Back to Origen

By insisting that “Creator” is a name intrinsic to God’s essence, Athanasius steps back into the problems from which Arianism arose in the first place. Anatolios notes that the debates about “Origen’s speculation that the title ‘Almighty,’ as a designation of God’s eternal being, implies that there was always a world over which God was ‘Almighty’” led to a reaction that emphasized “the absolute priority of the Unbegotten God over against a world that had a punctiliar origin ‘from nothing.’”

Athanasius avoids Origen’s error “by implicitly drawing a distinction between the active potency of God’s creative act, which is coterminus with the Father-Son relation, and the term of that act. In order for the title ‘Creator’ to be authentically predicated of the divine being, it is not necessary for the term of God’s creative potency to be in existence but only for that active potency itself to be integral to the divine being.”