On the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia 45–54

If, then, anyone blames those who met at Nicaea for saying what was contrary to the decisions of those before them, he might with equal reason blame the seventy too, for not keeping to what those before them held; and before them were the Dionysii and the bishops who met at Rome at that time. But it is not holy to accuse either these or those; for all were envoys of Christ’s cause, and all showed zeal against the heretics, the one council condemning the Samosatene, the other the Arian heresy. Both wrote rightly and well for the matter in hand. And as the blessed apostle, writing to the Romans, said, “The law is spiritual,” and “The law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good,” and a little later, “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak,” but wrote to the Hebrews, “The law made nothing perfect,” and to the Galatians, “By the law no one is justified,” and to Timothy, “The law is good, if one uses it lawfully”—and no one would accuse the saint of writing contradictory and conflicting things, but would rather admire him for writing fittingly to each, so that the Romans and the others might learn to turn from the letter to the Spirit, while the Hebrews and Galatians might be taught to place their hope not in the law but in the Lord who gave the law—so, if the fathers of the two councils spoke of “of the same essence” in different ways, we must by no means quarrel with them, but search out their meaning, and we shall certainly find the agreement of both councils. For those who deposed the Samosatene took “of the same essence” in a bodily sense, because Paul tried to argue sophistically, saying, “If Christ did not become God from being a man, then he is of the same essence as the Father, and there must be three essences, one prior, and two from it.” For this reason, rightly guarding against such a sophism of the Samosatene, they said that Christ is not of the same essence; for the Son is not related to the Father in the way Paul supposed. But those who anathematized the Arian heresy saw Paul’s craftiness and reckoned that “of the same essence” does not have such a meaning in the case of incorporeal things, and especially in the case of God. They knew that the Word is not a creature but an offspring from the essence, and that the Father’s essence is the beginning and root and fountain of the Son, and that he was the very true likeness of the one who begot him, not separated from the Father as being of another nature, as we are, but existing as Son from him inseparably, as the radiance is in relation to the light. They also had the illustrations used by Dionysius, the fountain, and his defense concerning “of the same essence,” and, before these, the Savior’s words expressing unity: “I and the Father are one” and “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” For this reason they too rightly said that the Son is of the same essence. And as, I said before, one would not accuse the apostle for having written about the law one way to the Romans and another to the Hebrews, in the same way neither would those of today find fault with the earlier fathers, when they see their interpretation, nor would the earlier ones blame those who came after them, when they see their interpretation and the need for which they wrote as they did about the Lord. For each council has a reasonable cause why the one spoke thus and the other thus. For since the Samosatene held that the Son did not exist before Mary, but had his beginning of being from her, those who met at that time deposed him and declared him a heretic; but writing more simply about the Son’s divinity, they did not concern themselves with the exact sense of “of the same essence,” but spoke of it as they understood it. For their whole concern was to destroy what the Samosatene had devised, and to show that the Son is before all things, and that he did not become God from among men, but, being God, put on the form of a servant, and being Word, became flesh, as John said. So that was done against the blasphemy of Paul. But Eusebius’s and Arius’s party said that the Son existed before times, yet taught that he was made and was one of the creatures, and did not believe “from God” in the sense of a genuine Son from a Father, but asserted that he is “from God” in the same way as the creatures; and they spoke of the oneness of likeness of the Son to the Father not as being according to essence or according to nature, as a son is like his father, but as resting on agreement of doctrines and teaching; and moreover they cut off and wholly estranged the Son’s essence from the Father, devising for him another beginning of being besides the Father and bringing him down among the creatures. For this reason those who met at Nicaea, seeing the craftiness of those who thought so, and gathering the sense from the Scriptures, wrote more clearly and said “of the same essence,” so that the true genuineness of the Son might be known from this, and that originated things might have nothing in common with him. For the exactness of this term both exposes their hypocrisy if they say the text “from God,” and casts out all their plausibilities, by which they carry off the simple. At any rate, though they are able to sophisticate and alter everything as they wish, this term alone, as …

Let all contention cease, then, and let us no longer stumble if the councils took the term “of the same essence” in different ways. For we have reasonable grounds in their defense: those already mentioned, and this one too. “Unbegotten,” though we have not learned it from the Scriptures (for the Scriptures nowhere call God unbegotten), yet since many reputable men have mentioned the name, we inquired and learned that this name too has different meanings. Some call “unbegotten” that which exists, but was neither begotten nor has any cause at all; others, that which is uncreated. As, then, these being its meanings, if one, looking to the first meaning, “having no cause,” were to say that the Son is not unbegotten, he would not accuse another who, looking to the fact that the Son is not a thing made or a creature but an eternal offspring, called the Son unbegotten. For both, looking each to his own aim, have spoken well. So too, if some of the fathers spoke in one way and others in another about “of the same essence,” let us not be contentious, but receive what they said piously, especially since they had zeal for piety.

