Arianismo e Mariologia

It was the lifelong obsession of Athanasius to insist that to be the Mediator between Creator and creature Christ the Son of God must be God in the full and unequivocal sense of the word: "through God alone can God be known," as the refrain of many orthodox church fathers put it. On the other hand, the Arian opponents of Athanasius, with their unstinted praise for Jesus as the crown of creation and as the supreme created embodiment of human nobility, were attributing to Christ as creature the kind of mediation that, according to Athanasius, only the Creator could exercise. In the words of Henry M. Gwatkin, they "degraded the Lord of Saints to the level of his creatures," but in the process they did make of him the supreme creature. Yet no creature, howsoever sublime metaphysically or exalted morally, could qualify as the Mediator who had saved the world; for to be a creature meant to be "subject to decay, corruption [phthartos]." Being itself subject to decay and corruption, no creature could make another creature "incorruptible [aphthartos]" or confer on it the gift of "incorruption [aphtharsia]" and of authentic participation in the divine nature. By drawing the line between Creator and creature and confessing that the Son of God belonged on God's side of the line, Nicene orthodoxy made possible and necessary a qualitative distinction between him and even the highest of saints. When the church, after several false stats, finally made its own this position of Athanasius that the Son and Logos of God now incarnate in Jesus Christ was the uncreated Mediator between God and the human race, that act of doctrinal legislation left the position of supreme created mediator vacant. Now that the subject of the Arian sentences was changed, what was to become of all the predicated? And so, in a sense quite different from that implied by Harnack, "what the Arians had taught about Christ, the orthodox now taught about Mary." And that was the position that the Mary of orthodoxy came to occupy, in place of the Christ of the Arians: the crown of creation and the supreme created embodiment of human nobility.

Jaroslav Pelikan. Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons. Princeton University Press (1990)