Against Eunomius 1 part 52/56

For just as death does not cut short the unending life of the Only-begotten, so neither will non-existence on the upward side arrest His life as it proceeds toward eternity, that so that which truly is may be pure on every side from all communion with non-being.

For this reason the Lord, wishing His disciples to be far removed from such an error, lest they too, in searching out something prior to the subsistence of the Only-begotten, should be carried away in their reasonings toward the non-existent,

'I,' He says, 'am in the Father, and the Father in Me,' so that neither is the non-existent conceived as being in that which is, nor that which is conceived as being in the non-existent.

And the very order of the utterance interprets the piety of the doctrine.

For since the Father is not from the Son, but the Son from the Father, He therefore says first, 'I am in the Father,' showing that He is not otherwise, but from Him; then He reverses the statement, 'And the Father in Me,' signifying that whoever, by his officious curiosity, passes beyond the Son, at the same time also passes beyond the conception concerning the Father.

For he who is in something cannot be found outside that in which he is.

So that he is vain who, while not denying that the Father is in the Son, yet imagines that he has apprehended something of the Father outside the Son; and the shadow-boxing about the term 'ingenerateness' waged by those who war against us treads on empty air through non-existent things, and leads men astray to no purpose.

Rather, if it is necessary to bring the whole absurdity of the argument into plain view, let us be permitted to dwell yet a little longer upon the consideration.

For since it is asserted by them that the Only-begotten God was begotten later, after the Father, it follows of necessity that their 'ingenerate'—whatever they imagine it also to be—is found to co-indicate the notion of evils.

For who does not know that, just as non-being is set in contradistinction to being, so too there is set over against every good thing and name that which is conceived as its opposite—as evil against good, falsehood against truth, darkness against light—and all things which in like manner are ranged against one another in mutual opposition, in whose case the opposition is immediate and it is not possible for the two to coexist together in the same respect, but rather the presence of the one excludes its antithesis, and in the withdrawal of the one there comes about the generation of its contrary?

Now these things having been thus agreed upon by us, that too is plain to everyone: that just as Moses says there was darkness before the creation of light, so also in the case of the Son—if, according to the reasoning of the heresy, the Father made Him then, when He willed, then before He made Him that Light which the Son is did not exist.

But light not yet existing, it is impossible that its opposite should not exist.

For indeed from other instances we have learned that none of the things which have come into being from the Creator is in vain, but that what is lacking is introduced to things that are, by means of creation.

It is therefore altogether plain that, if God made the Son, He made Him on account of something lacking in the nature of things that are.

All that the Son is, was not yet.

For that which is, even according to the testimony of the heresy, has no need of coming-to-be.

Therefore, if He made Him, it was assuredly the non-existent that He made.

Before the Son came to be, therefore, according to them, evidently neither had the Truth come to be, nor the intelligible Light, nor the fountain of life, nor the nature of any good and noble thing whatsoever.

But assuredly, upon the removal of each of these, that which is conceived as its opposite subsists alongside; and light not existing, it cannot be but that darkness exists; and in the case of the rest likewise, in place of each of the things conceived as better, whenever any of these is not present, it is not possible but that its contrary should altogether exist in place of that which is lacking.

It is therefore altogether necessary, as the Father was about to will to make the Son according to the reasoning of the heresy, that—there being none of all the things which the Son is—one must say that all the contraries were present about Him: in place of light, darkness; in place of truth, falsehood; in place of life, death; in place of good, evil.

For he who creates, creates the things that are not.

For that which is, as Eunomius says, does not require generation.

But of things contemplated by way of opposition, the better ones cannot be non-existent except through the existence of the worse.

These things, then, the wisdom of the heresy offers as gifts to the Father, by the very means through which it dishonors the eternity of the Son, bringing to God and Father the catalogue of evils before the manifestation of the Son.

And let no one suppose that he can overturn, by appeal to the rest of creation, the absurdity of the doctrine which has been demonstrated from this train of reasoning.

For someone will perhaps say that, just as when heaven does not exist there is nothing contrary to it, so also when the Son—who is Truth—has not yet come to be, we are not altogether compelled to admit that His contrary exists.

To whom it is possible to reply that to heaven there is indeed nothing opposed—unless indeed one should call 'not-being' the antithesis to its being.

But to virtue that which is according to vice is altogether opposed; and the Lord is virtue; so that when heaven did not exist, there was nothing, but when the Good did not exist, its contrary existed.

He, therefore, who says that the Good does not exist, will, even against his will, altogether concede that evil exists.

