Orthodoxy and heresies in the 4th and 5th centuries (1)

We must carefully distinguish the West from the East; in the great religious controversies which marked the end of Antiquity in the East, we sense the same metaphysical concern, the same concern to determine the intelligible structure of things as in the neo-Platonism of the same time; all these debates can be reduced either to the Trinitarian question and the relationship of the hypostases between them, or to the Christological question, that is to say to the relationship of the Word as divine hypostasis with Jesus Christ as man. And despite appeals to authority: and to Scripture, the differences between theologians seem to be of a philosophical order.

On the one hand, there are heretics: Sabellius and the moralists who fear falling into polytheism by making the Word the Son of God; Arius who, in the same spirit but in the opposite way, only admits the Son of God as a person on condition of making him a creature of God, the first of all, “but who is not eternal or co-eternal with the Father; because God is its principle” (1); it is the entire school of Antioch which refuses to see in Jesus Christ anything other than a man, filled with the graces of divinity, and rejects the metaphysical combinations of the man-god; idea which, after Nestorius, spread throughout Christianity and reached the Far East. We see, through all these opinions, the mark of the same rationalist inspiration, seeking to classify, to avoid confusion, to distinguish. In the face of these opinions, orthodox dogma is constituted; he seeks to reconcile theocentrism, which submerges all difference in divine unity, with the distinctions essential to the very existence of Christianity: this is the formula that Athanasius and the Council of Nicea oppose to Arius: unity of substance in God with the diversity of persons; these are the formulas with which Cyril of Alexandria and the Council of Ephesus (433) condemn Nestorius: the duality of natures, human and divine, in Christ, does not prevent Mary from being the theotokos, the mother of God.

In the West, there is no shortage of conflicts at the same time; but they are of another order; they all aim, directly or directly, at the necessity of the institution of the Church and its hierarchy: such is Donatism which, born and almost confined to Africa, dated back a century, when the debate chaired by Saint Augustine; such as the Pelagianism that Saint Augustine fought all his life. The Church, as an institution necessary for the dispensation of divine graces, was incompatible with both of these heresies. The Donatists claimed that the value of a sacrament was conditional on the moral value of the priest who conferred it: this was to deny the Church as a society based on practical, strict and objective rules; it was to leave it to all the hazards of a subjective appreciation of the morality of priests; he who confers the sacraments does not have to be holy in his heart, any more than the Roman jurist who says the law has to be just: formalism is a condition of stability.