QUICKUNQUE VULT
commonly called THE CREED OF SAINT ATHANASIUS
[Following is a treatment by the early Church of the notion of
the Triune God, and a definition of the Catholic (universal,
Christian) Faith. The term Catholic here does not mean Roman
Catholic.]
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he
hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole
and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the
Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and
Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the
Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son,
and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty
co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the
Holy Ghost. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy
Ghost uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible,
and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. The Father eternal, the Son
eternal, the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals,
but one eternal. As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor
three uncreated, but one incomprehensible. So likewise the Father
is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty.And yet
they are not three Almighties, but one Almighty.
So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God.
And yet they are not three Gods, but one God. So likewise the
Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord. And yet not
three Lords, but one Lord. For like as we are compelled by the
Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself to be both
God and Lord. So we are forbidden by the Catholic Religion, to say,
There be three Gods, or three Lords. The Father is made of none,
neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not
made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father
and of the Son, neither made, nor created nor begotten, but
proceeding. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not
three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.
And in this Trinity none is afore, or after other; none is greater,
or less than another; But the whole three Persons are co-eternal
together and co-equal. So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the
Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.
He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the Trinity.
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Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he
also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For
the right Faith is, that we believe and confess, that our Lord Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Substance of
the Father, begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Substance of
his Mother, born in the world; Perfect God and perfect Man, of a
reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting; Equal to the Father, as
touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching his
Manhood. Who although he be God and Man, yet he is not two, but
one Christ; One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but
by taking of the Manhood into God; One altogether; not by confusion
of Substance, but by unity of Person.
For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and Man
is one
Christ; Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell,
rose again the third day from the dead. He ascended into heaven, he
sitteth on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty, from whence he
shall come to judge the quick and the dead. At whose coming all men
shall rise again with their bodies and shall give account for their
own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting;
and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.
This is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully,
he cannot be saved.
2
A quick historical commentary F.Y.I. (for your information!)
My own denomination no longer includes the Athanasian Creed as central
to the faith as the Nicene and Apostle's Creed still are. However,
this creed was very formative in the history of the Church and is
worthy of consideration. [I have used single quote marks ''for emphasis
as I cannot do italics; gotten spoiled by WordPerfect!] The following
is a scholarly treatment I think is not too difficult reading
considering the complexity of the subject matter.]
This creed, called the "Quicunque Vult" or Athanasius' Creed was
formulated primarily in response to two prominent heresies known as
"subordinationism" and "monarchianism."
Any teaching which "subordinates" the Son to the Father, and the
Spirit to both Father and Son, by treating them as three divine (or
quasi-divine) beings which are separate from each other because they
exist at different levels of reality is known as subordinationism.
In other words, subordinationism is a direct and emphatic assertion
that Son and Spirit are intermediaries between God and the world.
They are divine; but they are not as divine as the Father.
Consequently, they are capable--in a way in which he is not--of being
directly related to the finite world. On a map of the structure of
reality, they would be "closer" to the visible world than the Father.
different from the Father; and neither, for that matter, is the Spirit.
But if this is what one wants to say, why not say it in the
simplest and most economical way possible? Why not dispense with any
real distinction among Father, Son and Spirit, and say that it is the one
God, the indivisible ultimate, who alone is really divine? This, in
essence, was the position
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of those who are known as "monarchians." These teachers--and their
tradition reached back into the second century--would, of course, have
agreed with Athanasius in their opposition to any form of subordina-
tionism. They saw no reason, however, to complicate matters by insisting
on a real threefoldness in God. Once you have pulled up the rope ladder
of subordinate or intermediary "divine " beings, what is left, in effect,
is simply the top rung--God, alone in himself. Moreover, it is only in
this way that the unity of God can truly be safeguarded. For all its
virtues, the position of people like Athanasius seemed to say that there
are three coequal Gods; and Arius was assuredly correct in perceiving the
absurdity of that position.
But then what did the monarchians make of the trinitarian formula?
How did they explain or interpret expressions like 'Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit?' Needless to say, they did not want simply to be rid of this way
of talking. They merely wished, as we have said, to make sure that it was
not taken to refer to any 'real' distinctions in God. What they
proposed, therefore, was a very simple--and in its way appealing--
solution. In one way or another, they all suggested that Father, Son,
and Spirit be taken as names for 'different ways in which God is seen
by us.' This might mean, for example, that they are names for
different attributes of God (and thus equivalent to abstract words like
'creative' or 'self-expressive'); or it might mean that they are names
for God's 'appearance,' for what he 'looks like.'
Now at first glance this position seems both plausible and helpful.
It does, after all, give concrete meaning to the trinitarian formula; and
at the same time, it asserts in a serious and explicit way the unity of
God. A second glance, however, reveals a rather strange thing. Like the
subordinationist, the monarchian erects a barrier between God and human
beings. In this case, of course, the barrier is not made up of a
descending hierarchy of intermediary divine beings. Rather, it is
constituted by God's appearance, which for the monarchian takes the
place, functionally speaking, of intermediaries. In other words, the
monarchian asserts that although God 'is' not Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, he nevertheless 'looks like' Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Between what God is in himself, on the one hand, and human beings on
the other, there stands this appearance: and again we are confronted
with a doctrine which questions the true and active presence of God
himself with humanity. On the monarchian view, what we have of God
directly is only his appearance, and not also his reality.
It was in order to forestall or correct this rather strange form of
the idea of the "intermediary" that most Christian teachers insisted on
saying that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are 'hypostases.'
