Clayton Shoppa: Athanasius and Critical Realism

 The history of Christianity can appear to consist in a series of disputes about the meaning of Christianity. Councils are preceded by precipitating disagreements that, unfortunately, they often only barely contain. Rather than review the fraught history of the Filioque, this paper assesses Athanasius of Alexandria's response to the Arians in light of the philosophical problem of realism. How might different assumptions about what is real help explain the controversy of consubstantiality? For its initial cast of heroes and villains, the debate draws on a number of finely related technical terms, such as agennêtos as opposed to agenêtos, ho ôn as opposed to to on, and, not least, homoousios. Arian realism attempts to suture the Son to the Father on the grounds that they share a common matter. They belong together, are of a piece, because of their lowest common denominator. God the Father thus precedes God the Son, if not in time then at least analytically. Athanasius departs less from Arius's theological conclusions and more from his defective realism. Reality is what is known when we correctly understand rather than a matter of traversing a gap from our knowing to real being. Arius anticipates some of the assumptions about reality found among the early modern philosophers, Athanasius the assumptions of critical realism.