Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Answer to the question he is always asking, “Can He who is be begotten?”
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
§39.
Answer to the question he is always asking, “Can He who is be
begotten?”
Eunomius does not like the
meaning of the Ungenerate to be conveyed by the term Father, because he
wants to establish that there was a time when the Son was not. It is in
fact a constant question amongst his pupils, “How can He who
(always) is be begotten?” This comes, I take it, of not weaning
oneself from the human application of words, when we have to think
about God. But let us without bitterness at once expose the actual
falseness of this ‘arrière pensée’ of his210
| 210 αὐτὸ τὸ
πεπλασμενον
τῆς
ὑπονοιας. | , stating first our conclusions upon the
matter.
These names have a different
meaning with us, Eunomius; when we come to the transcendent energies
they yield another sense. Wide, indeed, is the interval in all else
that divides the human from the divine; experience cannot point here
below to anything at all resembling in amount what we may guess at and
imagine there. So likewise, as regards the meaning of our terms, though
there may be, so far as words go, some likeness between man and the
Eternal, yet the gulf between these two worlds is the real measure of
the separation of meanings. For instance, our Lord calls God a
‘man’ that was a ‘householder’ in the parable211
; but though this title is ever so familiar to
us, will the person we think of and the person there meant be of the
same description; and will our ‘house’ be the same as that
large house, in which, as the Apostle says, there are the vessels of
gold, and those of silver212
, and those of the
other materials which are recounted? Or will not those rather be
beyond our immediate apprehension and to be contemplated in a blessed
immortality, while ours are earthern, and to dissolve to earth? So in
almost all the other terms there is a similarity of names between
things human and things divine, revealing nevertheless underneath this
sameness a wide difference of meanings. We find alike in both worlds
the mention of bodily limbs and senses; as with us, so with the life of
God, which all allow to be above sense, there are set down in order
fingers and arm and hand, eye and eyelids, hearing, heart, feet and
sandals, horses, cavalry, and chariots; and other metaphors innumerable
are taken from human life to illustrate symbolically divine things. As,
then, each one of these names has a human sound, but not a human
meaning, so also that of Father, while applying equally to life divine
and human, hides a distinction between the uttered meanings exactly
proportionate to the difference existing between the subjects of this
title. We think of man’s generation one way; we surmise of the
divine generation in another. A man is born in a stated time; and a
particular place must be the receptacle of his life; without it it is
not in nature that he should have any concrete substance: whence also
it is inevitable that sections of time are found enveloping his life;
there is a Before, and With, and After him. It is true to say of
any one whatever of those born into this world that there was a time
when he was not, that he is now, and again there will be time when he
will cease to exist; but into the Eternal world these ideas of time do
not enter; to a sober thinker they have nothing akin to that world. He
who considers what the divine life really is will get beyond the
‘sometime,’ the ‘before,’ and the
‘after,’ and every mark whatever of this extension in time;
he will have lofty views upon a subject so lofty; nor will he deem that
the Absolute is bound by those laws which he observes to be in force in
human generation.
Passion precedes the concrete
existence of man; certain material foundations are laid for the
formation of the living creature; beneath it all is Nature, by
God’s will, with her wonder-working, putting everything under
contribution for the proper proportion of nutrition for that which is
to be born, taking from each terrestrial element the amount necessary
for the particular case, receiving the co-operation of a measured time,
and as much of the food of the parents as is necessary for the
formation of the child: in a word Nature, advancing through all these
processes by which a human life is built up, brings the non-existent to
the birth; and accordingly we say that, non-existent once, it now is
born; because, at one time not being, at another it begins to be. But
when it comes to the Divine generation the mind rejects this
ministration of Nature, and this fulness of time in contributing to the
development, and everything else which our argument contemplated as
taking place in human generation; and he who enters on divine topics
with no carnal conceptions will not fall down again to the level of any
of those debasing thoughts, but seeks for one in keeping with the
majesty of the thing to be expressed; he will not think of passion in
connexion with that which is passionless, or count the Creator of all
Nature as in need of Nature’s help, or admit extension in time
into the Eternal life; he will see that the Divine generation is to be
cleared of all such ideas, and will allow to the title
‘Father’ only the meaning that the Only-begotten is not
Himself without a source, but derives from That the cause of His being;
though, as
for the actual beginning of His subsistence, he will not calculate
that, because he will not be able to see any sign of the thing in
question. ‘Older’ and ‘younger’ and all such
notions are found to involve intervals of time; and so, when you
mentally abstract time in general, all such indications are got rid of
along with it.