But the Father also, he says, is perfect virtue and life and unapproachable light and all the lofty conceptions and names;

so that there is no necessity, when the Only-begotten Light did not yet exist, that the corresponding darkness should be conceived from the opposite.

But this is precisely my own argument: that there never was darkness.

For neither was there ever a time when the Light was not;

for the Light is always altogether in the Light, as the prophecy says.

But if, according to the reasoning of the heresy, the ingenerate light is one thing and the generate another, and the one is from eternity while the other came to be afterward, it is altogether necessary that the opposite should never find room to stand against the eternal light;

for the light always shining, the operation of darkness has no room upon it;

but in the case of that which came to be afterward, as they say, it is impossible that the light should not have shone forth out of darkness, but altogether and in every way darkness will be interposed as the mean between the eternal light and that which came to be later.

For there would have been no need of the constitution of the light that came to be afterward, unless the thing being created were of use for some purpose.

And the one use of light is that through it the prevailing gloom should be dissolved.

Now that which is light uncreatedly is by itself and through itself that which it is by nature; but that which is created comes to be assuredly for the sake of something.

It is therefore necessary that the darkness should pre-exist, for the sake of which the radiance is of necessity fashioned; and there is no argument by which one can offer any consolation for the fact that the darkness does not precede the manifestation of the generate light, once it is believed to have been constituted afterward.

But assuredly such a notion is beyond all impiety.

It has therefore been clearly manifested that the Father of Truth did not make the Truth when it did not exist, but, being the fountain of light and truth and every good, He caused to shine forth from Himself the Only-begotten Light of Truth, through whom the glory of His subsistence is at all times characterized—so that from every side the blasphemy of those who say that the Son came into being later than God, by way of creation, is convicted.

But let us hold to the matters before us.

boasting of some incomprehensible sagacity, he sets forth such claims as these, and with these very words disparages our position:

For even if someone's mind, being darkened through evil-mindedness and therefore unable to see anything either before it or above its head, is but poorly disposed toward the apprehension of truth, one ought not on that account to suppose that the discovery of realities is unattainable for the rest of mankind as well.

But I would say to him that the one who declares the discovery of realities to be attainable has surely, by some method and orderly sequence, led his own understanding forward through the knowledge of realities; and having trained himself upon what is easily grasped and lesser through such apprehension, he thus directed his apprehending imagination even toward the things that lie beyond all conception.

Therefore let the one who boasts of having comprehended the knowledge of realities interpret for us the nature of even the very least of the things that appear to us, so that through what is familiar he may give assurance also concerning what is hidden. Let him expound in words the nature of the ant: whether its life is sustained by breath and respiration; whether it is regulated by inner organs like the other animals; whether its body is enclosed by bones; whether the hollows of the bones are filled with marrow within; whether its joints are braced by sinews and ligaments; whether the position of its sinews is held fast by envelopes of muscles and glands; whether the marrow extends through the vertebrae of the back from the crown to the tail; whether by the enclosure of the sinewy membrane it imparts the impulsive power to the moving limbs; whether within it there is a liver and a gall-bladder upon the liver, and kidneys and a heart and arteries and veins, membranes and a diaphragm and partitions; and whether it is bare or covered with hair; and whether it is divided into male and female; and in what part of the body the organ of sight or of hearing is seated; and whether it shares in the sense of smell; whether it is single-hoofed or has feet cloven into many divisions; how long a time it lives, and what is the manner of their generation one from another; how long the offspring is carried before birth; and how it is that not all ants are foot-bound nor all winged, but some belong to those that go along the ground while others are borne through the air.

Let him, then, who vaunts himself as having comprehended the knowledge of realities first make plain to us the nature of the ant, and only then in this fashion give a natural account of the Power that transcends all understanding.

But if he has not yet grasped by his knowledge the nature of the tiniest ant, how does he boast of having comprehended by his apprehending reason the One who holds within Himself all creation, and how does he say that those who acknowledge in themselves the weakness of human nature have had the perceptive faculties of their soul darkened, and can reach neither anything before them nor above their head? But let us who possess the knowledge of realities behold what he knows beyond the rest; let us hear that pompous utterance.

"Otherwise," he says, "the Lord would have named Himself a Door in vain, if there were none to pass through to the understanding and contemplation of the Father; and in vain a Way, if He afforded no facility to those who wished to come to the Father;"

"And how could He be Light, if He did not illumine men, if He did not shine upon the eye of the soul unto the understanding both of Himself and of the Light that lies above Him?" Now if he were setting forth arguments of his own devising that escape the understanding of his hearers by their subtlety, it might perhaps be possible to be deceived by the sagacity of his discourse, the meaning enclosed within often slipping past the hearer.

