Heresy of Athanasius

 

Athanasius believed that Christ did not know the time or the hour in his human nature:

Moreover, after narrating the parable of the Virgins, again He shows more clearly who they are who are ignorant of the day and the hour, saying, 'Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour Matthew 25:13.' He who said shortly before, 'No one knows, no not the Son,' now says not 'I know not,' but 'ye know not.' In like manner then, when His disciples asked about the end, suitably said He then, 'no, nor the Son,' according to the flesh because of the body; that He might show that, as man, He knows not; for ignorance is proper to man. - Against the Arians, Discourse 3, Chapter 28


Pope Gregory I affirmed that the view that "Christ is ignorant in his human nature" is Nestorianism:

Therefore (as) God and man He knows the day and the hour of judgment; but on this account, because God is man. But the fact is certainly manifest that whoever is not a Nestorian, can in no wise be an Agnoeta. For with what purpose can he, who confesses that the Wisdom itself of God is incarnate say that there is anything which the Wisdom of God does not know? - The Sources of Catholic Dogma, page 97


The interpretation of what Pope Gregory I says is affirmed by John Hardon:

AGNOETES. A sect of Monophysites who held that Christ was subject to positive ignorance. The leading exponent of its error was Deacon Themistios of Alexandria. He was condemned by the Church, which declared that Christ's humanity cannot be ignorant of anything of the past or of the future. To attribute ignorance to Christ's human nature is to profess Nestorianism (Denzinger 474-76). - Modern Catholic dictionary, page 16


His heresy was so apparent that translators such as John Henry Newman had to intentionally mistranslate the work of Athanasius in order to save his theology from heresy:

Newman’s struggle to make Athanasius consistent with later dogma began five years before Development of Christian Doctrine. In spite of arguing for doctrine’s propensity to change, as the bastion of orthodoxy Athanasius was somehow to be immune from ever looking doctrinally out-of-date. The Anglican patristic scholar and Bishop of Lincoln, John Kaye, criticized the first translation’s notes for finessing the way Athanasius held that Christ was ignorant in his human nature, a later heresy. In one annotation to the first translation, Newman said that Athanasius’s teaching, that the Son advanced in wisdom, was only ‘primâ facie’ inconsistent with the subsequent teaching of the Church. Kaye complained: ‘What is here meant by primâ facie I do not understand; the language of Athanasius is as express as language can be’. Kaye knew as well as Newman that it was not until the sixth century that Pope Gregory I, after the controversy with the Agnoetae, declared it heretical to claim Christ was ignorant in his human soul. But, asked Kaye, what had that to do with Athanasius, who was writing two centuries before? Had Kaye lived to see the 1881 translation, he would have thought that worse followed, for now Newman’s finessing occurred not in the footnotes but in the translation. Athanasius’s Christology must be made safe from subsequent heresy, to which end Newman amends the patriarch’s argument, so that now it is not Christ whose knowledge is perfected over time, but ours who are ‘looking at Him’. - Benjamin J. King, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century, Page 233




Source: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/28163.htm

Source: https://www.fisheaters.com/srpdf/xTheSourcesOfCatholicDogma.pdf

Source: https://archive.org/details/na00john/page/16/mode/2up

Source: https://dokumen.pub/newman-and-the-alexandrian-fathers-shaping-doctrine-in-nineteenth-century-england-changing-paradigms-in-historical-and-systematic-theology-1nbsped-9780199548132-0199548137.html