Augustine’s argument against the Athanasian use of 1 Corinthians 1;24 is that if Christ is the Wisdom and Power of God in the fullest sense, then the Father has no wisdom or power of His own. The Son would not be “wisdom from wisdom, power from power,” and that might imply too that the Son is not even “God from God.”
Athanasius would perhaps swallow the reductio , and reconstrue “God from God” rather than concede Augustine’s point concerning 1 Corinthians 1:24. It is not as if the Father by Himself would be God; the Father is Father only insofar as He has a Son, and Athanasius implies at times that the Father is God also insofar as He has a Son. So “God from God” doesn’t mean “The Father as self-standing divine Person begets a second self-standing divine Person.” Rather, “God from God” means that “the Father is God only insofar as He begets the eternal Son who is also fully God, and the Son is God only insofar as He is begotten by the Father.” The mutual dependence of the Father and Son, in short, is not simply at the level of “personhood” but, because there is no God except the God who is hypostatized, the mutual dependence of Father and Son is at the level of Godness. The Father has all His divine attributes in the Son begotten through the Spirit, and the Son has all His divine attributes from the Father who begets Him in the Spirit.
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