But since it is the divine words that are put forward, surely no one will find fault with those who have believed that the God-inspired teaching lies open in common to all.

Since, then, the Lord was named "Door," he says, from this he constructs the conclusion that the essence of God is comprehensible.

But the Gospel does not admit this interpretation.

For let us hear that very divine utterance:

"By me if anyone enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and shall find pasture."

Since the word bears these several meanings, it is not possible to include them all in the definition of the essence, lest the Divine be conceived as a compound of diverse elements; nor is it easy to find, out of the things enumerated, the one that can most properly be applied to the matter in hand.

Are we to say that he calls the "entering in" the essence, or the "salvation" of those who enter, or the "going out," or the "pasture," or the "finding"? For each of these is peculiar to its own signification and does not agree with the other.

For to come inside is, on the face of it, the opposite of going out; and the rest likewise, it seems.

For "pasture" is one thing in its proper sense, and "finding" is something other than this.

What then, out of these, is to be reckoned as the essence of the Father? For surely no one, by naming all of them—things that do not agree with one another in their signification—will thereby indicate through discordant terms the essence that is simple and non-composite.

And how could the word be true, that "No one has ever seen God," and "Whom no one of men has seen nor can see," and that "There is no one who shall see the face of the Lord and live," if either what is inside the door, or what is outside, or the finding of the pasture, were the essence of the Father? Yet not because this is not so shall we suppose that the name of "Door" is idle and without meaning when applied to the Lord.

But this novel theologian says that the Lord was named "Door" on account of the knowledge of the essence of the Father.

Why then does he not also drag the "Rock" and the "Stone" and the "Fountain" and the "Tree" and the rest of the names to the same meaning, so that by the multitude of incongruous testimonies he might give credit to his own dogma—being able to apply to each of these the same reasoning which he set forth concerning the Way and the Door and the Light? But I, taught this from the God-inspired Scripture, boldly declare that He who is above every name becomes for us many-named, being named according to the varieties of His benefactions: Light when He dispels the gloom of ignorance, Life when He bestows immortality, Way when He leads us by the hand from error to the truth;

so also He is named to us "Tower of strength" and "City of refuge" and "Fountain" and "Rock" and "Vine" and "Physician" and "Resurrection" and all such things, distributing Himself in manifold ways to our benefactions.

But those who interpret essences by means of names, who see keenly beyond human nature—who behold what is incomprehensible while overlooking what is comprehensible—confidently maintain that Him whom no man has seen nor can see, they not only see but even measure; yet they do not behold faith with the eye of the soul, which alone is commensurate with our understanding, but set the recognition drawn from reasonings before it.

Thus I have heard the history accuse the sons of Benjamin, who looked not to the mark but shot at a hair—the account indicating, I think, their occupation with what is vain: that of things useless and insubstantial they were unerring marksmen and skilful aimers, but of things manifestly useful they were ignorant and unpracticed;

for the history brings upon what has been said the calamity that befell them, how, having raged madly toward the lawlessness of Sodom, they were utterly destroyed when the whole army of the people of Israel was armed against them.

And it seems to me a humane counsel to suggest to the young archers not to be willing to shoot at a hair, and not to look at the door of the faith [in a carping spirit], but, dismissing the vain toil about what is beyond grasp, not to forfeit the ready gain that is found through faith alone.

But having examined what remains of his treatise, I shrink from carrying the discussion further, since a certain shudder has crept over my heart at what he says.

For he wishes to show that the Son is something other than the eternal life; and if this be not contemplated in the Only-begotten, then faith will be proved vain, the preaching empty, baptism superfluous, the labors of the martyrs to no purpose, and the sweat-toils of the apostles useless and unprofitable for the life of men.

For why did they proclaim Christ, in whom, according to Eunomius, there is not the power of eternal life? And to what end do they name after the name of Christ those who have believed, if not that through Him they should partake of eternal life? "For the mind," he says, "of those who have believed in the Lord, having stooped over all sensible and intelligible essence, is not by nature such as to halt even at the generation of the Son, but presses on beyond even this, yearning by desire of eternal life to attain to the First."

Which of the things he has said shall I rather lament—that these wretched men suppose eternal life not to be in the Son, or that they behold the subsistence of the Only-begotten as so lowly and earth-bound that, having set foot by their reasonings upon His beginning, they imagine themselves in their own understanding to stoop over, above the life of the Son, and, having left behind below them the generation of the Lord, to press on beyond it by desire of eternal life? For this is the meaning of what has been said: that the human mind, searching out the knowledge of realities and lifting itself above the sensible and intelligible creation, will, after the likeness of the rest, leave beneath itself the Word who is God in the beginning, and will itself come to be in that in which God the Word was not; through the meddlesomeness of the mind trespassing into the regions that lie above the life of the Son, searching there for eternal life where the Only-begotten God is not.

