Against Eunomius 3.593–3.605

For if we shake off every fleshly and material notion of the divine and lofty doctrines, we shall have, through the thought that remains once it is cleansed of such things, the safest guidance by the hand toward what is lofty and inaccessible. For it is admitted even by our opponents that the God who is over all both is and is called Father of the Only-begotten; and the only-begotten God, who is from the Father, they name begotten because he was begotten. Since, then, among human beings the name of father carries certain implications from which the pure nature is far removed, it is fitting to leave behind all the material notions that come in with the fleshly sense of “father,” and to impress on the mind, in the case of the God and Father, a sense befitting God that expresses only the genuineness of the relation. Now since not only what the flesh suggests is included in the notion of a human father, but a notion of interval is also certainly understood along with human fatherhood, it would be well, in the case of the divine begetting, to cast away the notion of interval together with bodily defilement, so that, the material property being washed away on every side, the transcendent begetting may be pure of every notion, not only of passion but also of interval. Whoever, then, says that God is Father will include, with the notion that God is, his being something as well. For in a being whose existence is from some beginning, its being something certainly also begins from some point; but in one whose existence did not begin, neither does anything else contemplated about him have its beginning from any point. But God is Father; therefore he is from eternity what he is. For he did not become Father, but is Father; for in God what was, also is and will be; and if he once was not something, he neither is it nor will be. For he is not believed to be Father of anything such that it is pious to say that God was ever by himself without it. For the Father is father of life, of truth and wisdom, of light and sanctification and power, and of all such things as the Only-begotten is and is named. When, then, our enemies contrive that the light once was not, I do not know whose loss is greater: the light’s itself, when the light is not, or its possessor’s, when he does not have the light. So too concerning life and truth and power and all the other things with which the Only-begotten fills the Father’s bosom, being all things in his own fullness. For the absurdity is equal in either case, and the impiety against the Father balances the blasphemy against the Son. For in saying that the Lord once was not, you will not simply assert that power was not, but you will say that God’s power was not, the power of the Father of power. Your argument’s contrivance that the Son once was not, then, establishes nothing other than the Father’s deprivation of every good. See to what end the shrewdness of the wise is overturned! How true, here too, is the Lord’s word that says, “He who rejects me rejects him who sent me”! For by the same means by which they reject the Only-begotten’s eternal existence, they dishonour the Father, stripping the Father’s glory, in their account, of every good name and notion. The weakness of the writer’s mischief, then, has been plainly detected through what has been said: in attempting to establish the opposition of the Only-begotten’s substance to the Father’s by calling the one unbegotten and the other begotten, he has been refuted as trifling with untenable things. For it has been shown through his own words, first, that the name of substance is one thing and that of begetting another; and second, that no new substance, differing from the substance of the Father, came to exist for the Son. Rather, what the Father is in the definition of nature, that also is he who is from him, an offspring, the nature not being changed into something different in the hypostasis of the Son, according to the truth of the argument shown us earlier. [As the begetting] did not make a change of nature in Abel’s substance, so too in the pure doctrines the only-begotten God, coming forth from the Father and being in the Father, as the Gospel says, altered nothing in himself of the substance of the one who was not begotten through his own begetting. Rather, according to the simple and unlearned account of our faith, he is light from light, true God from true God, being all that the other is, except being that one, the Father. As for the aim for which he goes through these technicalities, I think there is no need to speak of it now: whether it is bold and dangerous, or permitted and safe, to remodel the words that signify the divine nature from one form into another, and to call the one begotten “offspring”…

… I pass over these things, so that our discourse, occupied beyond what is needed with the fight over lesser matters, may not neglect the greater. But I say that this must be examined exactly: whether the natural relation brings in the use of these names. For this is certainly what he says: that kinship in substance is brought in along with the kinship of the appellations. For he would not say that bare names by themselves, cut off from the meaning of what they signify, have any relation or kinship with one another; it is in the meanings shown by the words that we distinguish what is kin and what is foreign in the appellations. If, then, he admits that the Son has a natural relation to the Father, let us leave the appellations and consider the force of what they signify: whether what is understood in the kinship is foreignness of substance, or what is akin and proper. To say “foreign” is plain madness. For how could anyone keep a connected and kindred order in the names of things alien and without communion, “since the begotten substance itself,” as he says, “and the name of Son make such a relation of the names appropriate”? But if he were to say that kinship is signified by these appellations, he will of necessity appear, through the kinship of the names, as an advocate of the community of substance. And in establishing that the connection of the subjects is signified (and he does this in many places of his writing), he does not know what he is doing. For by the very means by which he tries to pull down the truth he is often dragged unwillingly into advocacy of the doctrines he is fighting. It is something like what we heard from the history about Saul: when once he was moved with anger against those who were prophesying, he was overcome by the grace and became one of those possessed by God, the