This Greek word (which was translated into Latin as 'persona,' whence the
English 'person') meant simply "something objectively real." When
applied to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, therefore, it was calculated
to assert that God does not just 'appear' to be threefold; he genuinely
is threefold. Each of the three names refers to a real something in
God. This assertion, moreover, constitutes yet another defense of the
conviction that in creation, redemption and sanctification what is with
us is 'God'--as he truly is in himself.
Thus, the orthodox position in its basic outlines finally appeared.
God is 'one' in being. But, at the same time, he is, objectively and in
himself, three: "One God in three hypostases (persons)." But how can
such a thing be said, and what does it mean?
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It would be easy, of course, to evade these questions by saying
that the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery, and therefore something
which must be accepted on faith. This policy, however, will not really
work; and that is not merely because people have a hard time believing
something whose point they cannot see. In Christian faith, a mystery is
not something which fails to make sense. It is, rather, something whose
sense can be discerned, and even stated, but never mastered or fully
comprehended in its richness. The mysterious is such not because of its
absurdity or its incoherence, but because of its depth: not because one
cannot see or state truth about it, but because the truth as stated is
only a bare intimation of the reality to which it points. There can,
therefore, be no retreat from the task of asking what it is that the
doctrine of the Trinity is saying or pointing to.
In this task, the first thing which must be firmly grasped is the
deliberate seriousness with which the doctrine affirms that God is 'one.'
When it is said that Son and Spirit are God, that they are "of one
being" with the Father, this does not mean that they and the Father are
three quite separate instances of "Godness." It means, rather, that they
are in very truth one and the same God. Each of them is all that God is;
and none of them is separated from the others in being God. The persons
are not independent individuals: They are, to use classical language,
'ways in which God is God.' This suggests, moreover, yet another
dimension of God's unity. Because the persons 'are' not separate things,
they do not 'do' things separately, and they do not do 'different' things.
All of the works of God are works of the Father done in the Son and
perfected through the Spirit.
But how is this so? Do we not, in fact, associate creation with
the Father, redemption with the Son, and sanctification with the Holy
Spirit? The answer to this question is obviously Yes. It needs to be
remembered, however, that these three works of God are in reality
discovered as "moments" or dimensions of a single relationship. Redem-
ption, I have said, is creation, historically objectified and enacted.
Similarly, sanctification 'is' redemption, subjectively actualized. What
God is and what he does in relation to
humankind are 'one thing.'
What the Word does is what the Father does; and what the Holy Spirit does
is what the Word does. All carry out the one work of God, which is, as I
have said, always the work 'of' the Father, 'in' the Son, and 'through'
the Holy Spirit.
If this is so, however, in what way do the persons differ from one
another? How are they distinct?
Here the key word is 'relation.' It is worth noticing that every
account given of the meaning of the trinitarian formula explains the
distinction of the persons in terms of some kind of 'relatedness' which
is attributed to God. Subordinationism and monarchianism alike focused
attention on the relationship of God to the created world as a whole, or
to human beings in particular. In other words, the point, as they saw it,
of making a distinction of persons was to explain the 'how' of God's
'relatedness to the finite universe.' That is why the concept of the
intermediary played so central a role in their thought. What each of
these positions really emphasized, in short, was the distinction between
God-in-himself and God-related-to-the-world. Subordinationism identified
the Father with God-in-himself, removed and even isolated from the world.
It then explained the Son and the Holy Spirit in
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their distinction from the Father as God-in-contact-with-the-world--a
slightly inferior kind of God. The monarchian, as we has seen, took a
somewhat different tack, but worked with essentially the same idea. For
him, God-in-himself was the one true God; and God-in-relation-to-the-world
was God as he "appeared" in threefold guise.
The orthodox position results from a refusal to make this sort of
distinction in God. It wants to say, as we have seen, that God 'in
'himself' is self-communicative and active in relation to the world:
that at the very heart of the divine being is a movement of self-bestowal,
of sharing, of affirmation of the "other." In other words, the orthodox
sought a way of asserting that God-in-himself is not distinct from, but
exactly the same as, God-in-relation; and their way of doing this was to
say that the distinction of persons is expressive of the fact that relat-
edness is part of God's own,proper way of being. It is, therefore, not,
in the first instance, God's relationship to the world which the doctrine
of the Trinity focuses on. Rather, it is the fact that 'God stands in
relation to himself.' On this understanding, the language of the
trinitarian formula--'Father, Word, Holy Spirit'--says in effect that
God truly becomes "other' for himself, that he communicates himself to
himself. And this, in turn, means that relatedness to an "other" is not
something eternal or foreign to God, but part of the very logic of his
being. The doctrine of the Trinity says what God must be like in himself
to be the sort of God who genuinely gives himself--communicates him-
self--in love. For this reason, it states the presupposition of what we
learn about God in considering him as the ultimate "other' who is
actively present in creating, redeeming, and sanctifying.
IN CONCLUSION the "mystery" of Trinity-in-unity, then, is the
mystery of God's self-communicative nature as that is expressed in his
own being. He is his own Word to himself, and his own appropriation
of that Word. He genuinely reproduces himself for himself; and yet all
these "selves" are clearly 'one' in a final and unqualified sense.
Consequently, the doctrine of the Trinity, which is intimated in the
very structure of the creeds, states what sort of God it is whose very
nature is to affirm, and set himself in relation to, an "other." The
creeds, as we use them, enact jsut such a relation. When they are
recited sincerely, they constitute a point at which a created person is
seized up in the eternal self-communication of Father, Word, and Holy
Spirit; for that is the meaning of creation, of redemption, and of
sanctification.