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| To the Canonicæ.
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Letter LII.2184
| 2184 Placed at the
beginning of St. Basil’s episcopate, c. 370. |
To the Canonicæ.2185
| 2185 Canonicæ,
in the early church, were women enrolled in a list in the churches,
devoted to works of charity, and living apart from men, though not
under vows, nor always in a cœnobium. In Soc.,
H.E.i. 17 they are described as the recipients of St.
Helena’s hospitality. St. Basil is supposed to refuse to
recognise marriage with them as legitimate in Ep.
cclxxxviii. The word κανονικῶν
may stand for either gender, but the marriage of Canonici was
commonly allowed. Letter clxxiii. is addressed to the
canonica Theodora. |
1. I have been very
much distressed by a painful report which reached my ears; but I have
been equally delighted by my brother, beloved of God, bishop
Bosporius,2186
who has brought a
more satisfactory account of you. He avers by God’s grace
that all those stories spread abroad about you are inventions of men
who are not exactly informed as to the truth about you. He added,
moreover, that he found among you impious calumnies about me, of a kind
likely to be uttered by those who do not expect to have to give the
Judge in the day of His righteous retribution an account of even an
idle word. I thank God, then, both because I am cured of my
damaging opinion of you, an opinion which I have derived from the
calumnies of men, and because I have heard of your abandonment of those
baseless notions about me, on hearing the assurances of my
brother. He, in all that he has said as coming from himself, has
also completely expressed my own feeling. For in us both there is
one mind about the faith, as being heirs of the same Fathers who once
at Nicæa promulgated their great decree2187
| 2187 κήρυγμα. On
Basil’s use of this word and of dogma, vide note on p.
41. |
concerning the faith. Of this, some portions are universally
accepted without cavil, but the homoousion, ill received in certain
quarters, is still rejected by some. These objectors we may very
properly blame, and yet on the contrary deem them deserving of
pardon. To refuse to follow the Fathers, not holding their
declaration of more authority than one’s own opinion, is conduct
worthy of blame, as being brimful of self-sufficiency. On the
other hand the fact that they view with suspicion a phrase which is
misrepresented by an opposite party does seem to a small extent to
relieve them from blame. Moreover, as a matter of fact, the
members of the synods which met to discuss the case of Paul of
Samosata2188
| 2188
i.e.the two remarkable Antiochene synods of 264 and
269, to enforce the ultimate decisions of which against Paul of
Samosata appeal was made to the pagan Aurelian. On the
explanation of how the Homoousion came to be condemned in one sense
by the Origenist bishops at Antioch in 269, and asserted in another
by the 318 at Nicæa in 325, see prolegomena to
Athanasius in Schaff and Wace’s ed. p. xxxi.
cf. Ath.,De Syn. § 45, Hil., De
Trin. iv. 4, and Basil, Cont. Eunom. i. 19.
“Wurde seiner Lehre: ‘Gott sey
mit dem Logos zugleich Eine Person, ἓν
πρόσωπον
wie der Mensch mit seiner Vernunft Eines
sey,’ entgegengehalteh, die Kirchenlehre verlange Einen
Gott, aber mehrere πρόσωπα
desselben, so sagte er, da auch ihm
Christus eine Person (nämlich als Mensch) sey, so habe auch
sein Glaube mehrere πρόσωπα,
Gott und Christus stehen sich als
ὁμοούσιοι,
d. h. wahrscheinlich gleich persönliche
gegenüber, Diese veratorische Dialektik konnte zwar nicht
täuschen; wohl aber wurde das Wort ὁμοούσιος,
so gebraucht und auf die Person überhaupt
bezogen, dadurcheine Weile verdächtig (man fürchtete
nach Athan. De Syn. Ar. et Sel. c. 45,
eine menschliche Person nach Paul in die Trinität
einlassen zu müssen), bis das vierte Jahrhundert jenem Wort
bestimmten kirchlichen Stempel gab.”