Since, then, He who is
with the Father, in some inconceivable category, before the ages admits
not of a ‘sometime,’ He exists by generation indeed, but
nevertheless He never begins to exist. His life is neither in time, nor
in place. But when we take away these and all suchlike ideas in
contemplating the subsistence of the Son, there is only one thing that
we can even think of as before Him—i.e. the Father. But the
Only-begotten, as He Himself has told us, is in the Father, and so,
from His nature, is not open to the supposition that He ever existed
not. If indeed the Father ever was not, the eternity of the Son must be
cancelled retrospectively in consequence of this nothingness of the
Father: but if the Father is always, how can the Son ever be
non-existent, when He cannot be thought of at all by Himself apart from
the Father, but is always implied silently in the name Father. This
name in fact conveys the two Persons equally; the idea of the Son is
inevitably suggested by that word. When was it, then, that the Son was
not? In what category shall we detect His non-existence? In place?
There is none. In time? Our Lord was before all times; and if so, when
was He not? And if He was in the Father, in what place was He not? Tell
us that, ye who are so practised in seeing things out of sight. What
kind of interval have your cogitations given a shape to? What vacancy
in the Son, be it of substance or of conception, have you been able to
think of, which shows the Father’s life, when drawn out in
parallel, as surpassing that of the Only-begotten? Why, even of men we
cannot say absolutely that any one was not, and then was born. Levi,
many generations before his own birth in the flesh, was tithed by
Melchisedech; so the Apostle says, “Levi also, who receiveth
tithes, payed tithes (in Abraham),”213
adding the proof, “for he was yet in the loins of his father,
when” Abraham met the priest of the Most High. If, then, a man in
a certain sense is not, and is then born, having existed beforehand by
virtue of kinship of substance in his progenitor, according to an
Apostle’s testimony, how as to the Divine life do they dare to
utter the thought that He was not, and then was begotten? For He
‘is in the Father,’ as our Lord has told us; “I am in
the Father, and the Father in Me214
,” each of
course being in the other in two different senses; the Son being in the
Father as the beauty of the image is to be found in the form from which
it has been outlined; and the Father in the Son, as that original
beauty is to be found in the image of itself. Now in all hand-made
images the interval of time is a point of separation between the model
and that to which it lends its form; but there the one cannot be
separated from the other, neither the “express image” from
the “Person,” to use the Apostle’s words215
, nor the “brightness” from the
“glory” of God, nor the representation from the goodness;
but when once thought has grasped one of these, it has admitted the
associated Verity as well. “Being,” he says (not
becoming), “the brightness of His glory216
;” so that clearly we may rid ourselves
for ever of the blasphemy which lurks in either of those two
conceptions; viz., that the Only-begotten can be thought of as
Ungenerate (for he says “the brightness of His glory,” the
brightness coming from the glory, and not, reversely, the glory from
the brightness); or that He ever began to be. For the word
“being” is a witness that interprets to us the Son’s
continuity and eternity and superiority to all marks of
time.
What occasion, then, had our
foes for proposing for the damage of our Faith that trifling question,
which they think unanswerable and, so, a proving of their own doctrine,
and which they are continually asking, namely, ‘whether One who
is can be generated.’ We may boldly answer them at once, that He
who is in the Ungenerate was generated from Him, and does
derive His source from Him. ‘I live by the Father217
:’ but it is impossible to name the
‘when’ of His beginning. When there is no intermediate
matter, or idea, or interval of time, to separate the being of the Son
from the Father, no symbol can be thought of, either, by which the
Only-begotten can be unlinked from the Father’s life, and shewn
to proceed from some special source of His own. If, then, there is no
other principle that guides the Son’s life, if there is nothing
that a devout mind can contemplate before (but not divided from) the
subsistence of the Son, but the Father only; and if the Father is
without beginning or generation, as even our adversaries admit, how can
He who can be contemplated only within the Father, who is without
beginning, admit Himself of a beginning?
