3. Origen. Origen (d. 254) felt the whole weight of the christological problem, but obscured it by foreign speculations, and prepared the way both for the Arian heresy and the Athanasian orthodoxy, though more fully for the latter. On the one hand he closely approaches the Nicene
homoousion by bringing the Son into union with the essence of the Father, and ascribing to him the attribute of eternity. He is, properly the author of the Nicene doctrine of eternal generation of the Son from the essence of the Father (though he usually represents the generation as an act of the will of the Father).But, on the other hand, he teaches subordinationism by calling the Son simply "God," and "a second God," but not "the God" (
ho theos or
auto theos). In his views on the humanity of Christ, he approached the semi-Gnostic Dooetism, and ascribed to the glorified body of Christ ubiquity (in which he was followed by Gregory of Nyssa). His enemies charged him with teaching a double Christ (answering to the lower Jesus, and the higher
Soter the Gnostics), and a merely temporary validity of the body of the Redeemer. As to the relation of the two natures in Christ, he was the first to use the term "God-man" and to apply the favorite illustration of fire heating and penetrating the iron, without altering its character.
2. Iranaeus. The Western Church was not so fruitful in speculation, but, upon the whole, sounder and more self-consistent. The key-note was struck by Irenaeus (d. 202), who, though of Eastern origin, spent his active life in the south of France. He carries special weight as a pupil of Polycarp of
Smyrna, and through him a grand-pupil of St. John, the inspired master. He likewise uses the terms "Logos" and "Son of God" interchangeably, and concedes the distinction, made also by the Valentinians, between the inward and the uttered word, in reference to man; but contests the application of it to God, who is above all antitheses, absolutely simple and unchangeable, and in whom before and after, thinking and speaking, coincide. He repudiates also speculative or
a priori attempts to explain the derivation of the Son from the Father. This he holds to be an incomprehensible mystery. He is content to define the actual distinction between Father and Son by saying that the former is God revealing himself; the latter, God revealed. The one is the ground of revelation; the other is the actual, appearing revelation itself. Hence he calls the Father " the invisible of the Son "; and the Son; " the visible of the Father." He discriminates most rigidly the conceptions of generation and of creation. The Son, though begotten of the Father, is still, like him, distinguished from the created world as increate-without beginning, and eternal; all plainly showing that Iranaeus is much nearer the Nicene dogma of the essential identity of the Son with the Father than Justin Martyr and the Alexandrians. When, as he does in several passages, he still subordinates the Son to the Father, he is certainly inconsistent, and that for want of an accurate distinction between the eternal Logos and the incarnate Christ. Expressions like " My Father is greater than I," which apply only ,to the Christ of history, in the state of humiliation, he refers also, like Justin and Origen, to the eternal Logos. On the other hand, he is charged with leaning in the opposite direction toward the Sabellian and Patripassian views-but unjustly. Apart from his frequent want of precision in expression, he steers in general, with sure Biblical and churchly tact, equally clear of both extremes, and asserts alike the essential unity and the eternal personal distinction of the Father and the Son. He vindicates at length the true and full humanity of Christ against the Docetism of the Gnostic schools. Christ must be man, like us in body, soul, and spirit, though without sin if he would redeem us from sin, and make us perfect. He is the second Adam, the absolute, universal man, the prototype and summing up of the whole race. He also teaches a close union of the divinity and humanity in Christ, in which the former is the active principle, and the seat of personality, the latter the passive and receptive principle.
