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| Chapter VI. By way of leading up to his proof that Christ is not different from the Father, St. Ambrose cites the more famous leaders of the Arian party, and explains how little their witness agrees, and shows what defence the Scriptures provide against them.
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Chapter VI.
By way of leading up to his proof that Christ is not
different from the Father, St. Ambrose cites the more famous leaders of
the Arian party, and explains how little their witness agrees, and
shows what defence the Scriptures provide against them.
43. The Arians,
then, say that Christ is unlike the Father; we deny it. Nay,
indeed, we shrink in dread from the word. Nevertheless I would
not that your sacred Majesty should trust to argument and our
disputation. Let us enquire of the Scriptures, of apostles, of
prophets, of Christ. In a word, let us enquire of the Father,
Whose honour these men say they uphold, if the Son be judged inferior
to Him. But insult to the Son brings no honour to the good
Father. It cannot please the good Father, if the Son be judged
inferior, rather than equal, to His Father.
44. I pray your sacred Majesty to suffer me,
if for a little while I address myself particularly to these men.
But whom shall I choose out to cite? Eunomius?1751
| 1751 Eunomius, at
one time Bishop of Cyzicus, came into prominence about 355 a.d. Like Arius, he taught that the Son was a
creature, though the first and most perfect of God’s creatures;
His office being to guide other creatures to knowledge of the source of
their existence. Religion then in his view consisted in a right
and complete intellectual apprehension of a metaphysical principle, and
no more. The generation of the Son he regarded as an event in
time, not supra-temporal. The point where Eunomius went beyond
Arius was the assertion of the comprehensibility for the human mind of
the Divine Essence. Those, he said, who declared God to be in His
Essence incomprehensible, who taught that He could only know in part
and by token, preached an unknown God, and denied all possible
knowledge of God, and therefore, since without knowledge of God there
could be no Christianity, did not even deserve the name of
Christians. | or Arius and Aëtius,1752
| 1752 Aëtius
was Eunomius’ teacher. He became Bishop of Antioch, the see
of which was secured for him by the Arian Eudoxius, who obtained
Cyzicus for Eunomius. Aëtius and Eunomius were, however,
deposed about a.d. 360. | his instructors? For there are many
names, but one unbelief, constant in wickedness, but in conversation
divided against itself; without difference in respect of deceit, but in
common enterprise breeding dissent. But wherefore they will not
agree together I understand not.
45. The Arians reject the person of
Eunomius, but they maintain his unbelief and walk in the ways of his
iniquity. They say that he has too generously published the
writings of Arius. Truly, a plentiful lavishing of error!
They praise him who gave the command, and deny him who executed
it! Wherefore they have now fallen apart into several
sects. Some follow after Eunomius or Aëtius, others after
Palladius or Demophilus and Auxentius, or the inheritors of this form
of unbelief.1753
| 1753 Demophilus
was Bishop of Constantinople under Valens (d. 378 a.d.), but on the accession of Theodosius the Great he was
compelled to resign the see, which was given to Gregory of
Nazianzus. | Others,
again, follow different teachers. Is Christ, then,
divided?1754
Nay; but
those who divide Him from the Father do with their own hands cut
themselves asunder.
46.
Seeing, therefore, that men who agree not amongst themselves have all
alike conspired against the Church of God, I shall call those whom I
have to answer by the common name of heretics. For heresy, like
some hydra of fable, hath waxed great from its wounds, and, being
ofttimes lopped short, hath grown afresh, being appointed to find meet
destruction in flames of fire.1755
| 1755 Hercules found it
impossible to slay the Hydra (a monster water snake) of the Lernean
marshes by merely striking off its head, inasmuch as whenever one was
cut off, two immediately grew in its place. He was compelled to
sear the wound with fire. One of the heads was immortal, and
Hercules could only dispose of it by crushing it under a huge rock. | Or, like
some dread and monstrous Scylla, divided into many shapes of unbelief,
she displays, as a mask to her guile, the pretence of being a Christian
sect, but those wretched men whom she finds tossed to and fro in the
waves of her unhallowed strait, amid the wreckage of their faith, she,
girt with beastly monsters, rends with the cruel fang of her
blasphemous doctrine.1756
| 1756 For Scylla
and Charybdis, see Homer, Odyss. XI.; Virgil, Æn.
III. 424 f. The strait, bestrewed with wreckage of the faith
(1 Tim. i.
19) corresponds to the
strait between the rock of Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. In
order to avoid the latter, mariners were compelled to pass close under
the former, whereupon the monster darted out and seized them, dragging
them out of a ship as an angler whips a fish out of water
(Odyss. XI. 251–255). The language of this passage
shows plainly that St. Ambrose, in writing it, drew freely upon
Virgil. |
47. This monster’s cavern, your sacred
Majesty, thick laid, as seafaring men do say it is, with hidden lairs,
and all the neighbourhood thereof, where the rocks of unbelief echo to
the howling of her black dogs, we must pass by with ears in a manner
stopped. For it is written: “Hedge thine ears about
with thorns;”1757
and
again: “Beware of dogs, beware of evil
workers;”1758
and yet
again: “A man that is an heretic, avoid after the first
reproof, knowing that such an one is fallen, and is in sin, being
condemned of his own judgment.”1759
So then, like prudent pilots, let
us set the sails of our faith for the course wherein we may pass by
most safely, and again follow the coasts of the Scriptures.1760
| 1760 Virgil,
Æn. III. 692 f. (Æneas’ coast-voyage round
Sicily). | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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