prophetic Spirit, I suppose, wishing to instruct the apostate through himself. Hence the strangeness of the occurrence became a proverb for later life, the history telling of it with astonishment: “Is Saul also among the prophets?” In what, then, does Eunomius take the side of the truth? Where he says, “The Lord himself, being Son of the living God, not ashamed of his birth from the Virgin, often named himself Son of Man in his own words.” This is the very statement we too bring forward as proof of the community of substance: that the name “Son” shows an equal communion of nature in both cases. For as he is called son of man because of the kinship of his flesh with her from whom he was born, so too he is certainly understood to be Son of God because of the connection of his substance with that from which he came to exist; and this statement is the greatest weapon of the truth. For nothing shows the mediator between God and men, as the great Apostle named him, so well as the name “Son,” fitted equally to each nature, the divine and the human. For the same one is Son of God and became Son of Man by the economy, so that by his communion with each he might join in himself what is separated by nature. If, then, on becoming Son of Man he had had no share in human nature, it would follow that, being Son of God, he should not be said to share in the divine substance either. But if the whole human compound was in him (for “he was tempted in all things according to likeness, without sin”), it is altogether necessary to believe that every property of the transcendent substance is also in him, since the word “Son” bears witness to both alike in him: in the man, to the human; in God, to the divine. If, then, the appellations, as Eunomius says, show kinship, and kinship is seen in the realities, not in the bare sounds of names (by realities I mean the Son and the Father understood in themselves, if it is not bold to speak so), who could deny that the very champion of blasphemy has been dragged of his own accord into advocacy of godliness, overturning his own arguments by himself and proclaiming the community of substance in the divine doctrines? For the statement thrown out by him unwillingly on behalf of the truth does not lie about these things: that he would not have been called Son if the natural sense of the names did not confirm the calling. For as a pedestal is not called the son of the craftsman, and no sensible person would say that the builder begot the house, nor do we name the vineyard the offspring of the vinedresser, but the construction is a man’s work, and the one born from him is a man’s son (so that, I think, what is suitable may be signified in the subjects by the names), so too, taught that the Only-begotten is Son of God, we have not understood through this appellation a creature of God, but what the word “Son” truly shows by its meaning.

And if wine too is named by Scripture the “offspring of the vine,” not even so will the word be taken over from this shared name into the doctrines of godliness. For we do not call wine the offspring of an oak, nor the acorn the offspring of a vine, but only where there is some communion of nature between the offspring and what it comes from. For the moisture in the vine, drawn up through the base of the root by the pith, is water in potency; but travelling in a certain sequence through the paths of nature, and flowing over from the lower parts to what lies above, it changes into the quality of wine, the sun’s ray also cooperating somewhat, which, drawing the moisture by its heat from the depth to the shoot, makes the sap into wine by a proper and corresponding ripening. So by nature the moisture in the vine has no foreignness to the wine begotten from it; for this liquid is from that liquid, and no one could name another cause of the wine’s liquidity than the moisture naturally present in the branches. The differences of quality do not produce a change in the liquid; rather some property distinguishes the liquid in the wine from that in the branch, astringency or sweetness or [sourness] attending one of the two, so that they are the same in their subject but differ in their differences of quality. As, then, having heard from Scripture that the only-begotten God is Son of Man, we have learned through the relation of the name his kinship with true man, so too, even if the Son is called “offspring,” as our opponent says, we learn through this no less his kinship in substance with the one who begot him, since wine too, called the offspring of the vine, is found to be not foreign, in respect of its liquid, to the natural power present in the vine. Indeed, what our opponents say, if one examines it soundly, looks toward our doctrine; but their intention contradicts their own constructions, since they strive everywhere to establish foreignness of substance. And yet it is altogether impossible to guess where they were led to such suppositions from. For if the appellation “son” does not signify simply being from something, but properly presents through its meaning a kinship by nature, as Eunomius himself says; and if wine is not called the offspring of an oak, and the “offspring of vipers,” as the Gospel says, are snakes and not sheep; it is clear that in the case of the Only-begotten too the appellations “Son” and “offspring” would not have their kinship with something of another kind. But if, as our opponents say, he is also called offspring, and the calling of “Son” is, as they admit, according to nature, then the Son is certainly of the substance of the one who begot him, not of anything else contemplated outside his nature. And if he is truly from there, he is certainly not estranged from what he is from; as was shown in other cases too, everything that is begotten, having come to exist from something, is certainly of the same kind as that from which it has come. If anyone should demand of us some interpretation, description, and explanation of the divine substance, we shall not deny that we are ignorant of such wisdom, confessing only this much: that what is by nature unlimited cannot be grasped by any conception expressed in words. For the prophecy cries aloud, proclaiming plainly that the divine greatness has no limit: “Of his majesty, of his glory, of his holiness, there is no end.” If what is about him is boundless, much more is he himself, whatever he is in substance, enclosed by no limit in any respect. If, then, interpretation through names and words somehow encloses its subject by its meaning, and the unlimited cannot be comprehended, no one could reasonably blame our