Dorner, Christologie. B. i. 513.
Vide also Thomasius,
Christliche Dogmengeschichte, B. 1,
p. 188. | did find fault with
the term as an unfortunate one.
For they maintained that the homoousion set forth the
idea both of essence and of what is derived from it, so that the
essence, when divided, confers the title of co-essential on the parts
into which it is divided. This explanation has some reason in the
case of bronze and coins made therefrom, but in the case of God the
Father and God the Son there is no question of substance anterior or
even underlying both; the mere thought and utterance of such a thing is
the last extravagance of impiety. What can be conceived of as
anterior to the Unbegotten? By this blasphemy faith in the Father
and the Son is destroyed, for things, constituted out of one, have to
one another the relation of brothers.
2. Because even at that time there were men who
asserted the Son to have been brought into being out of the
non-existent, the term homoousion was adopted, to extirpate this
impiety. For the conjunction of the Son with the Father is
without time and without interval. The preceding words shew this
to have been the intended meaning. For after saying that the Son
was light of light, and begotten of the substance of the Father, but
was not made, they went on to add the homoousion, thereby showing that
whatever proportion of light any one would attribute in the case of the
Father will obtain also in that of the Son. For very light in
relation to very light, according to the actual sense of light, will
have no variation. Since then the Father is light without
beginning, and the Son begotten
light, but each of Them light and light; they rightly said “of
one substance,” in order to set forth the equal dignity of the
nature. Things, that have a relation of brotherhood, are not, as
some persons have supposed, of one substance; but when both the cause
and that which derives its natural existence from the cause are of the
same nature, then they are called “of one substance.”
3. This term also corrects the error of
Sabellius, for it removes the idea of the identity of the hypostases,
and introduces in perfection the idea of the Persons. For nothing
can be of one substance with itself, but one thing is of one substance
with another. The word has therefore an excellent and orthodox
use, defining as it does both the proper character of the hypostases,
and setting forth the invariability of the nature. And when we
are taught that the Son is of the substance of the Father, begotten and
not made, let us not fall into the material sense of the
relations. For the substance was not separated from the Father
and bestowed on the Son; neither did the substance engender by fluxion,
nor yet by shooting forth2189
as plants their
fruits. The mode of the divine begetting is ineffable and
inconceivable by human thought. It is indeed characteristic of
poor and carnal intelligence to compare the things that are eternal
with the perishing things of time, and to imagine, that as corporeal
things beget, so does God in like manner; it is rather our duty to rise
to the truth by arguments of the contrary, and to say, that since thus
is the mortal, not thus is He who is immortal. We must neither
then deny the divine generation, nor contaminate our intelligence with
corporeal senses.
4. The Holy Spirit, too, is numbered with
the Father and the Son, because He is above creation, and is ranked as
we are taught by the words of the Lord in the Gospel, “Go and
baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Ghost.”2190
He who, on
the contrary, places the Spirit before the Son, or alleges Him to be
older than the Father, resists the ordinance of God, and is a stranger
to the sound faith, since he fails to preserve the form of doxology
which he has received, but adopts some new fangled device in order to
be pleasing to men. It is written “The Spirit is of
God,”2191
and if He is of
God, how can He be older than that of which He is? And what folly
is it not, when there is one Unbegotten, to speak of something else as
superior to the Unbegotten? He is not even anterior, for nothing
intervenes between Son and Father. If, however, He is not of God
but is through Christ, He does not even exist at all. It follows,
that this new invention about the order really involves the destruction
of the actual existence, and is a denial of the whole faith. It
is equally impious to reduce Him to the level of a creature, and to
subordinate Him either to Son or to Father, either in time or in
rank. These are the points on which I have heard that you are
making enquiry. If the Lord grant that we meet I may possibly
have more to say on these subjects, and may myself, concerning points
which I am investigating, receive satisfactory information from
you.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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