You assume that the two are opposed to each other. The evidence is solidly against you.
When Athanasius insisted on the “homoousion,” many devout Christians who cared about preserving Sacred Tradition were concerned, because this language was historically associated with a form of modalism, and some of Athanasius’s theological allies appeared to be close to modalism. Eventually, a way was found to explain the homoousios while still preserving the distinction of persons. I don’t care whether you want to call this “compromise” or not. But whatever you call it, it’s what modern ecumenists are trying to do. It makes no sense to defend one and condemn the other. If one is compromise, the other is too. If one isn’t, the other isn’t.
But I think this is different. When dealing with God, there are many antinomies which need to be addressed. The Trinity was one of them, for the question which had to be addressed was: how can God be truly three but also truly one? The orthodox position was not really a compromise between differing views like the Sabellian heresy and the Arian heresy. Rather, it stood in contradistinction to both of them, which is why the term homoousion was used, because it denied any sort of subordinationism (unlike homoiousion, which was a true compromise between heteroousianism and homoousianism), and which was why the term hypostasis was used to describe the persons of the trinity, because this language made impossible any Sabellian understanding of the idea that the Father and the Son are consubstantial.
With the Christological controversies over the natures of Christ, we also have a similar process happening, but spanning over three councils. First, the teaching of the hypostatic union was declared Orthodox at the council of Ephesus (as opposed to the prosopic union of Nestorius). Cyril’s distinction between the terms nature and hypostasis, however, was rather vague, which led to the heresy taught by Eutyches, where the Word did not really become fully human at all, but only seemed to be man, an interpretation which the vagueness of Cyril’s one nature formulation allowed. This is where the Chalcedonian definition came into play, proclaiming that Jesus was in two natures, fully God and fully man. Unfortunately, vagueness in the meaning of nature had left the Chalcedonian interpretation open to a Nestorianizing tendency, which again had to be corrected at the Second Council of Constantinople.
It was only at the Second Council of Constantinople, that orthodox Christology was defined with great precision, making impossible both the Eutychian understanding of the Hypostatic union (because it was confessed that Christ was the hypostasis of the Word, consubstantial with man, and is consubstantial with the Father) but also making impossible a Nestorian interpretation of the Chalcedonian definition (here because it was written that the distinction of the natures exists only in contemplation, and that the natures themselves have no personal existence to them). Here we see the same process, where orthodox theology is brought to precision against the teaching of heresies, rather than a process of compromise between competing schools of thought. I honestly feel that compromise is foreign to the mindset of the church fathers.
. I can understand a Calvinist saying “no one is willing to see the truth–God changes your heart.” But even in that view, God changes your heart to make it willing to see truth it didn’t see before. And you aren’t a Calvinist. . . .
