by the Monarchianistic reaction, demanded nothing less than God on earth. The theory of emanation in degrees, in hierarchies of powers of being, demanded something less than that which is ultimately transcendent and the One beyond everything given.

Out of this conflict a division occurred in the school of Origen, and everybody was in the school of Origen in these decades. It was a division into what one has called the Origenistic "right" and the Origenistic "left," the right-wingers and the left-wingers of the Origenistic school. The right wing said: Nothing is created or subjected in the trius; nothing has been added which had not been in it before; there is no inferiority in the Son to the Father, and in the Spirit to the Son. – These were words of representatives of a kind of ecclesiastical traditionalism who wanted what is today called a "high" Christology: nothing shall be less in God, so that Jesus is not less than the Father Himself. It is the same trend we saw in the Monarchianistic movement.

The left wing was against the traditionalism of the right wing; it was scientific and modernistic. They said the Son is essentially strange to the Father, and being something that is made He had no being before He was generated. This means the Logos Christology in terms of hierarchies – there is God the Father, the highest hierarchy, the eternal One beyond everything; there is the Logos, the second hierarchy, but as the second, lower than the first; and the Spirit is the third hierarchy, and lower than the second. The immortal spirits are the fourth hierarchy, lower than the three others. These were the two wings in the great struggle which almost ruined the Christian Church.

But besides the theological differences, there was politics and the attempt to find a practical way to solve a problem without going into its theoretical depths. This is not only American pragmatism but also Roman eclecticism. This was Rome. Rome, following its eclectic tradition, gave the directive for a solution which avoided the depths of Greek thinking and tried to find a way out of this conflict. There was a Pope, Dionysius, in Rome, who declared: "Two things must be preserved: the Divine trius and the holy message of monarchy." These are the two main terms of the two wings, The holy message of the monarchy, which stood against the Logos Christology; the Divine trius, which expressed the Logos Christology. So what Pope Dionysius in Rome did was to take the main formulas of both groups and said that they must both be preserved. But he didn't say how! This was practical Church politics. And this finally prevailed, as we shall see But it prevailed only after a tremendous fight of almost 80 years, a fight in which the whole situation of the Church changed, as we shall see, and in which finally something was decided which is valid for all periods of Christianity. The event of which I am speaking now is the so-called Arian controversy

This controversy is a unique and classical struggle, and caused by many motives. In it is involved the politics of the emperors, who needed unity in the Church which in just these years had become the state religion of the Roman Empire, and now the Church itself threatened to split the whole Empire into pieces. There were involved personal feuds of bishops and theologians. There were in conflict narrow traditionalism and unrestrained speculation. There was included an overemphasis on theoretical solution and popular monastic fanaticism.

But this is not the whole story. Besides all these motives, the really decisive issue, its meaning and permanent significance, is the answer to the question, "How is salvation possible, in a world of darkness and mortality?" This alone was the question. This was the question, as we have seen already in the Apostolic Fathers. It was the question ever since, and it was the question in the period of the great Trinitarian and Christological struggles.

Athanasius, the great foe of Arius, formulates that it is possible only under one condition, namely Jesus "was made man that we :might become God." But this was possible only if the Logos is eternal, if it is really God who has appeared to us, as God is Father only because He is the Father of the Son. Therefore He is without beginning. Eternally the Father has the Son. The Son is Son eternally, as the Son of the Father. And the Father is Father eternally, because He is the Father of the Son. Only if they are co-eternal can Jesus, in whom the Logos is present, give us eternity. He can make us like God, which always means, make us immortal, and give us eternal knowledge, the knowledge of eternal life. Not even the highest of all created spirits can give us a real salvation. He is less than God, but we are separated from God, we are dependent on God and must return to him So God Himself must save us.

Now this is the religious motive behind the Alexandrian trend in theology. Therefore the West and their allies in the East could not accept the theology of the Alexandrian presbyter Arius. According to him, only God the Father is by Himself and without beginning. The Logos, i. e. , the pre-existent Christ, is a creature. He is one of the creatures He is created out of nothing, and there was a time when He was not. You remember the famous saying of Origen: there was no time in which He was not Against this, the left-wing Origenistic theology says there was a time in which He was not. This time was before our temporal existence, but it was not eternity; the Logos is not eternal. The power of God who works in Jesus is not the eternal Divine power itself but a limited reduced hierarchy. This Logos is strange to the Divine nature, unsimilar in every respect to the Father's essence. This Logos can neither see nor know the Father completely and exactly. He becomes God only in the way in which every saint can become deified. This deification happened as it happens in every saint, through his freedom. He had the freedom to turn away from God, but he didn't. This Logos, therefore, is a half-Divine power. This half-Divine power is the soul of Jesus, and it becomes the anxiety and suffering of Jesus. . . This means Jesus is not fully man, with a natural human soul. Mary gives birth to this half-God, who is neither God nor man. This was the solution of Arius, a solution which is very well in line with the hero cult of the ancient world; the world is full of half-gods, of deteriorized gods, of gods who even in Heaven (Olympus) are not fully gods but derived forms of God, and one of them is Jesus – but it is not God Himself.