"For by desire of eternal life," he says, "the mind is borne to the regions beyond the Son," as though it had by no means found what it sought in the Son.

If, then, eternal life is not in the Son, shall He be convicted as a liar who said, "I am the life"? Or is He indeed life, but not eternal? But that which is not eternal is altogether temporal, and such a kind of life is common even to the irrational animals.

Where then is the majesty of true life, if the irrational nature also shares in it? And how shall the Word be the same as the life, if He takes up His dwelling in the irrational nature through temporal life? For if, according to the great John, the Word is life, but this be temporal and not eternal, as the heresy holds, and if the temporal comes to be also in the other creatures, what follows by consequence? Either that the irrational are rational, or that the Word is confessed to be irrational.

Do we still need words to refute their accursed and wicked blasphemy? For are not the things they say such as to contain a hidden counsel of denial of the Lord? For if the apostle plainly says that what is not eternal is temporal, while these men behold eternal life in the essence of the Father alone, and, estranging the Son from the nature of the Father, cut Him off also from eternal life—what else is this but a manifest denial and a setting aside of faith in the Lord, when the apostle clearly says that those who have hoped in Christ in this life only are of all men the most to be pitied? If, then, the Lord is life but not eternal, life is altogether temporal and ephemeral, being that which is exercised throughout the present time, in which the apostle bewails those who set their hope as having fallen short of the true life.

But indeed, having passed beyond this, those enlightened followers of Eunomius are borne by their reasonings to the regions beyond the Son, seeking eternal life in that which is contemplated outside the Only-begotten.

What need is there to say anything at such evils, save whatever calls forth lamentation and tears?

They were condemned to captivity, being banished from the sanctuary and become far from the inheritance of the fathers.

These lamentations, it seems to me, are now more fittingly to be sung, when the imitator of Jechonias draws the deceived toward this new form of idolatry, banishing them from the paternal inheritance—I mean, from the faith.

For these, according to the history, the removal to Babylon takes place literally: from Jerusalem above, that is, from the Church of God, to this confusion of wicked dogmas, whither they are transferred;

for "Babylon" is interpreted as "confusion."

And like Jechonias who was blinded, this man too, having willingly deprived himself of the light of the truth, has become spoil to the tyrant of Babylon, the wretched one not having learned that the Gospel teaches that eternal life is to be beheld equally in Father and Son and Holy Spirit: concerning the Father, the Word speaking thus, that to know Him is eternal life; concerning the Son, that everyone who believes in Him has eternal life; and concerning the Holy Spirit, that in the one who has received the grace there shall be a fountain of water springing up unto eternal life.

Therefore everyone who longs for eternal life, when he has found the Son—I mean the true Son and not the falsely named—has found in Him wholly all that he longed for, because He Himself is also the life and has the life in Himself.

But this man, subtle in mind and keen-sighted in heart, by his great sharpness of vision does not discover eternal life in the Son, but, passing Him by and leaving Him behind as though He were some hindrance to what is sought, searches out eternal life there, where he supposes true life not to be.

What could one conceive of these things more dreadful in point of blasphemy, or more gloomy as an occasion for lamentation? Yet indeed, that Sabellius and Montanus should be noised abroad against our own dogmas is of the same sort as if one were to fasten upon us the blasphemy that follows the doctrine of dissimilarity.

For if one should carefully examine the deceit of these heresies, he will find that they bear a great kinship to the error of Eunomius.

For each of them Judaizes in his dogma, admitting neither the Only-begotten God nor the Holy Spirit into communion of the Godhead with the one whom they call the great and first God;

for whom Sabellius calls three-named, this same one Eunomius names "unbegotten;"

and neither of these contemplates the Godhead in the Trinity of the persons.

Which of them, then, stands in kinship with Sabellius, let the judgment of those who meet with this discourse declare.

But let these matters be [dealt with] to this extent.

But since he is copious in what follows, stirring up the stench of his loathsome arguments, by which he constructs the claim that the Only-begotten God once was not, I say it is well—now that our thinking on these matters has been moderately cleansed by what has gone before—no longer to plunge the discussion together with him into the like evils.

Only this one thing, perhaps, it is not unseasonable to add, having selected it out of the many.

