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| Chapter III
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Chapter
III.
And so
one who severely studies the depths of the mystery, receives secretly
in his spirit, indeed, a moderate amount of apprehension of the
doctrine of God’s nature, yet he is unable to explain clearly in
words the ineffable depth of this mystery. As, for instance, how the
same thing is capable of being numbered and yet rejects numeration, how
it is observed with distinctions yet is apprehended as a monad, how it
is separate as to personality yet is not divided as to subject matter1950
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is separate as to personality yet is not divided as to subject
matter. The words are respectively
ὑπόστασις and ὑποκείμενον. The last word is with Gregory, whose clearness in
philosophical distinctions makes his use of words very observable,
always equivalent to οὐσία,
and οὐσία generally
to φύσις. The
following note of Casaubon (Epist. ad Eustath.) is valuable: In
the Holy. Trinity there is neither “confusion,” nor
“composition,” nor “coalescing”; neither the
Sabellian “contraction,” any more than the Arian
“division,” neither on the other hand
“estrangement,” or “difference.” There is
“distinction” or “distribution” without
division. This word “distribution” is used by Tertullian
and others to express the effect of the “persons”
(ἰδιότητες,
ὑποστάσεις,
πρόσωπα)
upon the Godhead which forms the definition of the substance
(ὁ τῆς οὐσίας
λόγος). | . For, in personality, the Spirit is one
thing and the Word another, and yet again that from which the Word and
Spirit is, another. But when you have gained the conception of what the
distinction is in these, the oneness, again, of the nature admits not
division, so that the supremacy of the one First Cause is not split and
cut up into differing Godships, neither does the statement harmonize
with the Jewish dogma, but the truth passes in the mean between these
two conceptions, destroying each heresy, and yet accepting what is
useful to it from each. The Jewish dogma is destroyed by the acceptance
of the Word, and by the belief in the Spirit; while the polytheistic
error of the Greek school is made to vanish by the unity of the Nature
abrogating this imagination of plurality. While yet again, of the
Jewish conception, let the unity of the Nature stand; and of the
Hellenistic, only the distinction as to persons; the remedy against a
profane view being thus applied, as required, on either side. For it is
as if the number of the triad were a remedy in the case of those who
are in error as to the One, and the assertion of the unity for those
whose beliefs are dispersed among a number of divinities.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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