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| The Passage where he attacks the ῾Ομοούσιον, and the contention in answer to it.
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§34. The Passage where he attacks the
‘Ομοούσιον, and the contention in answer to it.
I will omit to speak of the
words which occur before this passage which has been quoted. They
contain merely shameless abuse of our Master and Father in God, and
nothing bearing on the matter in hand. But on the passage itself, as he
advances by the device of this terrible dilemma a double-edged
refutation, we cannot be silent; we must accept the intellectual
challenge, and fight for the Faith with all the power we have, and show
that the formidable two-edged sword which he has sharpened is feebler
than a make-believe in a scene-painting.
He attacks the community of
substance with two suppositions; he says that we either name as Father
and as Son two independent principles drawn out parallel to each other,
and then say that one of these existencies is produced by the other
existence: or else we say that one and the same essence is conceived
of, participating in both names in turn, both being173
| 173 Reading οὖσαν for
οὐσίαν of
Oehler and Migne. |
Father, and becoming Son, and itself produced in generation from
itself. I put this in my own words, thereby not misinterpreting his
thought, but only correcting the tumid exaggeration of its expression,
in such a way as to reveal his meaning by clearer words and afford a
comprehensive view of it. Having blamed us for want of polish and for
having brought to the controversy an insufficient amount of learning,
he decks out his own work in such a glitter of style, and passes the
nail174
, to use his own
phrase, so often over his own sentences, and makes his periods so smart
with this elaborate prettiness, that he captivates the reader at once
with the attractions of language; such amongst many others is the
passage we have just recited by way of preface. We will, by leave,
again recite it. “And so the scolding you have given is only a
halter, not to be eluded, which you have woven for your own necks;
justice, as might have been expected, records in your own words a
verdict against yourselves.”
Observe these flowers of the old
Attic; what polished brilliance of diction plays over his composition;
what a delicate and subtle charm of style is in bloom there! However,
let this be as people think. Our course requires us again to turn to
the thought in those words; let us plunge once more into the phrases of
this pamphleteer. “Either you conceive of the beings as separated
and independent of each other, and then bring down one of them, by
generation, to the rank of Son, and contend that One who exists
independently nevertheless was made by means of the Other
existence.” That is enough for the present. He says, then, that
we preach175
| 175 πρεσβεύειν. So Lucian. Diog. Laert., and Origen passim. | two causeless Beings. How can this man,
who is always accusing us of levelling and confusing, assert
this from our
believing, as we do, in a single substance of Both. If two natures,
alien to each other on the score of their being, were preached by our
Faith, just as it is preached by the Anomœan school, then there
would be good reason for thinking that this distinction of natures led
to the supposition of two causeless beings. But if, as is the case, we
acknowledge one nature with the differences of Person, if, while the
Father is believed in, the Son also is glorified, how can such a Faith
be misrepresented by our opponents as preaching Two First Causes? Then
he says, ‘of these two causes, one is lowered’ by us
‘to the rank of Son.’ Let him point out one champion of
such a doctrine; whether he can convict any single person of talking
like this, or only knows of such a doctrine as taught anywhere at all
in the Church, we will hold our peace. For who is so wild in his
reasonings, and so bereft of reflection as, after speaking of Father
and Son, to imagine in spite of that two ungenerate beings: and then
again to suppose that the One of them has come into being by means of
the Other? Besides, what logical necessity does he show for pushing our
teaching towards such suppositions? By what arguments does he show that
such an absurdity must result from it? If indeed he adduced one single
article of our Faith, and then, whether as a quibble or with a real
force of demonstration, made this criticism upon it, there might have
been some reason for his doing so with a view to invalidate that
article. But when there is not, and never can be such a doctrine in the
Church, when neither a teacher of it nor a hearer of it is to be found,
and the absurdity cannot be shown, either, to be the strict logical
consequence of anything, I cannot understand the meaning of his
fighting thus with shadows. It is just as if some phenzy-struck person
supposed himself to be grappling with an imaginary combatant, and then,
having with great efforts thrown himself down, thought that it was his
foe who was lying there; our clever pamphleteer is in the same state;
he feigns suppositions which we know nothing about, and he fights with
the shadows which are sketched by the workings of his own
brain.
For I challenge him to say why a
believer in the Son as having come into being from the Father must
advance to the opinion that there are two First Causes; and let him
tell us who is most guilty of this establishment of two First Causes;
one who asserts that the Son is falsely so named, or one who insists
that, when we call Him that, the name represents a reality? The first,
rejecting a real generation of the Son, and affirming simply that He
exists, would be more open to the suspicion of making Him a First
Cause, if he exists indeed, but not by generation: whereas the second,
making the representative sign of the Person of the Only-begotten to
consist in subsisting generatively from the Father, cannot by any
possibility be drawn into the error of supposing the Son to be
Ungenerate. And yet as long as, according to you thinkers, the
non-generation of the Son by the Father is to be held, the Son Himself
will be properly called Ungenerate in one of the many meanings of the
Ungenerate; seeing that, as some things come into existence by being
born and others by being fashioned, nothing prevents our calling one of
the latter, which does not subsist by generation, an Ungenerate,
looking only to the idea of generation; and this your account,
defining, as it does, our Lord to be a creature, does establish about
Him. So, my very learned sirs, it is in your view, not ours, when it is
thus followed out, that the Only-begotten can be named Ungenerate: and
you will find that “justice,”—whatever you mean by
that,—records in your own words176
| 176 your
own words, i.e. not ours, as you say. The
Codex of Turin has τοῖς
ἡμετέροις, and ἡμῖν above:
but Oehler has wisely followed that of Venice. Eunomius had said of
Basil’s party (§34) ‘justice records in your own words
a verdict against yourselves.’ ‘No,’ Gregory answers;
‘your words (interpreting our doctrine) alone lend
themselves to that.’ But to change καθ᾽ ἡμῶν of the Codd. also to καθ᾽ ὑμῶν would supply a still better sense. | a
verdict against us.
