20.9. The Development of the Concept of the Individual
But although the learned labours of Eusebius bear witness to a strong individual regard for truth and a vast range of secular knowledge, the solid contributions to thought on the part of Christian writers must be looked for in other directions. The period which we must admit to have been marked by so much credulity and error in matters of science is the period of the oecumenical councils, of the conciliar creeds and the consequent systematisation of Christian doctrine. Councils gathered and expressed in creed and canon the common belief and practice of the churches. Their aim was, not to introduce fresh doctrine, but precisely the reverse, to protect from ruinous innovation the faith once delivered. Nor were the creeds, which served as tests of orthodoxy, intended to simplify or explain the mystery of that faith. Rather they reaffirmed in terms congenial to the age the inexplicable mystery of the revelation in Christ. It was such heretics as the Arians who tried to simplify and explain the difficulties that confronted the Christian believer. This intellectual effort was met by an appeal to experience, to man's need of redemption and the means by which that need is satisfied.
The great advance made by Athanasius was really a return to the simple facts of the Gospel and the words of Scripture. "He went back from the Logos of the philosophers to the Logos of St John, from the god of the philosophers to God in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself." In a word, the great victories of the fourth and fifth centuries were the victories of soteriology over theological speculation. Into the thorny labyrinth of the Arian and Nestorian conflicts there is no need to enter in this chapter. We have only to consider what contributions to general thought were made by the victorious party.
The process of fixing the terminology in which the results of the Arian controversy were expressed and the doctrine affirmed of One God in three Persons of equal and coeternal majesty and Godhead could not be carried through without a serious attempt to deal with the problem of personality. Pre-Christian thinkers had no clear understanding, or at least had not formulated a clear view, of human personality in its two most essential features, viz. universality and unity.
These were necessarily brought out by Christianity, first in the historic figure of its founder and His unexampled life, and then in the development of the doctrine of His person. In that development the Cappadocian fathers were pioneers. The formula in which they declared the eternal relations existing within the Godhead marks a great advance in scientific precision of thought and language.
The way was thus prepared for Boethius' great definition of person as the individual substance of a rational nature (persona est naturae rationalis indindua substantia) which was accepted by Thomas Aquinas and held good throughout the Middle Ages. But between the times of Basil and Boethius a great controversy had arisen which carried forward the recognition of the facts of human personality — the controversy concerning the will and its freedom.
To understand this we must know what were the current opinions concerning the origin of the soul. The Platonic doctrine of pre-existence, as taught by Origen, had had its day; the only traces of it within the period are to be found in the pages of Nemesius the philosophic bishop of Emesa, and, less certainly, in those of Prudentius the Spanish poet. Thus the field was divided between Creatianism and Traducianism. The former view, according to which each soul is a new creation, the body alone being naturally begotten, emphasised the essential purity of the spiritual principle, the evilness of matter, and the unity of man's physical nature. Traducianism, on the other hand, maintained the transmission from the first parents through all succeeding generations of both soul and body, and sin therewith. Creatianism left room for the exercise of a free will, enfeebled but not destroyed by the Fall; Traducianism seemed to exclude free will and to posit a total corruption of soul and body. Creatianism was held by most of the Eastern fathers, and by Jerome and Hilary in the West: Traducianism, by the Westerns generally and by Gregory of Nyssa. Augustine, without definitely declaring himself on either side, was so far traducianist that he regarded the Fall as an historical act resulting in such a complete disablement of man's will that a special divine operation was required to start him again on the Godward path from which Adam's sin had driven him. Without Grace man can only will and do evil.
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