Ignatius, then, who after the apostles was appointed bishop at Antioch and became a martyr of Christ, writing about the Lord, said: “There is one physician, fleshly and spiritual, originate and unoriginate, God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God.” And some teachers after Ignatius also write: “The Father is the one unoriginate, and one is the genuine Son from him, true offspring, Word and Wisdom of the Father.” If, then, we are opposed to these too, let our fight be with the councils as well. But if, knowing their faith in Christ, we are persuaded that the blessed Ignatius too wrote rightly, calling him originate because of the flesh (for Christ became flesh) and unoriginate because he is not one of the things made and originated but Son from Father; and if we are not ignorant that those who said that the Father is the one unoriginate did not write so as though the Word were originate and a thing made, but because he has no cause, and rather the Father himself is Father of Wisdom and made all originated things in wisdom—why do we not bring together in piety the fathers too, both those who deposed the Samosatene and those who exposed the Arian heresy, rather than make a distinction between them, and not rather think rightly about them? For those, as I said, having their mind directed against the sophism of the Samosatene and his interpretation, wrote “He is not of the same essence”; and these, understanding well, said that the Son is of the same essence. I too, thinking such things about those who are pious toward Christ, have written briefly; but if it were possible to obtain the letter which they say those men wrote, I think more reasons would be found for which those blessed men were compelled to write as they did. For it is necessary and fitting for us to think such things and to keep such a good conscience toward the fathers, if indeed we are not bastards, but have the traditions from them and the teaching of piety from them. [48] Let this, then, be said and believed as the meaning of the fathers. But come, let us again examine the matter with them gently and with a good conscience, remembering what was said before, whether the bishops who assembled at Nicaea are not really shown to have thought rightly. If the Word is a thing made and foreign to the Father’s essence, so as to be separated from the Father by the separation of a different nature, he would not be of the same essence as the Father, but rather of the same kind by nature as the things made, even if he surpasses them in grace. But if we confess that he is not a thing made but a genuine offspring from the Father’s essence, it would follow that he is also inseparable from the Father, being of the same nature because he was begotten from him; and being such, he might rightly be called “of the same essence.” Next, if the Son is not Son by participation, but is in essence the Word and Wisdom of the Father, and this essence is the offspring of the Father’s essence and its likeness, as the radiance is of the light; and the Son says, “I and the Father are one,” and “He who has seen me has seen the Father”—how must these sayings be understood? Or how, taking them, shall we preserve the oneness of the Father and the Son? If it is by agreement of doctrines, and by not disagreeing with the Father, as the Arians say, such a sense is poor. For the saints too, and still more angels and archangels, have such agreement with God, and there is no disagreement among them; for the devil, who disagreed, was seen falling from heaven, as the Lord said. So if the Father and the Son are one on account of agreement, there would also be originated things that agree with God in this way, and each might say, “I and the Father are one.” But if this is absurd—and it truly is absurd—it is necessary to understand the oneness of Son and Father as being according to essence. For originated things, even if they have agreement with their maker, have it by motion and participation and mind; and whoever did not keep it was cast out of heaven. But the Son, being offspring from the essence, is one in essence, he and the Father who begot him.

This is why he has equality with the Father in words expressing unity, and why what is said of the Father, the Scriptures also say of the Son, except only his being called Father. For the Son himself said, “All things that the Father has are mine”; and he said to the Father, “All mine are yours, and yours are mine.” For example, the name “God”: “For the Word was God”; “Almighty”: “Thus says he who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty”; being light: “I am,” he says, “the light”; the creative cause: “For all things came to be through him,” and “What I see the Father doing, these things I also do”; being eternal: “For his eternal power and divinity,” and “In the beginning was the Word,” and “He was the true light, which enlightens every man coming into the world”; being Lord: “For the Lord rained brimstone and fire from the Lord”; and the Father says, “I am the Lord,” and “Thus says the Lord God Almighty”; while of the Son Paul says, “One Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” And angels minister to the Father, while the Son is worshiped by them: “And let all the angels of God worship him.” And he is said to be Lord of angels too: “For the angels ministered to him,” and “The Son of Man will send his angels.” Being honored as the Father is: “that they may honor the Son,” he says, “as they honor the Father”; being equal to God: “He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped”; being truth from the true and life from the living, as from the Father, who is truly the fountain; giving life and raising the dead as the Father does, for so it is written in the Gospel. And of the Father it is written, “The Lord your God is one Lord,” and “The God of gods, the Lord, has spoken, and called the earth”; but of the Son, “God is the Lord, and he has shone upon us,” and “The God of gods will be seen in Zion.” And again, of God Isaiah says, “Who is a God like you, taking away iniquities and passing over unrighteousness?”; while the Son said to whom he wished, “Your sins are forgiven”; and when the Jews murmured, he showed the forgiveness in deed, saying to the paralytic, “Rise, take up your bed, and go to your house.” And of God Paul said, “To the King of the ages”; while of the Son David sang, “Lift up your gates, O rulers, and be lifted up, eternal gates, and the King of glory shall come in,” and Daniel heard, “His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,” and “His kingdom shall not be destroyed.” And in general, as many things as you may find said of the Father, so many will you find said of the Son too, except only his being Father, as has been said.

