Reference numbers Doc. 12
CPG 2061
Incipit Prouisor omnium
Date ?
Ancient sources Two manuscripts: Vatican latin 5750 and Milan Ambrose E 147
Modern edition used Gustave Bardy. Recherches sur saint Lucien d’Antioche et son école. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1936), pp. 207-08.

<The Cilician bishop Athanasius said>

[The Son] is God, the overseer, judge and administrator of all things, who created and framed all things, who made everything out of nothing.

Again the same Athanasius calls the ancients, and bishop Dionysius, to show that the Father existed before the Son was begotten, saying1:

So the Father indeed is father and not son; because he has not been made, but rather he is; he is not from anything, but subsists in himself. Neither is the Son father; not because he was existing, but because he has been made. He has obtained the dignity of a Son not from himself, but from him who made him.

Later the same Athanasius:

For the Son does not set himself up against the Father, nor does he think that he is equal to God, but he yields to his Father and confesses, teaching everyone that the Father is greater <than himself; greater> however, not in vastness or magnitude, which are attributes of corporeal bodies, but in his eternal and indescribable paternal power and power to beget, because he himself is eternal and in himself has fullness and has life from no one else.

Note:

1 – Hanson suggest rather strongly that this paragraph (So the Father…made him) is Athanasius’ quotation of Dionysius and that the final paragraph is Athanasius’ commentary on Dionysius (R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), p. 42, note 76).

Translation by GLT

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