Abstract
When St. Basil the Great entered the controversy with Eunomius, the political and theological context was not very friendly for the defenders of the Nicene definition of faith, to say the least. After Constantine’s death, the ideological consensus reached and maintained with such difficulties during his lifetime began to unravel rapidly. A significant and growing number of Eastern bishops were searching for an alternative expression of faith to that adopted in Nicaea. Of course, these bishops were careful to reject Arius’s patronage and ideas as extremist, but they also showed an even more resolute aversion toward the Nicene Creed, in which they claimed to detect a subtle form of modalism. Behind the text of the “318 Fathers,” their contention went, loomed the specter of Marcellus of Ancyra, reportedly holding, through an original interpretation of homoousion, that between the Father and the Son, the identity is not only generical but also numerical. “A new Sabellius” in the Nicene Creed, this was the rhetorical strategy by which many Easterners were seeking to discredit the definition of 325 and its ever fewer defenders. Yet, instead of making genuine efforts to bring more theological clarity to the controversial homoousion, as Athanasius was to do, these bishops were in fact eager to replace the Nicene Creed altogether with confessions of faith that were at best ambiguous in form and, in fact, more often subordinationist in their theological orientation.
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Notes
On Basil’s Against Eunomius, see M. V. Anastos, “Basil’s Kata Eunomiou: A Critical Analysis,” in Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic, ed. P. J. Fedwick (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Biblical Studies, 1981), 69–134;
P. Rousseau, “Basil of Caesarea, Contra Eunomium: The Main Preoccupations,” in The Idea of Salvation: Papers from the Conference on the Idea of Salvation, Sacred and Secular, Held at St. Paul’s College, University of Sydney, 22–25 August, ed. D. Dockrill et al. (Auckland, NZ: Prudentia, 1988), 77–94; B. Sesboüe, introduction to Basile de Césarée, Contre Eunome, suivi d’Eunome, Apologie (Sources chrétiennes [Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1982; hereafter SC] 299, 15–95); and A. Radde-Gallwitz and M. DelCogliano, introduction to St. Basil of Caesarea (St. Basil the Great), Against Eunomius, trans. Radde-Gallwitz and DelCogliano (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 3–75.
There is a significant theological continuity between Arius and Eunomius, in spite of their differences. See, for instance, K. Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 77–79. In this sense, it is therefore justified to consider Eunomius a radical Arian or a “Neo-Arian”; see
T. Kopecek, A History of Neo-Arianism (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979).
On Eunomius’s life and theology, see E. Cavalcanti, Studi Eunomiani (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1976); Kopecek, History of Neo-Arianism, esp. 299–359 and 441–543;
M. Wiles, “Eunomius: Hairsplitting Dialectician or Defender of the Accessibility of Salvation?” in The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, ed. R. D. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 157–72;
R. P. Vaggione, Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and
J. Behr, The Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2: The Nicene Faith (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 267–82.
For Eunomius’s theory of language, see R. Mortley, From Word to Silence: The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek, vol. 2 (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986), 128–59;
K.-H. Uthemann, “Die Sprache der Theologie nach Eunomius von Cyzicus,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 104 (1993): 143–75; and
M. DelCogliano, Basil of Caesarea’s Anti-Eunomian Theory of Names: Christian Theology and Late-Antique Philosophy in the Fourth-Century Trinitarian Controversy (Brill: Leiden, 2010). See also
L. Karfiková, “Der Ursprung der Sprache nach Eunomius und Gregor vor dem Hintergrund der antiken Sprachtheorien (CE II 387–444; 543–53),” in Gregory of Nyssa: Contra Eunomium II. An English Version with Supporting Studies, Proceedings of the 10th International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (Olomouc, September 15–18, 2004), ed. L. Karfiková et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 279–306.
Ibid. 19 (SC 305, 272). On this point, see now A. Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Ibid. 1.17 (SC 299, 230–32) and 2.12 (SC 305, 44–46). See also D. Robertson, “Relatives in Basil of Caesarea,” Studia Patristica 37 (2001): 277–87.
See R. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, revised ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 137–39.
A similar idea was put forth by Athanasius. See K. Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), 125–33. See also Williams, Arius, 239–43.
Rowan Williams, for instance, suggests that one should not. See R. Williams, “Baptism and the Arian Controversy,” in Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts, ed. M. Barnes and D. H. Williams (Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1993), 172–73. Maurice Wiles, too, expressed skepticism about this point. See
M. Wiles, “Triple and Single Immersion: Baptism in the Arian Controversy,” Studia Patristica 30 (1997): 340–41.
Theodoret of Cyrus, Haereticarum fabularum compendium 4.3, Patrologia Graeca, ed. Jacques Paul Migne (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857–66) 83, 420B–C. This text is translated and discussed by E. Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2009), 716.
See, for instance, T. Kopecek, “Neo-Arian Religion: The Evidence of the Apostolic Constitutions,” in Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments, ed. R. C. Gregg (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1985), 167–68; cf. Williams, “Baptism and the Arian Controversy,” 174–75. In a more simple way, however, Philostorgius (HE 10.4) tells us that baptism should be performed through a single immersion because the Lord “suffered for us only once, not twice or thrice.”
This was also noticed by their pagan contemporaries. See, for instance, L. W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 605–9.
St. Basil the Great, Against Eunomius 1.3 (SC 299, 156–58); Against Eunomius 2.2 (SC 305, 12–16); Against Eunomius 3.1 (SC 305, 144–46); etc. For a contemporary case, see, for instance, Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ; and R. Bauckham, Jesus and the God of the Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), esp. 127–81.
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Sferlea, G.O. (2016). Philosophical Arguments and Christian Worship in St. Basil’s Debate with Eunomius. In: Dumitraşcu, N. (eds) The Ecumenical Legacy of the Cappadocians. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-50269-8_7
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