Against Eunomius 1 part 56/56

And of the goods that pertain to us, the chief, according to those who think rightly, is believed to be the return to life;

and this was accomplished through the Lord's economy according to man—not by the Father, at the time of the economy, standing apart in inactivity and inoperativeness, as the heresy would have it.

For this is not what He indicates who said, 'He who sent Me is with Me,' and, 'The Father who abides in Me does these works.'

How, then, does the heresy, while attributing to the Son alone the grace bestowed on our behalf, deprive the Father of the thanksgiving due for the good things accomplished? For by nature the return of thanksgiving is owed to benefactors alone, whereas one incapable of conferring benefit is altogether excluded from being thanked.

You see how in every respect their aim recoils to the opposite of what they intend, so that the blasphemy directed against the Only-begotten passes, by logical consequence, over to the Father.

And to me it seems that such a thing happens of necessity.

For if 'he who honours the Son honours the Father,' according to the divine pronouncement, it is plain that the zeal exercised against the Son toward the contrary end likewise has its reference back to the Father.

But I maintain that, for those who receive more simply the proclamation concerning the cross and the resurrection, an equal thanksgiving toward both the Son and the Father arises as the very same grace and ground; and since the Son fulfilled the Father's will (which is that all men should be saved, as the Apostle says), it is fitting to honour Father and Son alike for this grace, seeing that our salvation would never have come to pass had not the good will of the Father, through His own power, gone forth into effect on our behalf.

And that the Son is the power of the Father we have learned from the Scriptures.

But let us once more consider what has been said.

If, he says, he is able to show that the God who is over all—who is unapproachable light—has come, or is able to come, to be in the flesh, then let him call the one light equal to the other light.

...(not that any form of love for mankind was able to prevail), but because it belongs to a nature subject to passion to receive the suffering of the cross.

But as I considered and inquired whence such suppositions concerning the Divine had come upon them—namely, to suppose the unbegotten light unapproachable to its opposite and purely impassible and undefiled, but to regard the begotten as ambiguous in its nature, as not preserving the Divine sincere and pure in impassibility, but as having a certain mixed and compounded essence made of contraries, one that both reaches out for participation in the Good and yet flows over into a passible disposition—since it was not possible to find in Scripture the grounds of such absurdity, it occurred to me to reflect whether perhaps, in admiration of the Egyptians' mythologies about the Divine, he mingles their opinions with the doctrines concerning the Only-begotten.

For they say that those people, when they fit the shapes of certain irrational beasts to human limbs in their monstrous fashioning of idols, declare it to be a riddle of the composite nature which they call a daemon; and this nature is subtler than men and far surpasses our own in power, yet does not possess the Divine unmixed and unalloyed, but is compounded of the nature of soul and the perception of body, admitting of both pleasure and pain—none of which belongs to the unbegotten God.

For those men too utter this name, ascribing unbegottenness to the god who, according to their suppositions, is supreme.

It seems, then, that this wise theologian is introducing into the proclamation of the Christians, out of the Egyptian sanctuaries, an Anubis or an Isis or an Osiris—differing only in the confession of the names.

But as regards impiety there is surely no difference at all between one who confesses the names of the idols and one who firmly holds within himself the opinions concerning them while sparing the names.

If, then, it is not possible to find from the divine Scripture any advocacy of this impiety, but their argument derives its strength from hieroglyphic riddles, it is surely not unclear what it befits the right-minded to conclude about these matters.

And that we do not bring this charge out of malice, Eunomius himself would be our witness through his own words—he who says that the unbegotten is unapproachable light and unable to come to any experience of sufferings, while he defines that in the begotten such a disposition is fitting and akin to its nature.

So that man owes no thanks to the Only-begotten God for the things He suffered on his behalf, if indeed, according to their argument, He slid of His own accord into the experience of sufferings, His passible essence being naturally dragged down to this—which is worthy of no thanksgiving at all.

For who would receive as a matter of grace what happens by necessity, even if it be profitable and beneficial? For we feel no gratitude to fire for its heat nor to water for its flowing, referring what occurs to the necessity of nature, since fire cannot be deprived of its heating activity, nor can water remain stationary on a slope, the mere local inclination of its own accord drawing its motion forward.

If, then, they say that the benefit conferred on men through the flesh came about by the Son through natural necessity, they surely acknowledge no grace, since they refer what happened not to authoritative power but to natural necessity.

But if, while perceiving the gift, they dishonour the benefaction, I fear lest their impiety recoil again to the opposite for them, and they come to prefer the passible disposition of the Son to the impassibility of the Father, making the judgment of the good by their own standard of what is good.

For if it had befallen the Son also, as they dogmatize concerning the Father, to be incapable of receiving the passion, the calamity of our nature would have remained uncorrected, there being none to snatch man into incorruption through His own experience; and thus the cleverness of these sophists escapes their notice—by the very means through which it attempts to pull down the majesty of the Only-begotten God, it leads Him round into greater and more preferable estimations, since he who is able to act is more to be preferred, with respect to the good, than he who is unable.

