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| Then he again mentions S. Peter's word, “made,” and the passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which says that Jesus was made by God “an Apostle and High Priest”: and, after giving a sufficient answer to the charges brought against him by Eunomius, shows that Eunomius himself supports Basil's arguments, and says that the Only-begotten Son, when He had put on the flesh, became Lord.
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§2. Then he again mentions S. Peter’s word,
“made,” and the passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
which says that Jesus was made by God “an Apostle and High
Priest”: and, after giving a sufficient answer to the charges
brought against him by Eunomius, shows that Eunomius himself supports
Basil’s arguments, and says that the Only-begotten Son, when He
had put on the flesh, became Lord.
And although we make these
remarks in passing, the parenthetic addition seems, perhaps, not less
important than the main question before us. For since, when St. Peter
says, “He made Him Lord and Christ761
,” and again, when the Apostle Paul says
to the Hebrews that He made Him a priest762
,
Eunomius catches at the word “made” as being applicable to
His pre-temporal existence, and thinks thereby to establish his
doctrine that the Lord is a thing made763
| 763 Altering Oehler’s punctuation. | , let
him now listen to Paul when he says, “He made Him to be sin for
us, Who knew not sin764
.” If he refers
the word “made,” which is used of the Lord in the passages
from the Epistle to the Hebrews, and from the words of Peter, to the
pretemporal idea, he might fairly refer the word in that passage which
says that God made Him to be sin, to the first existence of His
essence, and try to show by this, as in the case of his other
testimonies, that he was “made”, so as to refer the word
“made” to the essence, acting consistently with himself,
and to discern sin in that essence. But if he shrinks from this by
reason of its manifest absurdity, and argues that, by saying, “He
made Him to be sin,” the Apostle indicates the dispensation of
the last times, let him persuade himself by the same train of reasoning
that the word “made” refers to that dispensation in the
other passages also.
Let us, however, return to the
point from which we digressed; for we might gather together from the
same Scripture countless other passages, besides those quoted, which
bear upon the matter. And let no one think that the divine Apostle is
divided against himself in contradiction, and affords by his own
utterances matter for their contentions on either side to those who
dispute upon the doctrines. For careful examination would find that his
argument is accurately directed to one aim; and he is not halting in
his opinions: for while he everywhere proclaims the combination of the
Human with the Divine, he none the less discerns in each its proper
nature, in the sense that while the human weakness is changed for the
better by its communion with the imperishable, the Divine power, on the
other hand, is not abased by its contact with the lowly form of nature.
When therefore he says, “He spared not His own Son,” he
contrasts the true Son with the other sons, begotten, or exalted,
or adopted765
| 765 Reading, as Gulonius seems to have done, and according to
Oehler’s suggestion (which he does not himself follow),
υἱοθετηθεῖσι
for ἀθετήσασι. In the latter reading the mss.
seem to agree, but the sense is doubtful. It may be rendered, perhaps,
“Who were begotten and exalted, and who rejected Him.” The
quotation from S. Paul is from Rom. viii. 32. | (those, I mean, who were brought into
being at His command), marking the specialty of nature by the addition
of “own.” And, to the end that no one should connect the
suffering of the Cross with the imperishable nature, he gives in other
words a fairly distinct correction of such an error, when he calls Him
“mediator between God and men766
” and
“man767
,” and “God768
,” that, from the fact that both are
predicated of the one Being, the fit conception might be entertained
concerning each Nature—concerning the Divine Nature,
impassibility, concerning the Human Nature, the dispensation of the
Passion. As his thought, then, divides that which in love to man was
made one, but is distinguished in idea, he uses, when he is proclaiming
that nature which transcends and surpasses all intelligence, the more
exalted order of names, calling Him “God over all769
,” “the great God770
,” “the power” of God, and
“the wisdom” of God771
, and the like; but
when he is alluding to all that experience of suffering which, by
reason of our weakness, was necessarily assumed with our nature, he
gives to the union of the Natures772
that name which
is derived from ours, and calls Him Man, not by this word placing Him
Whom he is setting forth to us on a common level with the rest of
nature, but so that orthodoxy is protected as regards each Nature, in
the sense that the Human Nature is glorified by His assumption of it,
and the Divine is not polluted by Its condescension, but makes the
Human element subject to sufferings, while working, through Its Divine
power, the resurrection of that which suffered. And thus the experience
of death is not773
| 773 Reading οὔτε, in favour of
which apparently lies the weight of mss. The
reading of the Paris edition gives an easier connection, but has
apparently no ms. authority. The distinction
S. Gregory draws is this:—“You may not say ‘God
died,’ for human weakness does not attach to the Divine
Nature; you may say ‘He who died is the Lord of glory,’ for
the Human Nature is actually made partaker of the power and majesty of
the Divine.” | referred to Him Who
had communion in our passible nature by reason of the union with Him of
the Man, while at the same time the exalted and Divine names descend to
the Man, so that He Who was manifested upon the Cross is called even
“the Lord of glory774
,” since the
majesty implied in these names is transmitted from the Divine to the
Human by the commixture of Its Nature with that Nature which is lowly.
