This brings us to the question in what sense ousia is used in the Nicene definition. We must remember the strong Western and anti-Origenist influence which prevailed in the council (above, p. xvii.), and the use of hupostasis and ousia as convertible terms in the anathematism (see Excursus A, pp. 77, sqq. below). Now going back for a moment to the correspondence of the two Dionysii, we see that Dionysius of Rome had contended not so much against the subordination of the Son to the Father as against their undue separation (memerismenai hupostaseis). In other words he had pressed the homoousion upon his namesake in the interest rather of the unity than of the equality of the Persons in the Holy Trinity. At Nicæa, the problem was (as shewn above) to explain (at least negatively) how the Church understood the Generation of the Son. Accordingly we find Athanasius in later years explaining that the Council meant to place beyond doubt the Essential Relation of the Divine Persons to one another (to idion tes ousias, tautotes, see de Decr. pp. 161, 163 sq., 165, 168, 319; of course including identity of Nature, pp. 396, 413, 232), and maintaining to the end (where he expresses his own view, p. 490, &c.) the convertibility of ousia and hupostasis for this purpose. By the word ho theos or theos he understands ouden heteron e ten ousian tou ontos (de Decr. 22). The conclusion is that in their original sense the definitions of Nicæa assert not merely the specific identity of the Son with the Father (as Peter qua man is of one ousia with Paul, or the Emperor's statue of one form with the Emperor himself, p. 396), but the full unbroken continuation of the Being of the Father in the Son, the inseparable unity of the Son with the Father in the Oneness of the Godhead. Here the phrase is balanced' by the ek tes [hupostaseos e] ousias tou Patros, not as though merely one ousia had given existence to another, but in the sense that with such origination the ousia remained the same. This is a first approximation to the mysterious doctrine of the perichoresis' coinherence, or circuminsessio,' which is necessary to guard the doctrine of the Trinity against tritheism, but which, it must be observed, lifts it out of the reach of the categories of any system of thought in which the workings of human intelligence have ever been able to organise themselves. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity vindicated by the Nicene formula on the one hand remains, after the exclusion of others, as the one direction in which the Christian intellect can travel without frustrating and limiting the movement of faith, without bringing to a halt the instinct of faith in Christ as Saviour, implanted in the Church by the teaching of S. Paul and of S. John, of the Lord Himself: on the other hand it is not a full solution of the intellectual difficulties with which the analysis of that faith and those instincts brings us face to face. That God is One, and that the Son is God, are truths of revelation which the category of substance' fails to synthesise. The Nicene Definition furnishes a basis of agreement for the purpose of Christian devotion, worship, and life, but leaves two theologies face to face, with mutual recognition as the condition of the healthy life of either. The theology of Athanasius and of the West is that of the Nicene formula in its original sense. The inseparable Unity of the God of Revelation is its pivot. The conception of personality in the Godhead is its difficulty. The distinctness of the Father, Son, and Spirit is felt (allos ho Pater allos ho hui& 231;s), but cannot be formulated so as to satisfy our full idea of personality. For this Athanasius had no word; prosopon meant too little (implying as it did no more than an aspect possibly worn but for a special period or purpose), hupostasis (implying such personality as separates Peter from Paul) too much. But he recognised the admissibility of the sense in which the Nicene formula eventually, in the theology of the Cappadocian fathers, won its way to supremacy in the East. To them hupostasis was an appropriate term to express the distinction of Persons in the Godhead, while ousia expressed the divine Nature which they possessed in common (see Excursus A. p. 77 sqq.). This sense of ousia approximated to that of species, or eidos (Aristotle's secondary' ousia), while that of hupostasis gravitated toward that of personality in the empirical sense. But in neither case did the approximation amount to complete identity. The idea of trine personality was limited by the consideration of the Unity; the perichoresis was recognised, although in a somewhat different form, the prominent idea in Athanasius being that of coinherence or immanence, whereas the Cappadocians, while using, of course, the language of John xiv. 11, yet prefer the metaphor of successive dependence hosper ex haluseo. (Bas. Ep. 38, p. 118 D). To Athanasius, the Godhead is complete not in the Father alone, still less in the Three Persons as parts of the one ousia, but in each Person as much as in all. The Cappadocian Fathers go back to the Origenist view that the Godhead is complete primarily in the Father alone, but mediately in the Son or Spirit, by virtue of their origination from the Father as pege or aitia tes theotetos. To Athanasius the distinct Personality of Son and Spirit was the difficulty; his difference from Origen was wide, from Marcellus subtle. To the Cappadocians the difficulty was the Unity of the Persons; to Marcellus they were toto cælo opposed, they are the pupils of Origen [34] . Accordingly when Basil makes a distinction between ousia and hupostasis in the Nicene anathematism, he is giving not historical exegesis but his own opinion.
The Nicene definition in this sense emphasized the Unity of the Godhead in Three Persons, against the Arian division of the Son from the Father. How then did it escape the danger of lending countenance to Monarchianism? Athanasius feels the difficulty without solving it, for the distinction given by him, p. 84, between homoousios and monoousios is without real meaning (we say with Tertullian of one substance'). On the whole in mature years he held that the title Son' was sufficient to secure the Trinity of Persons. By the name Father we confute Arius, by the name of Son we overthrow Sabellius' (p. 434; cf. p. 413); and we find that the council in its revision of the Cæsarean creed shifted hui& 231;s to the principal position where it took the place of logos. Beyond this the Creed imposed no additional test in that direction (the ek tes ousias is important but not decisive in this respect). This was felt as an objection to the Creed, and the objection was pointed by the influence of Marcellus at the council. The historical position of Marcellus is in fact, as we shall see, the principal key to the conservative' reaction which followed. The insertion into the conservative creeds of a clause asserting the endlessness of Christ's Kingdom, which eventually received ecumenical authority, was an expression of this feeling. But a final explanation between the Nicene doctrine and Monarchianism could not come about until the idea of Personality had been tested in the light of the appearance of the Son in the Flesh. The solution, or rather definition, of the problem is to be sought in the history of the Christological questions which began with Apollinarius of Laodicea.