ignorance, since we are not bold about what may not be dared. For by what name shall I enclose the incomprehensible? By what word shall I proclaim the unspeakable? Since, then, the Divine is greater and higher than the meaning of names, we have learned to honour with silence what is beyond word and thought. And even if one who thinks more highly than he ought to think tramples on this reverent caution of speech, making a mockery of our ignorance about incomprehensible things, and claims to recognize the difference, by way of unlikeness, of what is without shape, limit, size, or quantity (I mean the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit), and brings forward as a refutation of our ignorance what is constantly put forward by the disciples of deceit, “You worship what you do not know,” if you do not know the substance of what is worshipped, we will not fear the reproach of fools, as the prophet counsels, nor, because of their disparagement, will we speak boldly about the unspeakable. We make Paul, “unskilled in speech,” our teacher of the mysteries that are beyond knowledge, who is so far from thinking the divine nature to lie within human comprehension that he says God’s judgments are unsearchable and his ways untraceable, and insists that what has been promised to those who love him for their good deeds in this life is beyond comprehension, so that it is not possible for the eye to receive it, or the ear to take it in, or the heart to contain it.

Having learned these things from Paul, then, we declare with confidence that not only are the judgments of God higher than the power of those who attempt to search them, but the ways of knowledge too remain to this day untrodden and inaccessible. For we think the Apostle wished to signify this when he called “untraceable” the ways that lead to the incomprehensible, showing by the word that that knowledge is inaccessible to human reasonings, and that no one has yet set his mind on such a journey of reason, or marked on what cannot be grasped any trace or sign of an approach that grasps it. Having learned these things, then, from the greatness of the Apostle’s mind, we reason from what has been said that, if the judgments cannot be searched out, and the ways are not traced, and the promise of good things lies beyond every guess and conjecture, how much more, in proportion to its being unspeakable and unapproachable, is the Divine itself higher and loftier than the things understood about it, of which the God-taught Paul declares there is no knowledge? And for this reason we confirm in ourselves the doctrine that is mocked, confessing that we are less in knowledge than what surpasses knowledge; and we say that we truly worship what we know. We know the height of the glory of him who is worshipped by this very fact, that we cannot grasp it with our reasonings, considering how inconceivable his greatness is. And the word spoken by the Lord to the Samaritan woman, but brought forward against us by our enemies, would more properly be said to them. For the Lord says, “You worship what you do not know,” to the Samaritan woman, who was preoccupied with bodily notions in her opinions about God; and the word fittingly rebukes her, because the Samaritans, thinking that they worshipped God, and then supposing that the Divine was bodily settled in a place, were pious only as far as the word, worshipping something else and not God. For nothing understood within a boundary is divine; it is proper to the Godhead to be everywhere, to pervade all things, and to be enclosed by nothing. So the word brought forward against us turns round to accuse the fighters against Christ. For as the Samaritans, thinking that the Divine was contained in some local boundary, were rebuked by what they heard (“You worship what you do not know,” and your worship that looks to God becomes profitless to you; for a God thought to be settled in some place is not God), so it would properly be said to the new Samaritans too: since you suppose that the divine substance is enclosed in the name of unbegottenness as in a kind of place, you worship what you do not know, serving God, yet ignorant that God’s unlimitedness surpasses every meaning and comprehension that comes from names. But our discourse has been carried further than the matter before us, following what keeps being found in its sequence; let us, then, take up the sequence again. For I think it has been sufficiently shown by what has been said that the statement he put forward is contrary not only to the truth but also to itself. For if, according to them, the natural relation to the Father is established by the appellation “Son,” and that to the begetter by “offspring” (their wisdom, through some grammatical nonsense, reshaping the words that signify the divine nature into a form of names), no one could any longer doubt that the relation of the names to one another, established by nature, becomes a proof of their kinship in substance, or rather of their identity. But let our argument not twist the opposing statement, so that the doctrine of godliness may not seem to be strengthened only by the weakness of its opponents, but to have its strength above all in itself. As far as possible, then, let the opposing argument be confirmed by ourselves with a more vigorous advocacy, so that the surpassing power [of the truth] may be recognized with full confidence, as we bring forward to an exact testing of our truth even what our opponents have omitted. For perhaps someone who takes our opponents’ side will say that the calling “son” and “offspring” does not always present kinship by nature. For in Scripture someone is called a “child of wrath,” and a “son of perdition,” and “offspring of a viper,” and surely no community of nature appeared along with such names. For Judas, named “the son of perdition,” is not the same in subject as perdition itself in its meaning; what is signified by “Judas” is one thing, and what is signified by “perdition” another. Likewise the argument could build the same case from the opposite side. For those called “sons of light” and “sons of day” are not the same as light and day in the definition of nature; and stones become children of Abraham when through faith and works they make kinship with him their own; and “those who are led by the Spirit of God,” as the Apostle says, are called “sons of God,” though they are not the same as God in nature. And many such things can be gathered from the God-inspired Scripture, by which deceit, like a picture decorated with scriptural testimonies, plays the part of truth’s likeness.