For this cause he describes Him in varied and different language, at
one time as Him Who came down from heaven, at another time as Him Who
was born of woman, as God from eternity, and Man in the last days; thus
too the Only-begotten God is held to be impassible, and Christ to be
capable of suffering; nor does his discourse speak falsely in these
opposing statements, as it adapts in its conceptions to each Nature the
terms that belong to it. If then these are the doctrines which we have
learnt from inspired teaching, how do we refer the cause of our
salvation to an ordinary man? and if we declare the word
“made” employed by the blessed Peter to have regard not to
the pre-temporal existence, but to the new dispensation of the
Incarnation, what has this to do with the charge against us? For this
great Apostle says that that which was seen in the form of the servant
has been made, by being assumed, to be that which He Who assumed it was
in His own Nature. Moreover, in the Epistle to the Hebrews we may learn
the same truth from Paul, when he says that Jesus was made an Apostle
and High Priest by God, “being faithful to him that made Him so775
.” For in that passage too, in giving
the name of High Priest to Him Who made with His own Blood the priestly
propitiation for our sins, he does not by the word “made”
declare the first existence of the Only-begotten, but says
“made” with the intention of representing that grace which
is commonly spoken of in connection with the appointment of priests.
For Jesus, the great High Priest (as Zechariah says776
), Who offered up his own lamb, that is, His
own Body, for the sin of the world; Who, by reason of the children that
are partakers of flesh and blood, Himself also in like manner took part
with them in blood777
(not in that He was
in the beginning, being the Word and God, and being in the form of God,
and equal with God, but in that He emptied Himself in the form of the
servant, and offered an oblation and sacrifice for us), He, I say,
became a High Priest many generations later, after the order of
Melchisedech778
. Surely a reader who has more than a
casual acquaintance with the discourse to the Hebrews knows the mystery
of this matter. As, then, in that passage He is said to have been made
Priest and Apostle, so here He is said to have been made Lord and
Christ,—the latter for the dispensation on our behalf, the former
by the change and transformation of the Human to the Divine (for by
“making” the Apostle means “making anew”). Thus
is manifest the knavery of our adversaries, who insolently wrest the
words referring to the dispensation to apply them to the pretemporal
existence. For we learn from the Apostle not to know Christ in the same
manner now as before, as Paul thus speaks, “Yea, though we have
known Christ after the flesh, yet now know we Him no more779
,” in the sense that the one knowledge
manifests to us His temporary dispensation, the other His eternal existence.
Thus our discourse has made no inconsiderable answer to his
charges:—that we neither hold two Christs nor two Lords, that we
are not ashamed of the Cross, that we do not glorify a mere man as
having suffered for the world, that we assuredly do not think that the
word “made” refers to the formation of the essence. But,
such being our view, our argument has no small support from our accuser
himself, where in the midst of his discourse he employs his tongue in a
flourishing onslaught upon us, and produces this sentence among others:
“This, then, is the conflict that Basil wages against himself,
and he clearly appears neither to have ‘applied his own mind to
the intention of the Apostles,’ nor to be able to preserve the
sequence of his own arguments; for according to them he must, if he is
conscious of their irreconcilable character, admit that the Word Who
was in the beginning and was God became Lord,” or he fits
together “statements that are mutually conflicting.” Why,
this is actually our statement which Eunomius repeats, who says that
“the Word that was in the beginning and was God became
Lord.” For, being what He was, God, and Word, and Life, and
Light, and Grace, and Truth, and Lord, and Christ, and every name
exalted and Divine, He did become, in the Man assumed by Him, Who was
none of these, all else which the Word was and among the rest did
become Lord and Christ, according to the teaching of Peter, and
according to the confession of Eunomius;—not in the sense that
the Godhead acquired anything by way of advancement, but (all exalted
majesty being contemplated in the Divine Nature) He thus becomes Lord
and Christ, not by arriving at any addition of grace in respect of His
Godhead (for the Nature of the Godhead is acknowledged to be lacking in
no good), but by bringing the Human Nature to that participation in the
Godhead which is signified by the terms “Christ” and
“Lord.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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