It is easy also to find mud in
his words after that to cast upon this execrable teaching. For the
other horn of his dilemma partakes in the same mental delusion; he
says, “or else you first allow one single causeless being, and
then marking this out by an act of generation into Father and Son, you
declare that this non-generated being came into existence by means of
itself.” What is this new and marvellous story? How is one
begotten by oneself, having oneself for father, and becoming
one’s own son? What dizziness and delusion is here? It is like
supposing the roof to be turning down below one’s feet, and the
floor above one’s head; it is like the mental state of one with
his senses stupified with drink, who shouts out persistently that the
ground does not stand still beneath, and that the walls are
disappearing, and that everything he sees is whirling round and will
not keep still. Perhaps our pamphleteer had such a tumult in his soul
when he wrote; if so, we must pity him rather than abhor him. For who
is so out of hearing of our divine doctrine, who is so far from the
mysteries of the Church, as to accept such a view as this to the
detriment of the Faith. Rather, it is hardly enough to say, that no one
ever dreamed of such an absurdity to its detriment. Why, in the case of
human nature, or any other entity falling within the
grasp of the senses who, when he hears of a community of substance,
dreams either that all things that are compared together on the ground
of substance are without a cause or beginning, or that something comes
into existence out of itself, at once producing and being produced by
itself?
The first man, and the man born
from him, received their being in a different way; the latter by
copulation, the former from the moulding of Christ Himself; and yet,
though they are thus believed to be two, they are inseparable in the
definition of their being, and are not considered as two beings,
without beginning or cause, running parallel to each other; nor can the
existing one be said to be generated by the existing one, or the two be
ever thought of as one in the monstrous sense that each is his own
father, and his own son; but it is because the one and the other was a
man that the two have the same definition of being; each was mortal,
reasoning, capable of intuition and of science. If, then, the idea of
humanity in Adam and Abel does not vary with the difference of their
origin, neither the order nor the manner of their coming into existence
making any difference in their nature, which is the same in both,
according to the testimony of every one in his senses, and no one, not
greatly needing treatment for insanity, would deny it; what necessity
is there that against the divine nature we should admit this strange
thought? Having heard of Father and Son from the Truth, we are taught
in those two subjects the oneness of their nature; their natural
relation to each other expressed by those names indicates that nature;
and so do Our Lord’s own words. For when He said, “I and My
Father are one177
,” He conveys by that confession
of a Father exactly the truth that He Himself is not a first cause, at
the same time that He asserts by His union with the Father their common
nature; so that these words of His secure our faith from the taint of
heretical error on either side: for Sabellius has no ground for his
confusion of the individuality of each Person, when the Only-begotten
has so distinctly marked Himself off from the Father in those words,
“I and My Father;” and Arius finds no confirmation of his
doctrine of the strangeness of either nature to the other, since this
oneness of both cannot admit distinction in nature. For that which is
signified in these words by the oneness of Father and Son is nothing
else but what belongs to them on the score of their actual being; all
the other moral excellences which are to be observed in them as over
and above178
| 178 ὄσα
ἐπιθεωρεῖται
τῇ φύσει. | their nature may without error be set
down as shared in by all created beings. For instance, Our Lord is
called merciful and pitiful by the prophet179
, and
He wills us to be and to be called the same; “Be ye therefore
merciful180
,” and “Blessed are the
merciful181
,” and many such passages. If,
then, any one by diligence and attention has modelled himself according
to the divine will, and become kind and pitiful and compassionate, or
meek and lowly of heart, such as many of the saints are testified to
have become in the pursuit of such excellences, does it follow that
they are therefore one with God, or united to Him by virtue of any one
of them? Not so. That which is not in every respect the same, cannot be
‘one’ with him whose nature thus varies from it.
Accordingly, a man becomes ‘one’ with another, when in
will, as our Lord says, they are ‘perfected into one182
| 182 John xvii. 23. “I in
them, and thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one.”
(R.V.) | ,’ this union of wills being added to
the connexion of nature. So also the Father and Son are one, the
community of nature and the community of will running, in them, into
one. But if the Son had been joined in wish only to the Father, and
divided from Him in His nature, how is it that we find Him testifying
to His oneness with the Father, when all the time He was sundered from
Him in the point most proper to Him of all?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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