This combination was endangered when the emanation system of Origen became questioned from the point of view of Christian conformism. For instance, the eternity and the pre-existence of all spirits, or the idea of the transcendent fall, or the idea of the spiritual bodyless resurrection and of the spiritualized eschatology.
In this moment the whole Logos Christology, especially the place of the Logos, became questioned. Common sense and conformism, supported by the Monarchianistic reaction, demanded nothing less than God on earth. The theory of emanation in degrees, in hierarchies of powers of being, demanded something less than that which is ultimately transcendent and the One beyond everything given.
Out of this conf lict a division occurred in the school of Origen, and everybody was in the school of Origen in these decades. It was a division into what one has called the Origenistic “right” and the Origenistic “left,” the right-wingers and the left- wingers of the Origenistic school. The right wing said: Nothing is created or subjected in the trius; nothing has been added which had not been in it before; there is no inferiority in the Son to the Father, and in the Spirit to the Son. – These were words of representatives of a kind of ecclesiastical traditionalism who wanted what is today called a “high” Christology: nothing shall be less in God, so that Jesus is not less than the Father Himself. It is the same trend we saw in the Monarchianistic movement.
The left wing was against the traditionalism of the right wing; it was scientific and modernistic. They said the Son is essentially strange to the Father, and being something that is made He had no being before He was generated. This means the Logos Christology in terms of hierarchies – there is God the Father, the highest hierarchy, the eternal One beyond everything; there is the Logos, the second hierarchy, but as the second, lower than the first; and the Spirit is the third hierarchy, and lower than the second. The immortal spirits are the fourth hierarchy, lower than the three others. These were the two wings in the great struggle which almost ruined the Christian Church.
But besides the theological differences, there was politics and the attempt to find a practical way to solve a problem without going into its theoretical depths. This is not only American pragmatism but also Roman eclecticism. This was Rome. Rome, following its eclectic tradition, gave the directive for a solution which avoided the depths of Greek thinking and tried to find a way out of this conf lict. There was a Pope, Dionysius, in Rome, who declared: “Two things must be preserved: the Divine trius and the holy message of monarchy.” These are the two main terms of the two wings, The holy message of the monarchy, which stood against the Logos Christology; the Divine trius, which expressed the Logos Christology. So what Pope Dionysius in Rome did was to take the main formulas of both groups and said that they must both be preserved. But he didn’t say how! This was practical Church politics. And this finally prevailed, as we shall see But it prevailed only after a tremendous fight of almost 80 years, a fight in which the whole situation of the Church changed, as we shall see, and in which finally something was decided which is valid for all periods of Christianity. The event of which I am speaking now is the so-called Arian controversy This controversy is a unique and classical struggle, and caused by many motives. In it is involved the politics of the emperors, who needed unity in the Church which in just these years had become the state religion of the Roman Empire, and now the Church itself threatened to split the whole Empire into pieces. There were involved personal feuds of bishops and theologians. There were in conf lict narrow traditionalism and unrestrained speculation. There was included an overemphasis on theoretical solution and popular monastic fanaticism.