Now this Christology has been rejected in the first and most important of all Christian councils, that of Nicaea, in June, 325. The text of the decision of Nicaea: "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible." – let me stop here for a moment, because all these words are very important. "Invisible" means the Platonic "ideas." God is the creator not only of the things on earth, but also the creator of the "essences," as they appear in Plato's philosophy. "And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only begotten of the essence of the Father, God of God, and Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, being of one substance (homoousios) with the Father, by Whom all things were made in Heaven and on earth, who for us men and our salvation came down and was incarnate and was made man. He suffered and the third day he rose again, ascended into Heaven. From thence He comes to judge the quick\c and the dead.. . and in the Holy Ghost." Then it goes on to say: "And those who say there was a time when He was not, or He was not before He was made, and He was made out of nothing, and out of another substance or thing, or the Son of God is created or changeable, or alterable: they are condemned by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church." Now this is the first and fundamental Christian confession. I will give you immediately its significance, but before this a few words of comment: The central phrase is "of one substance with the Father" (homoousios to patri). Then the important thing is that nothing else is said about the Holy Ghost. This was the reason for further struggles and decisions Then the condemnations are interesting: The first and all-embracing one: "Those who say there was a time when He was not. . . are condemned by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church." Now let me give you, point by point, the significance of this decision for world history and the history of the Church:

1) The main possible Christian heresy was overcome. Christ is not one of the many half-Gods; He is not a hero. He is God Himself appearing in Divine essence within a historical person. – This was the definite negation of paganism. In Arius, paganism again raised its head after it was defeated in the anti-Gnostic struggle, and it raised its head very strongly – Christ, one of the many powers of being – this would have made Christianity one of the many possible religions

2) This fundamental statement was expressed in terms which were more pleasing to Rome and the West than to the East. The East did not like the homoousios; it wanted a ladder of hierarchies. The West, Rome, and her allies in the East, insisted on the homoousios. For this reason the decision of Nicaea was immediately attacked and somehow transformed into something else by the East, in 60 years of struggle and theological work. Only in 381 did this struggle come to an end, and then in terms which pleased the East more than the original formula did, and in new theological interpretations.

3) The decisive statement is: "Being of one substance with the Father." This is not in the scheme of emanation but in the scheme of Monarchianism. Consequently it was accused of being Sabellian. And so were the main defenders, Athanasius and Marcellus.

4) The negative character of the decision is especially visible in the condemnations. The creatureliness of Christ is negated. He is of no other ousia than the Father.. But what the homoiousios is, is not explained. It was not decided whether the three prosopa are really differences in God, and if so whether they were eternal or historical. And no doctrine of the Spirit was given. But one and only one thing was decided: Jesus Christ is not an incarnated half-God; He is not a creature higher than all others; He is God, and God is creator and unconditional – this negative decision is the truth and the greatness of the decision of Nicaea. And you should not forget what I said in the beginning about the dogma; the dogma is a negative decision against ideas which perhaps could undercut the conformity of the Christian congregation, which can undermine the basic statement that Jesus is the Christ. And every synodal decision worthwhile being mentioned is and was such a decision. The dogmas are not invented because people wanted dogmas, but they developed because people had to protect a religious substance. And in this light you must see the limited meaning of the dogma and of such a decision, and at the same time its greatness.

5) Beside this basic element some consequent implications must be mentioned. The statements had been made in philosophical, non-biblical terms. So some Greek terms were taken into the dogma. They were taken in not so much as classical philosophy as mystical philosophy of religion.

6) The unity of the Church from now on is identical with the majority of the bishops. A conciliarism has developed in hierarchical terms, and the majority of the bishops from now on replace all other authorities. And only much later did the Roman bishop claim and receive a special standing among the bishops, and finally the majority of the bishops as authority was abolished.

7) The Church had become a state Church This was the price which had to be paid for unity. The emperor did not command the content of the dogma, but he exercised pressure. Therefore revolts occurred against it, and the emperor after Constantine had to exercise even more pressure. All this meant a new development of Church history, and even of world history.