What harm, too, does our Faith suffer from our admitting those
expressions of our opponents which they bring forward against us as
absurd, when they ask ‘whether He which is can be
begotten?’ We do not assert that this can be so in the sense in
which Nicodemus put his offensive question218
,
wherein he thought it impossible that one who was in existence
could come to a second birth: but we assert that, having His existence
attached to an Existence which is always and is without beginning, and
accompanying every investigator into the antiquities of time, and
forestalling the curiosity of thought as it advances into the world
beyond, and intimately blended as He is with all our conceptions of the
Father, He has no beginning of His existence any more than He is
Ungenerate: but He was both begotten and was, evincing on the score of
causation generation from the Father, but by virtue of His everlasting
life repelling any moment of non-existence.
But this thinker in his
exceeding subtlety contravenes this statement; he sunders the being of
the Only-begotten from the Father’s nature, on the ground of one
being Generated, the other Ungenerate; and although there are such a
number of names which with reverence may be applied to the Deity, and
all of them suitable to both Persons equally, he pays no attention to
anyone of them, because these others indicate that in which Both
participate; he fastens on the name Ungenerate, and that alone; and
even of this he will not adopt the usual and approved meaning; he
revolutionizes the conception of it, and cancels its common
associations. Whatever can be the reason of this? For without some very
strong one he would not wrest language away from its accepted meaning,
and innovate219
| 219 ξενίζει, intrans. N.T. Polyb. Lucian. | by changing the signification of words.
He knows perfectly well that if their meaning was confined to the
customary one he would have no power to subvert the sound doctrine; but
that if such terms are perverted from their common and current
acceptation, he will be able to spoil the doctrine along with the word.
For instance (to come to the actual words which he misuses), if,
according to the common thinking of our Faith he had allowed that God
was to be called Ungenerate only because He was never generated, the
whole fabric of his heresy would have collapsed, with the withdrawal of
his quibbling about this Ungenerate. If, that is, he was to be
persuaded, by following out the analogy of almost all the names of God
in use for the Church, to think of the God over all as Ungenerate, just
as He is invisible, and passionless, and immaterial; and if he was
agreed that in every one of these terms there was signified only that
which in no way belongs to God—body, for instance, and passion
and colour, and derivation from a cause—then, if his view of the
case had been like that, his party’s tenet of the
Unlikeness would lose its meaning; for in all else (except the
Ungeneracy) that is conceived concerning the God of all even these
adversaries allow the likeness existing between the Only-begotten and
the Father. But to prevent this, he puts the term Ungenerate in front
of all these names indicating God’s transcendent nature; and he
makes this one a vantage-ground from which he may sweep down upon our
Faith; he transfers the contrariety between the actual expressions
‘Generated’ and ‘Ungenerate’ to the Persons
themselves to whom these words apply; and thereby, by this difference
between the words he argues by a quibble for a difference between the
Beings; not agreeing with us that Generated is to be used only because
the Son was generated, and Ungenerate because the Father exists without
having been generated; but affirming that he thinks the former has
acquired existence by having been generated; though what sort of
philosophy leads him to such a view I cannot understand. If one were to
attend to the mere meanings of those words by themselves, abstracting
in thought those Persons for whom the names are taken to stand, one
would discover the groundlessness of these statements of theirs.
Consider, then, not that, in consequence of the Father being a
conception prior to the Son (as the Faith truly teaches), the order of
the names themselves must be arranged so as to correspond with the
value and order of that which underlies them; but regard them alone by
themselves, to see which of them (the word, I repeat, not the Reality
which it represents) is to be placed before the other as a conception
of our mind; which of the two conveys the assertion of an idea, which
the negation of the same; for instance (to be clear, I think similar
pairs of words will give my meaning), Knowledge,
Ignorance—Passion, Passionlessness—and suchlike contrasts,
which of them possess priority of conception before the others? Those
which posit the negation, or those which posit the assertion of the
said quality? I take it the latter do so. Knowledge, anger, passion,
are conceived of first; and then comes the negation of these ideas. And
let no one, in his excess of devotion220
| 220 ἐθελοθρησκείας, “will worship.” | , blame this
argument, as if it would put the Son before the Father. We are
not making out that the Son is to be placed in conception before the
Father, seeing that the argument is discriminating only the meanings of
‘Generated,’ and ‘Ungenerate.’ So Generation
signifies the assertion of some reality or some idea; while Ungeneracy
signifies its negation; so that there is every reason that Generation
must be thought of first. Why, then, do they insist herein on fixing on
the Father the second, in order of conception, of these two names; why
do they keep on thinking that a negation can define and can embrace the
whole substance of the term in question, and are roused to exasperation
against those who point out the groundlessness of their
arguments?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
