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| He then declares that the close relation between names and things is immutable, and thereafter proceeds accordingly, in the most excellent manner, with his discourse concerning “generated” and “ungenerate.”
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§2. He then declares that the close relation between names
and things is immutable, and thereafter proceeds accordingly, in the
most excellent manner, with his discourse concerning
“generated” and “ungenerate.”
Now seeing that the
Only-begotten is in the Divine Scriptures proclaimed to be God, let
Eunomius consider his own argument, and condemn for utter folly the man
who parts the Divine into created and uncreated, as he does him who
divides “man” into “horse” and
“man.” For he himself says, a little further on, after his
intermediate nonsense, “the close relation of names to things is
immutable,” where he himself by this statement assents to the
fixed character of the true connection of appellations with their
subject. If, then, the name of Godhead is properly employed in close
connection with the Only-begotten God (and Eunomius, though he may
desire to be out of harmony with us, will surely concede that the
Scripture does not lie, and that the name of the Godhead is not
inharmoniously attributed to the Only-begotten), let him persuade
himself by his own reasoning that if “the close relation of names
to things is immutable,” and the Lord is called by the name of
“God,” he cannot apprehend any difference in respect of the
conception of Godhead between the Father and the Son, seeing that this
name is common to both,—or rather not this name only, but there
is a long list of names in which the Son shares, without divergence of
meaning, the appellations of the Father,—“good,”
“incorruptible,” “just,” “judge,”
“long-suffering,” “merciful,”
“eternal,” “everlasting,” all that indicate the
expression of majesty of nature and power,—without any
reservation being made in His case in any of the names in regard of the
exalted nature of the conception. But Eunomius passes by, as it were
with closed eye, the number, great as it is, of the Divine
appellations, and looks only to one point, his “generate and
ungenerate,”—trusting to a slight and weak cord his
doctrine, tossed and driven as it is by the blasts of error.
He asserts that “no man
who has any regard for the truth either calls any generated thing
‘ungenerate,’ or calls God Who is over all
‘Son’ or ‘generate.’” This statement
needs no further arguments on our part for its refutation. For he does
not shelter his craft with any veils, as his wont is, but treats the
inversion of his absurd statement as equivalent834
| 834 That
is, in making a rhetorical inversion of a proposition in itself
objectionable, he so re-states it as to make it really a different
proposition while treating it as equivalent. The original proposition
is objectionable as classing the Son with all generated existences: the
inversion of it, because the term “God” is substituted
illicitly for the term “ungenerate.” | ,
while he says that neither is any generated thing spoken of as
“ungenerate,” nor is God Who is over all called
“Son” or “generate,” without making any special
distinction for the Only-begotten Godhead of the Son as compared with
the rest of the “generated,” but makes his opposition of
“all things that have come into being” to “God”
without discrimination, not excepting the Son from “all
things.” And in the inversion of his absurdities he clearly
separates, forsooth, the Son from the Divine Nature, when he says that
neither is any generated thing spoken of as “ungenerate,”
nor is God called “Son” or “generate,” and
manifestly reveals by this contradistinction the horrid character of
his blasphemy. For when he has distinguished the “things that
have come into being” from the “ungenerate,” he goes
on to say, in that antistrophal induction of his, that it is impossible
to call (not the “unbegotten,” but) “God,”
“Son” or “generate,” trying by these words to
show that which is not ungenerate is not God, and that the
Only-begotten God is, by the fact of being begotten, as far removed
from being God as the ungenerate is from being generated in fact or in
name. For it is not in ignorance of the consequence of his argument
that he makes an inversion of the terms employed thus inharmonious and
incongruous: it is in his assault on the doctrine of orthodoxy that he
opposes “the Godhead” to “the
generate”—and this is the point he tries to establish by
his words, that that which is not ungenerate is not God. What was the
true sequence of his argument? that having said “no generated
thing is ungenerate,” he should proceed with the inference,
“nor, if anything is naturally ungenerate, can it be
generate.” Such a statement at once contains truth and avoids
blasphemy. But now by his premise that no generated thing is
ungenerate, and his inference that God is not generated, he clearly
shuts out the Only-begotten God from being God, laying down that
because He is not ungenerate, neither is He God. Do we then need any
further proofs to expose this monstrous blasphemy? Is not this enough
by itself to serve for a record against the adversary of Christ, who by
the arguments cited maintains that the Word, Who in the beginning was
God, is not God? What need is there to engage further with such men as
this? For we do not entangle ourselves in controversy with those who
busy themselves with idols and with the blood that is shed upon their
altars, not that we acquiesce in the destruction of those who are
besotted about idols, but because their disease is too strong for our
treatment. Thus, just as the fact itself declares idolatry, and the
evil that men do boldly and arrogantly anticipates the reproach of
those who accuse it, so here too I think that the advocates of orthodoxy
should keep silence towards one who openly proclaims his impiety to his
own discredit, just as medicine also stands powerless in the case of a
cancerous complaint, because the disease is too strong for the art to
deal with.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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