If, then, anyone conceives of another beginning and another Father because of the equality of what is said, the notion is mad. But if, because the Son is from the Father, all the things of the Father are in the Son as in an image and impress, let us consider fairly whether an essence foreign to the Father’s essence is capable of such things, and whether such a one is of another nature and of alien essence, and not of the same essence as the Father. For we must beware lest, by transferring what is proper to the Father to what is unlike him in essence, and expressing the divinity of the Father in what is unlike in kind and alien in essence, we bring in another, foreign essence, capable of the properties of the first essence, and be put to shame by God himself, who says, “My glory I will not give to another,” and be found worshiping what is alien, and be thought to be such as the Jews of that time were, who said, “Why do you, being a man, make yourself God?”—when also, transferring what belongs to the Spirit, they blasphemed, saying, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul.” But if this is unseemly, it is plain that he would not be unlike in essence, but of the same essence as the Father; and if the things of the Father are by nature the Son’s, and the Son himself is from the Father, and because of such oneness of divinity and of nature he and the Father are one, and he who has seen the Son has seen the Father, he was rightly called “of the same essence” by the fathers; for to have such things does not belong to one of another essence.

Again, if, as we said before, the Son is not Son by participation, but all originated things have the grace from God by participation, while he is the Father’s Wisdom and Word, of which all things partake, it is plain that he, being the deifying and enlightening power of the Father, in whom all things are deified and given life, is not alien in essence from the Father, but of the same essence. For by partaking of him we partake of the Father, because the Word is the Father’s own. Hence, if he too were Son by participation, and not essential divinity and image of the Father from him, he would not deify, being deified himself. For one who has something by participation cannot impart a share of it to others, since what he has is not his own but the giver’s, and what he has received is barely the grace sufficient for himself. Yet let us examine honestly the reason for which, as it is said, some decline “of the same essence,” whether the Son is not rather shown by it to be of the same essence as the Father. They say, then, as you wrote, that one should not say the Son is of the same essence as the Father, because he who says “of the same essence” speaks of three things: some essence lying beneath, and those begotten from it, which are of the same essence; and they add: “If, then, the Son is of the same essence as the Father, there must be an essence lying beneath them, from which they were begotten, and the one is not Father and the other Son, but both are brothers.” Even if these are interpretations of the Greeks, and what comes from them is not binding on us, let us nevertheless see whether the things said to be of the same essence, brothers from the essence presupposed, are of the same essence with one another or with the essence from which they were begotten. For if with one another, they will be of another essence than the essence that begot them, and unlike it; for “of another essence” is the opposite of “of the same essence.” But if each is of the same essence as the essence that begot them, it is plain that what is begotten from something is of the same essence as what begot it; and one need no longer look for three essences, but need only ask whether this is truly from that. For even if it happens that there are not two brothers, but only one came to be from that essence, the one begotten would not be called alien in essence because there is no other; but even being alone, he would be of the same essence as the one who begot him. For what should we say of the daughter of Jephthah, that she was only-begotten—“and he had no other child,” it says—and of the son of the widow whom the Lord raised from the dead, that he too had no brother but was only-begotten? Was each of them, then, not of the same essence as the one who begot them? Indeed they were; for they were children, and this is proper to children in relation to parents. So too the fathers, having said that the Son of God is from the essence, rightly said that he is of the same essence as well; for the radiance too has this relation to the light. And it would follow from their argument that creation did not come to be from nothing either. For men, who beget with passion, also work on an underlying matter and could not make anything otherwise; but if we do not understand creating in a human way in the case of God, much less is it fitting to understand begetting in a human way in God’s case, or to take “of the same essence” in a bodily sense. Rather, we must withdraw from originated things and, laying aside below all human images and in short all the senses, ascend to the Father, lest we unawares take the Son away from the Father and add him to his own creatures.