For he does not keep to the course that befits him, but, like hot and mettlesome colts, is carried off together with the blasphemies of his adversaries into the absurdities of his thesis.

We must therefore rein him in, as he bolts beyond measure toward the establishment of absurdities.

But the fair-minded hearer will surely pardon us for what has been said, reckoning the absurdity that emerges from the examination not to us, but to those who lay down wicked first principles.

But we must transfer our contemplation to another of the things that have been said.

For he says that he makes God composite for us, in that he lays down light as common, but by certain properties and various differences separates the one from the other.

For that which is brought together by one common feature, yet separated by certain differences and concurrences of properties, is none the less composite.

But against these things our reply is brief and easily dispatched.

For that which he charges against our doctrines, if he does not establish it by his own arguments, we admit the charge against ourselves.

For let us examine what has been written by him.

He names the Lord 'true light,' and the Father 'unapproachable light.'

Therefore he himself too has confessed the fellowship in respect of light, naming each of them thus.

And since the appellations are fittingly applied to the things, as he has repeatedly defined, we understand that the word 'light' is not spoken of the divine nature as a mere sound without any meaning, but is predicated of some underlying subject.

Therefore, by the fellowship in respect of the name, they also confess the identity of the things signified, since of those whose names are the same, they have declared that the natures too are not otherwise.

Since, then, that which is signified by 'light' is one, the addition of 'unapproachable' and 'true' separates, according to the heresy's argument, the common by the particular, so that the Father's light is thought of as one thing, and the Son's as another, the two being distinguished from each other by their properties.

Either, then, let him overturn the particulars, lest by what he says he construct the Divine as composite, or let him not lay these things to our charge, which he beholds in his own words.

For in no way does our argument through these things do violence to simplicity, since commonality and particularity are not essence, so that their concurrence should demonstrate the underlying subject to be composite.

Rather, the essence in itself remains whatever it is according to its nature, being that very thing which it is;

but these things anyone endowed with understanding would say belong to the things conceived and contemplated concerning it; for even with respect to us men it is possible to conceive of something common to the divine nature, yet not on that account is the Divine humanity, or the human divinity.

For believing God to be good, we know that this name too has been assigned by Scripture to man.

But that which is particular in each case divides the commonality that arises from the homonymy of the signification.

For the one, being the fountain of goodness, is named from it; while the other, participating in goodness, shares also in the name.

And God is not on this account composite, that He shares with man in the appellation of the good.

Therefore it is plainly confessed from these things that the account of the commonality is one thing and that of the essence another, and that no more on this account is any composition or multiplicity of parts constructed around the simple and quantityless nature, if any of the things contemplated be beheld either in particularity or have its signification in respect of something common.

But let us pass on, if it seems good, to another of the things said, letting go with a farewell the intervening nonsense—by which, laboriously trumpeting the Aristotelian division of beings against our argument, he has worked up genera and species and differentiae and individuals, and all the technical apparatus of the categories, marshalling it for the slander of our doctrines.

Letting these things go, then, let us pass on to what is weighty and hard to contend against in his argument.

And I shall set forth, word for word, the very sayings of this composer of treatises.

'But if, the begotten being related to the unbegotten as its contrary, the begotten light should sink down in equal degree relative to the unbegotten light, the one will become light, but the other darkness.'

Now the sharp and well-aimed character of the response to this antithesis, whoever has leisure, let him learn from that man's own words.

But I would ask him who plays the part of our people either to speak our own words (or to bring the imitation as close as possible to our reasoning), or, as he has been trained and is able, to conduct his argument from his own person and not discourse in our name.

For may none of our people ever be so led astray as to suppose that, the begotten being contrary in signification to the unbegotten, the one is a lowering of the other.

For everything opposed has its distinction not in a lessening, but its contradistinction in a total estrangement in respect of signification; as we say that someone sleeps or does not sleep, sits or does not sit, has been begotten or has not been begotten, and all other things after the same pattern;

of which the removal of the one becomes the positing of its opposite.

Just as, then, to live is not a lessening of not living, but a total opposition, so we have understood 'to have been begotten' not as a lessening of 'not having been begotten,' but as a certain antithesis and unmediated contradistinction, such that the signification in each in no way has fellowship with the other, neither in a small degree nor in a greater.

Let him, then, who says that that which is conceived as from the contrary sinks down toward its opposite advance the argument from his own person.

For our plain way of speaking says that things corresponding to opposites stand apart, in equal measure with their prototypes, from one another as well.

So that, even if Eunomius applies to light the same variance which he observes between the begotten and the unbegotten, I shall take up our argument again: that just as there the one member of the contradiction remains without fellowship with its opposite, so likewise, if light be joined to one member of the contraries, that which is left over will surely be shown to be conjoined with darkness, the necessity of antithesis, in proportion to what precedes, separating also the account of light in relation to its opposite.

These things we, who—as our slanderer says—attempt to write without any logical dexterity, mumble in rustic fashion to the new Paeanian by means of the local tongue.

For our manner, in respect of refuting the doctrines of impiety, is not overly hard to set in motion; but in respect of making comedy of the ignorance of the uneducated, it is altogether unsuited.