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| He shows the falsehood of Eunomius' calumnious charge that the great Basil had said that “man was emptied to become man,” and demonstrates that the “emptying” of the Only-begotten took place with a view to the restoration to life of the Man Who had suffered.
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§4. He shows the
falsehood of Eunomius’ calumnious charge that the great Basil had
said that “man was emptied to become man,” and demonstrates
that the “emptying” of the Only-begotten took place with a
view to the restoration to life of the Man Who had suffered727
| 727 This
seems to be the sense of the Greek title. The Latin version of the
earlier editions appears to represent a different reading,
“contigisse, quando in passione homo Christus passus
est.” | .
He asserts that we say that man
has emptied Himself to become man, and that He Who by obedience humbled
Himself to the form of the servant shared the form of men even before
He took that form. No change has been made in the wording; we have
simply transferred the very words from his speech to our own. Now if
there is anything of this sort in our writings, (for I call my
master’s writings ours) let no one blame our orator for
calumny. I ask for all regard for the truth: and we ourselves will give
evidence. But if there is nothing of all this in our writings, while
his language not merely lays blame upon us, but is indignant and
wrathful as if the matter were clearly proved, calling us full of
absurdity, nonsense, confusion, inconsistency, and so on, I am at a
loss to see the right course to take. Just as men who are perplexed at
the groundless rages of madmen can decide upon no plan to follow, so I
myself can find no device to meet this perplexity. Our master says (for
I will again recite his argument verbally), “He is not setting
forth to us the mode of the Divine existence, but the terms which
belong to the Incarnation.” Our accuser starts from this point,
and says that we maintain that man emptied Himself to become man! What
community is there between one statement and the other? If we say that
the Apostle has not set forth to us the mode of the Divine existence,
but points by his phrase to the dispensation of the Passion, we are on
this ground charged with speaking of the “emptying” of man
to become man, and with saying that the “form of the
servant” had pretemporal existence, and that the Man Who was born
of Mary existed before the coming in the flesh! Well, I think it
superfluous to spend time in discussing what is admitted, seeing that
truth itself frees us from the charge. In a case, indeed, where one may
have given the calumniators some handle against oneself, it is proper
to resist accusers: but where there is no danger of being suspected of
some absurd charge, the accusation becomes a proof, not of the false
charge made against him who is calumniated, but of the madness of the
accuser. As, however, in dealing with the charge of being ashamed of
the Cross, we showed by our examination that the charge recoiled upon
the accuser, so we shall show how this charge too returns upon those
who make it, since it is they, and not we, who lay down the doctrine of
the change of the Son from like to like in the dispensation of
the Passion. We will examine briefly, bringing them side by side, the
statements of each party. We say that the Only-begotten God, having by
His own agency brought all things into being, by Himself728
| 728 This
seems to be the force of αὐτῷ; αὐτὸν might
give a simpler construction, but the sense would not be changed.
Oehler, who here restores some words which were omitted in the earlier
editions, makes no mention of any variation of reading. | has full power over all things, while the
nature of man is also one of the things that were made by Him: and that
when this had fallen away to evil, and come to be in the destruction of
death, He by His own agency drew it up once more to immortal life, by
means of the Man in whom He tabernacled, taking to Himself humanity in
completeness, and that He mingled His life-giving power with our mortal
and perishable nature, and changed, by the combination with Himself,
our deadness to living grace and power. And this we declare to be the
mystery of the Lord according to the flesh, that He Who is immutable
came to be in that which is mutable, to the end that altering it for
the better, and changing it from the worse, He might abolish the evil
which is mingled with our mutable condition, destroying the evil in
Himself. For “our God is a consuming fire729
,” by whom all the material of
wickedness is done away. This is our statement. What does our accuser
say? Not that He Who was immutable and uncreated was mingled with that
which came into being by creation, and which had therefore suffered a
change in the direction of evil; but he does say that He, being Himself
created, came to that which was kindred and homogeneous with Himself,
not coming from a transcendent nature to put on the lowlier nature by
reason of His love to man, but becoming that very thing which He
was.
For as regards the general
character of the appellation, the name of “creature” is
one, as predicated of all things that have come into being from
nothing, while the divisions into sections of the things which we
contemplate as included in the term “creature”, are
separated one from the other by the variation of their properties: so
that if He is created, and man is created, He was
“emptied,” to use Eunomius’ phrase, to become
Himself, and changed His place, not from the transcendent to the lowly,
but from what is similar in kind to what (save in regard of the special
character of body and the incorporeal) is similar in dignity. To whom
now will the just vote of those who have to try our cause be given, or
who will seem to them to be under the weight of these charges? he who
says that the created was saved by the uncreated God, or he who refers
the cause of our salvation to the creature? Surely the judgment of
pious men is not doubtful. For any one who knows clearly the difference
which there is between the created and the uncreated, (terms of which
the divergence is marked by dominion and slavery, since the uncreated
God, as the prophet says, “ruleth with His power for ever730
,” while all things in the creation are
servants to Him, according to the voice of the same prophet, which says
“all things serve Thee731
,”) he, I say,
who carefully considers these matters, surely cannot fail to recognize
the person who makes the Only-begotten change from servitude to
servitude. For if, according to Paul, the whole creation “is in
bondage732
,” and if, according to Eunomius, the
essential nature of the Only-begotten is created, our adversaries
maintain, surely, by their doctrines, not that the master was mingled
with the servant, but that a servant came to be among servants. As for
our saying that the Lord was in the form of a servant before His
presence in the flesh, that is just like charging us with saying that
the stars are black and the sun misty, and the sky low, and water dry,
and so on:—a man who does not maintain a charge on the ground of
what he has heard, but makes up what seems good to him at his own sweet
will, need not be sparing in making against us such charges as these.
It is just the same thing for us to be called to account for the one
set of charges as for the other, so far as concerns the fact that they
have no basis for them in anything that we have said. How could one who
says distinctly that the true Son was in the glory of the Father,
insult the eternal glory of the Only-begotten by conceiving it to have
been “in the form of a servant”? When our author thinks
proper to speak evil of us, and at the same time takes care to present
his case with some appearance of truth, it may perhaps not be
superfluous or useless to rebut his unfounded accusations.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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