And besides: if, while confessing Father and Son, we speak of two principles or two Gods, as Marcion and Valentinus do, or say that the Son has some other kind of divinity and is not the image and impress of the Father because he is by nature from him, then let him be unlike; for such essences are wholly foreign to one another. But if we know the one and only divinity of the Father, and that the Son is his Word and Wisdom, and believing thus we do not say two Gods, and if we understand the oneness of the Son with the Father not by likeness of teaching but as being according to essence and in truth, so that on this account we say not two Gods but one God, there being one form of divinity, as with the light and the radiance—for this is what was seen by the patriarch Jacob, and Scripture says, “The sun rose upon him when the form of God passed by”; and the holy prophets, seeing this and understanding whose Son and image he is, said, “The word of the Lord came to me”; and, knowing the Father beheld and revealed in him, they dared to say, “The God of our fathers appeared to me, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob”—this being so, why should we scruple to call “of the same essence” him who is one with the Father and appears as the Father is, according to likeness and one divinity? For if, as has often been said, he does not have the property of the Father’s essence, nor the resemblance proper to a Son, we are right to scruple; but if he is the enlightening and creative power, most proper to the Father, without whom the Father neither creates nor is known (for all things came to be through him and hold together in him), why, understanding the reality, do we decline to say the word that signifies it? For what is so of one nature with the Father as to be of the same essence with him? For God did not take to himself the Son as something alien, as one needing an assistant; nor are the things made equal in worth to their creator, so that they should be honored as he is, or be thought to be one with the Father. Or let someone dare to divide and say that the sun and its radiance are two lights, or that the radiance is another essence, or that it is an accident and not a simple and pure offspring from the sun—when in fact sun and radiance are two, but the light is one, because the radiance is the offspring from the sun. And since the nature of the Son in relation to the Father is such, and indeed even more indivisible, and the divinity is not something added to the Son, but the Father’s divinity is in the Son, so that he who has seen the Son sees the Father in him, why should such a one not be called of the same essence?

These things too are sufficient to persuade you not to accuse those who have said that the Son is of the same essence as the Father. Yet let us examine the term “of the same essence” in itself, so as to know whether one ought to say “of the same essence” at all, and whether it is a proper term and fittingly said of the Son. For you know too, and no one would doubt it, that “like” is said not of essences but of shapes and qualities; for in the case of essences one would speak not of likeness but of identity. A man, at any rate, is said to be like a man not in essence but in shape and form; for in essence they are of one nature. And again a man is not said to be unlike a dog, but of a different nature. So the one is “of one nature” and “of the same essence,” the other “of a different nature” and “of another essence.” Therefore whoever says “like in essence” says “like” by participation. For likeness is a quality, which may be added to an essence. And this would be proper to things made; for these are made like God by participation. “For when he appears,” it says, “we shall be like him”—like, plainly, not in essence but in sonship, which we receive from him. If, then, you say that the Son too is Son by participation, let him be called by you “of like essence.” But so called, he is not truth, nor light at all, nor God by nature. For things that are by participation are said to be like not in truth but by a likeness to the truth, so that the participation can also fall away and be taken from those who partake. And this again is proper to creatures and things made. So if this is absurd, he would not be Son by participation, but by nature and in truth Son, light, wisdom, God. And being so by nature and not by participation, he would not properly be called “of like essence” but “of the same essence.” But what one would not say even of other things—for it was shown that “like” is not said of essences—how is it not unreasonable, or perhaps even harsh, to apply it to the Son, and not rather “of the same essence”?

That is why the council at Nicaea rightly wrote what it was fitting to say, that the Son, begotten from the essence of the Father, is of the same essence. Having learned this, let us too not fight with shadows, especially since we know that those who wrote these things confessed the faith in this way not as misinterpreting the truth, but as defending the truth and piety toward Christ, and as destroying the blasphemies of the Ariomaniacs against him. For it must be considered and understood exactly that, when we say “unlike in essence” and “of another essence,” we do not signify the true Son, but one of the things made, an adopted Son and Son by appointment, which is what the heretics hold; but when we say “of the same essence” without contentiousness, we signify a genuine Son born from the Father, even if the Christ-fighters often burst with rage at it. These things, which I myself know and have heard from wise men in discussion, I have written briefly; but you, remaining on the foundation of the apostles and holding fast the traditions of the fathers, pray that now at last all strife and rivalry may cease, and the foolish questionings of the heretics and all disputes about words may be condemned; that the ill-named and murderous heresy of the Arians may vanish, and the truth shine forth in the hearts of all, so that all everywhere may say the same and think the same; and that, with no Arian slander remaining any longer, it may be said and confessed in every church, “One Lord, one faith, one baptism,” in Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom to the Father be the glory and the power to the ages of ages. Amen.