What, then, do we say to this? The divine Scripture knows how to use the word “son” in both senses, so that for some this appellation comes from nature, and for others it is added from outside and acquired. For when it speaks of “sons of men” and “sons of rams,” it signifies the relation in substance of what is begotten to that from which it came; but when it speaks of “sons of power” or “children of God,” it presents the kinship that comes from choice. And indeed, in the opposite sense too, the same persons were named both “sons of Eli” and “sons of pestilence,” the appellation “sons” fitting either notion well. For by being called sons of Eli they were attested to have natural kinship with him; but in being named sons of pestilence they were accused of the wickedness of their choice, as men who did not emulate their father in their life but made their choice akin to vice. In the lower nature, then, and in our own affairs, since what is human leans toward either side, toward vice, I mean, and toward virtue, it is in our power to become sons either of night or of day, while the nature, in what is primary, remains within its own bounds. For neither was he who became a child of wrath through vice estranged from human birth, nor did he who made himself akin to the good by choice reject his descent from human beings through the refinement of his pursuits; but while the nature stands firm in both, the differences of choice put on the names of kinship, as they become children of God through virtue or of the adversary through vice. But in the divine doctrines, how does Eunomius, he who “preserves the natural order” (for I will use the writer’s own words), and “abides by what is known from above,” and “does not refuse to call the begotten offspring, since the begotten substance itself,” as he says, “and the name of Son make such a relation of the names appropriate,” how does he estrange the begotten from kinship in substance with the begetter? For in the case of sons or offspring so called in reproach, or again where some praise accompanies such names, it cannot be said that anyone called a child of wrath was truly begotten by wrath; nor again did anyone have the day bodily for his mother, so as to be named its son; but the difference of choices makes the names of such kinship. Here, however, Eunomius says, “Since the Son is begotten, we do not refuse to call him offspring, since the begotten substance,” he says, “and the name of Son make such a relation of the names appropriate.” If, then, he admits that such a relation of the names is appropriate because the Son is truly offspring, how is it fitting to apply such a ground for the names both to things said by metaphor, in a stretched sense, and to those for which the natural relation, as Eunomius says, makes such a calling appropriate? Such a thing, then, is true only of those whose nature stands on the border between virtue and vice, among whom someone often takes contrary names, becoming a child now of light, now of darkness, through his kinship with the good or with its opposite. But where the opposite has no place, one could no longer say that the word “son” is applied by metaphor, like those who acquire the calling by choice. For no one would come to this argument: that just as a man, having put away the works of darkness, becomes a child of light through a seemly life, so too the only-begotten God by a change from the worse takes the better in exchange. For one who is a man becomes son of God by being joined to Christ through spiritual birth; but he who makes man son of God through himself does not himself need another son to grant him adoption, but is by nature what he is also named. A man changes himself, exchanging the old for the new; but God, into what will he be changed, so as to acquire what he does not have? A man, having stripped himself off, puts on the divine nature; but he who is always the same, what does he put off or put on? A man becomes son of God by taking on what he does not have and casting off what he has; but he who never came to be in vice has neither anything to take nor anything to leave. Again, a man can in one way truly be called someone’s son, when one speaks with a view to nature, and in another way by a stretched use, when the choice of his life imposes the name. But God, being one good in a simple and uncompounded nature, always looks to the same, and is never changed by the impulses of choice; he always both wills what he is, and certainly is what he wills.