The above account of the anti-Arian test formulated at Nicæa will suffice to explain the motives for its adoption, the difficulties which made that adoption reluctant, and the fact of the reaction which followed. One thing is clear, namely that given the actual conditions, nothing short of the test adopted would have availed to exclude the Arian doctrine. It is also I think clear, that not only was the current theology of the Eastern Church unable to cope with Arianism, but that it was itself a danger to the Church and in need of the corrective check of the Nicene definition. Hellenic as was the system of Origen, it was in its spirit Christian, and saturated with the influence of Scripture. It could never have taken its place as the expression of the whole mind of the Church; but it remains as the noblest monument of a Christian intellect resolutely in love with truth for its own sake, and bent upon claiming for Christ the whole range of the legitimate activity of the human spirit. But the age had inherited only the wreck of Origenism, and its partial victory in the Church had brought confusion in its train, the leaders of the Church were characterised by secular knowledge rather than grasp of first principles, by dogmatic intellectualism rather than central apprehension of God in Christ. Eusebius of Cæsarea is their typical representative. The Nicene definition and the work of Athanasius which followed were a summons back to the simple first principles of the Gospel and the Rule of Faith. What then is their value to ourselves? Above all, this, that they have preserved to us what Arianism would have destroyed, that assurance of Knowledge of, and Reconciliation to, God in Christ of which the divinity of the Saviour is the indispensable condition; if we are now Christians in the sense of S. Paul we owe it under God to the work of the great synod. Not that the synod explained all; or did more than effectually block off false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference' which challenged the acceptance of Christian people.' The decisions of councils are primarily not the Church saying "yes" to fresh truths or developments or forms of consciousness; but rather saying "no" to untrue and misleading modes of shaping and stating her truth,' (Lux Mundi, ed. i. p. 240, cf. p. 334). It is objected that the Nicene Formula, especially as understood by Athanasius, is itself a false form of thought,' a flat contradiction in terms. That the latter is true we do not dispute (see Newman's notes infra, p. 336, note 1, &c.). But before pronouncing the form of thought for that reason a false one, we must consider what the terms' are, and to what they are applied. To myself it appears that a religion which brought the divine existence into the compass of the categories of any philosophy would by that very fact forfeit its claim to the character of revelation. The categories of human thought are the outcome of organised experience of a sensible world, and beyond the limits of that world they fail us. This is true quite apart from revelation. The ideas of essence and substance, personality and will, separateness and continuity, cause and effect, unity and plurality, are all in different degrees helps which the mind uses in order to arrange its knowledge, and valid within the range of experience, but which become a danger when invested with absolute validity as things in themselves. Even the mathematician reaches real results by operating with terms which contain a perfect contradiction (e.g. ·, and to some extent the calculus of operations'). The idea of Will in man, of Personality in God, present difficulties which reason cannot reconcile.
The revelation of Christ is addressed primarily to the will not to the intellect, its appeal is to Faith not to Theology. Theology is the endeavour of the Christian intellect to frame for itself conceptions of matters belonging to the immediate consequences of our faith, matters about which we must believe something, but as to which the Lord and His Apostles have delivered nothing formally explicit. Theology has no doubt its certainties beyond the express teaching of our Lord and the New Testament writers; but its work is subject to more than the usual limitations of human thought: we deal with things outside the range of experience, with celestial things; but we have no celestial language.' To abandon all theology would be to acquiesce in a dumb faith: we are to teach, to explain, to defend; the logos sophias and logos gnoseos have from the first been gifts of the Spirit for the building up of the Body. But we know in part and prophesy in part, and our terms begin to fail us just in the region where the problem of guarding the faith of the simple ends and the inevitable metaphysic, into which all pure reflexion merges, begins. Eite oun philosopheteon eite me philosopheteon, philosopheteon, man is metaphysical nolens volens:' only let us recollect that when we find ourselves in the region of antinomies we are crossing the frontier line between revelation and speculation, between the domain of theology and that of ontology. That this line is approached in the definition of the great council no one will deny. But it was reached by the council and by the subsequent consent of the Church reluctantly and under compulsion. The bold assumption that we can argue from the revelation of God in Christ to mysteries beyond our experience was made by the Gnostics, by Arius: the Church met them by a denial of what struck at the root of her belief, not by the claim to erect formulæ applied merely for the lack of better into a revealed ontology. In the terms Person, Hypostasis, Will, Essence, Nature, Generation, Procession, we have the embodiment of ideas extracted from experience, and, as applied to God, representing merely the best attempt we can make to explain what we mean when we speak of God as Father and of Christ as His Son. Even these last sacred names convey their full meaning to us only in view of the historical person of Christ and of our relation to God through Him. That this meaning is based upon an absolute relation of Christ to the Father is the rock of our faith. That relation is mirrored in the name Son of God: but what it is in itself, when the empirical connotations of Sonship are stripped away, we cannot possibly know. Omoousios to Patri, ek tes ousias tou Patros' these words assert at once our faith that such relation exists and our ignorance of its nature. To the simplicity of faith it is enough to know (and this knowledge is what our formula secures) that in Christ we have not only the perfect Example of Human Love to God, but the direct expression and assurance of the Father's Love to us.