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| Issue joined with those who assert that the Son is not with the Father, but after the Father. Also concerning the equal glory.
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Chapter VI.
Issue joined with those who assert that the Son is not
with the Father, but after the Father. Also concerning the equal
glory.
13. Our opponents,
while they thus artfully and perversely encounter our argument, cannot
even have recourse to the plea of ignorance. It is obvious that
they are annoyed with us for completing the doxology to the Only
Begotten together with the Father, and for not separating the Holy
Spirit from the Son. On this account they style us innovators,
revolutionizers, phrase-coiners, and every other possible name of
insult. But so far am I from being irritated at their abuse,
that, were it not for the fact that their loss causes me
“heaviness and continual sorrow,”786
I could almost have said that I was
grateful to them for the blasphemy, as though they were agents for
providing me with blessing. For “blessed are ye,”
it is said, “when men shall revile you for my
sake.”787
The grounds
of their indignation are these: The Son, according to them, is
not together with the Father, but after the Father. Hence it
follows that glory should be ascribed to the Father
“through him,” but not “with
him;” inasmuch as “with him” expresses
equality of dignity, while “through him” denotes
subordination. They further assert that the Spirit is not to
be ranked along with the Father and the Son, but under the Son and
the Father; not coordinated, but subordinated; not connumerated, but
subnumerated.788
| 788 ὑποτάσσω.
cf. 1 Cor.
xv. 27, and
inf. cf. chapter xvii. ὑποτεταγμένος
is applied to the Son in the Macrostich or Lengthy Creed,
brought by Eudoxius of Germanicia to Milan in 344. Vide
Soc. ii. 19. |
With technical terminology of this kind they pervert the
simplicity and artlessness of the faith, and thus by their ingenuity,
suffering no one else to remain in ignorance, they cut off from
themselves the plea that ignorance might demand.
14. Let us first ask them this
question: In what sense do they say that the Son is “after
the Father;” later in time, or in order, or in dignity? But
in time no one is so devoid of sense as to assert that the Maker of the
ages789
| 789 ποιητὴς
τῶν αἰ&
240·νων. | holds a second
place, when no interval intervenes in the natural conjunction of
the Father with the Son.790
| 790 Yet the great
watchword of the Arians was ἦν
ποτε ὅτε οὐκ
ἦν. | And indeed
so far as our conception of human relations goes,791
| 791 τῆ ἐννοί&
139· τῶν
ἀνθρωπίνων
is here the reading of five MSS. The Benedictines prefer
τῶν
ἀνθρώπων, with
the sense of “in human thought.” | it is impossible to think of the Son as
being later than the Father, not only from the fact that Father
and Son are mutually conceived of in accordance with the
relationship subsisting between them, but because posteriority in
time is predicated of subjects separated by a less interval from
the present, and priority of subjects farther off. For
instance, what happened in Noah’s time is prior to what
happened to the men of Sodom, inasmuch as Noah is more remote from
our own day; and, again, the events of the history of the men of
Sodom are posterior, because they seem in a sense to approach
nearer to our own day. But, in addition to its being a
breach of true religion, is it not really the extremest folly to
measure the existence of the life which transcends all time and
all the ages by its distance from the present? Is it not as
though God the Father could be compared with, and be made superior
to, God the Son, who exists before the ages, precisely in the same
way in which things liable to beginning and corruption are
described as prior to one another?
The superior remoteness of the Father is really
inconceivable, in that thought and intelligence are wholly impotent to
go beyond the generation of the Lord; and St. John has admirably
confined the conception within circumscribed boundaries by two words,
“In the beginning was the Word.” For thought
cannot travel outside “was,” nor imagination792
| 792 Φαντασία
is the philosophic term for imagination or presentation, the mental
faculty by which the object made apparent, φάντασμα,
becomes apparent, φαίνεται.
Aristotle, de An. III. iii. 20 defines it as “a movement of
the mind generated by sensation.” Fancy, which is
derived from φαντασία
(φαίνω, ÖBHA=shine) has acquired a slightly different
meaning in some usages of modern speech. | beyond “beginning.”
Let your thought
travel ever so far backward you cannot get beyond the
“was,” and however you may strain and strive to see
what is beyond the Son, you will find it impossible to get further than
the “beginning.” True religion, therefore,
thus teaches us to think of the Son together with the
Father.
15. If they really conceive of a kind of
degradation of the Son in relation to the Father, as though He were in
a lower place, so that the Father sits above, and the Son is thrust off
to the next seat below, let them confess what they mean. We shall
have no more to say. A plain statement of the view will at once
expose its absurdity. They who refuse to allow that the Father
pervades all things do not so much as maintain the logical sequence of
thought in their argument. The faith of the sound is that God
fills all things;793
but they who divide
their up and down between the Father and the Son do not remember even
the word of the Prophet: “If I climb up into heaven thou
art there; if I go down to hell thou art there also.”794
Now, to omit all proof of the ignorance
of those who predicate place of incorporeal things, what excuse can be
found for their attack upon Scripture, shameless as their antagonism
is, in the passages “Sit thou on my right hand”795
and “Sat down on the right hand of the
majesty of God”?796
| 796 Heb. i. 3, with the variation of “of
God” for “on high.” | The expression
“right hand” does not, as they contend, indicate the lower
place, but equality of relation; it is not understood physically, in
which case there might be something sinister about God,797
| 797 I know of no
better way of conveying the sense of the original σκαῖος than by
thus introducing the Latin sinister, which has the double
meaning of left and ill-omened. It is to the credit of the
unsuperstitious character of English speaking people that while the
Greek σκαῖος and
ἀριστερός,
the Latin sinister and lævus, the French
gauche, and the German link, all have the meaning of awkward and
unlucky as well as simply on the left hand, the English
left (though probably derived from lift=weak) has lost all
connotation but the local one. | but Scripture puts before us the magnificence
of the dignity of the Son by the use of dignified language indicating
the seat of honour. It is left then for our opponents to allege
that this expression signifies inferiority of rank. Let them
learn that “Christ is the power of God and wisdom of
God,”798
and that “He is
the image of the invisible God”799
and
“brightness of his glory,”800
and
that “Him hath God the Father sealed,”801
by engraving Himself on Him.802
| 802 The more obvious
interpretation of ἐσφράγισεν
in John vi.