He says: "In like manner, when someone has said that unbegottenness is conjoined also to the essence of the Father, the argument proceeds by way of the like [terms], just as it reached its conclusion in the case of the Son." Clearly, by the establishment of the contraries, the dogma of piety is confirmed—namely, that one is not to suppose unbegottenness and generation to be the same as the essence, but that these are contemplated in the underlying subject, while the underlying subject is, in its proper account, something other than these; and since in it no difference is found (because the difference according to the begotten and the unbegotten is separated from the essence), it remains, of every necessity, that the essence is composed as invariable in both.

Let us further examine this too, in addition to what has been said: how he says that generation is separated from the Father—understanding it as essence, or as activity.

But if he supposes it to be an activity, it is surely conjoined equally both to that which was produced and to that which produces; just as in every construction the activity is likewise to be seen both in that which comes to be and in that which makes, neither separated from the craftsman nor manifested apart from the fashioning of the products.

If he should call it an essence separated from the essence of the Father, confessing that from this the Lord comes to be, he is manifestly regarding this in place of the Father in the case of the Only-begotten, so that two fathers are conceived in the case of the Son: the one merely named—whom indeed he calls also "unbegotten," yet as having no share in the generation—and the other, that which effects in the Only-begotten the things proper to the Father, which he names "generation."

And this is refuted rather by Eunomius's own words than by ours.

For he says in what follows:

"But God, being without generation, is even prior to that which was begotten," and a little later:

"For he to whom being belongs from having been begotten, this one, before he was begotten, was not."

If, then, generation is separated from the Father, but being belongs to the Son from having been begotten, then the Father is without activity in the case of the subsistence of the Only-begotten, and separated from the generation from which the Son has His being.

If, then, the Father has been estranged from the generation of the Son, either they fashion, through the name of generation, some other father of the Son, or these wise men, by what has been said, demonstrate the Son to be self-begotten and self-originated.

You see the muddled state of the understanding of one who parades his ignorance before us up and down through his own words—how the blasphemy wanders astray through its many bypaths, or rather its trackless wastes, advancing toward its own aim by nothing sure? And it is such as one may see in the case of little children, when, playing by reason of their age, they imitate in some sand the constructions of buildings, whose imitation is not artfully likened to the archetype according to a purpose, but they first, out of thoughtlessness, worked out something at random, and then deliberate what they ought to name the thing they have made;

this same shrewdness I behold also in the case of our word-writer.

For, having heaped together the words of his impiety like some pile of sand according to whatever came upon him, he afterward reckons up his inconceivable blasphemy—to what it looks—which, without any rational sequence, has sprung up of itself out of what has been said.

For I do not think that the subsistence of generation has been fashioned by him by design, so as to come to be in place of a father to the essence of the Son; nor was it, as I suppose, according to any purpose of the rhetorician that the Father should be demonstrated to be alien to the generation of the Son; nor was the monstrous notion of the self-originated introduced through any forethought; but all such things were vomited forth by the word-writer without any thought, so that he who errs in dogmas—yet without knowing, as the apostle says, either what he says or concerning what he makes his affirmations—is not even worthy of much accusation in these matters.

"For he to whom being belongs from having been begotten," he says, "this one, before he was begotten, was not."

If, understanding generation in place of the Father, he says this, I too agree, and there is none to contradict.

For it is possible to signify the same thing by either expression—both by saying that "Abraham begot Isaac," and, instead of "begot," that "he became father of Isaac."

Since, then, to be a father is the same as to have begotten, if one should transpose the words into another form, fatherhood, being the same as generation, will be shown forth.

If, then, Eunomius says thus, namely:

'For he who has his being from the Father did not exist before the Father'—the statement is sound, and we too cast our vote in favour of what has been said.

But if by his argument he refers back to that begetting, and says that it is separated from the Father yet conjoined with the Son, I consider it futile to linger over the contemplation of things that cannot even be conceived.

For up to now we have been unable to discern from what has been said whether he supposes the begetting to be a thing contemplated in its own hypostasis, or whether by means of the name he is drawn away in his notions toward that which is without hypostasis.

For his argument, in like manner toward either supposition, is shown to be unfixed and rootless, bending toward whatever seems good to the one who conceives it.

But the grievous part of the blasphemy has not yet been examined—that which the sequence of what has been written now adds;

and so let us scrutinize what has been said word for word.

Yet I do not know how one can dare to bring forth through his mouth the horrifying and godless treatise of this enemy of Christ.

—lest a residue of the destructive bitterness, an imitation of deadly poisons, be left behind on the mouth through which the utterance passes.

'He who draws near to God,' says the Apostle, 'must believe that He is.'

Therefore the distinctive mark of Godhead is truly to be.