27, would be
sealed with a mark of approval, as in the miracle just
performed. cf. Bengel, “sigillo id
quod genuinum est commendatur, et omne quod non genuinum est
excluditur.” But St. Basil explains
“sealed” by “stamped with the image of His
Person,” an interpretation which Alfred rejects. St.
Basil at the end of Chapter xxvi. of this work, calls our Lord
the χαρακτὴρ
καὶ
ἰσότυπος
σφραγίς,
i.e., “express image and seal graven to the
like” of the Father. St. Athanasius (Ep. i. ad Serap.
xxiii.) writes, “The seal has the form of Christ the
sealer, and in this the sealed participate, being formed
according to it.” cf. Gal.
iv. 19; and 2 Pet. i. 4. |
Now are we to call these passages, and others like
them, throughout the whole of Holy Scripture, proofs of humiliation, or
rather public proclamations of the majesty of the Only Begotten, and of
the equality of His glory with the Father? We ask them to listen
to the Lord Himself, distinctly setting forth the equal dignity of His
glory with the Father, in His words, “He that hath seen me hath
seen the Father;”803
and again,
“When the Son cometh in the glory of his
Father;”804
that they
“should honour the Son even as they honour the
Father;”805
and, “We
beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the
Father;”806
and “the
only begotten God which is in the bosom of the
Father.”807
| 807 John i. 18. “Only begotten
God” is here the reading of five mss.
of Basil. The words are wanting in one codex. In Chapter
viii. of this work St. Basil distinctly quotes Scripture as calling
the Son “only begotten God.” (Chapter viii.
Section 17.) But in Chapter xi. Section 27, where he has been
alleged to quote John i. 18, with the reading “Only
begotten Son” (e.g., Alford),
the ms. authority for his text is in favour
of “Only begotten God.” OC is the reading of א.B.C. TC of A. On the comparative
weight of the textual and patristic evidence vide Bp.
Westcott in loc. | Of all these
passages they take no account, and then assign to the Son the place
set apart for His foes. A father’s bosom is a fit and
becoming seat for a son, but the place of the footstool is for them
that have to be forced to fall.808
We have only touched cursorily on these proofs, because
our object is to pass on to other points. You at your leisure can
put together the items of the evidence, and then contemplate the height
of the glory and the preeminence of the power of the Only
Begotten. However, to the well-disposed hearer, even these are
not insignificant, unless the terms “right hand” and
“bosom” be accepted in a physical and derogatory sense, so
as at once to circumscribe God in local limits, and invent form, mould,
and bodily position, all of which are totally distinct from the idea of
the absolute, the infinite, and the incorporeal. There is
moreover the fact that what is derogatory in the idea of it is the same
in the case both of the Father and the Son; so that whoever repeats
these arguments does not take away the dignity of the Son, but does
incur the charge of blaspheming the Father; for whatever audacity a man
be guilty of against the Son he cannot but transfer to the
Father. If he assigns to the Father the upper place
by way of precedence,
and asserts that the only begotten Son sits below, he will find
that to the creature of his imagination attach all the consequent
conditions of body. And if these are the imaginations of
drunken delusion and phrensied insanity, can it be consistent
with true religion for men taught by the Lord himself that
“He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the
Father”809
to refuse to
worship and glorify with the Father him who in nature, in glory,
and in dignity is conjoined with him? What shall we
say? What just defence shall we have in the day of the
awful universal judgment of all-creation, if, when the Lord
clearly announces that He will come “in the glory of his
Father;”810
when Stephen
beheld Jesus standing at the right hand of God;811
when Paul testified in the spirit
concerning Christ “that he is at the right hand of
God;”812
when the Father
says, “Sit thou on my right hand;”813
when the Holy Spirit bears witness that
he has sat down on “the right hand of the
majesty”814
of God; we
attempt to degrade him who shares the honour and the throne, from
his condition of equality, to a lower state?815
| 815 Mr. Johnston
well points out that these five testimonies are not cited
fortuitously, but “in an order which carries the reader from
the future second coming, through the present session at the right
hand, back to the ascension in the past.” | Standing and sitting, I
apprehend, indicate the fixity and entire stability of the
nature, as Baruch, when he wishes to exhibit the immutability and
immobility of the Divine mode of existence, says, “For thou
sittest for ever and we perish utterly.”816
Moreover, the place on the right
hand indicates in my judgment equality of honour. Rash,
then, is the attempt to deprive the Son of participation in the
doxology, as though worthy only to be ranked in a lower place of
honour.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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