Against Eunomius 6.733–7.749

For when I hear “cross,” I understand the cross; and when I am taught a human name, I see the nature that the name signifies. Having learned from Peter, then, that this one was made Lord and Christ, I do not hesitate to say that it is the one who came to be before our eyes. For the saints agree with one another, both in everything else and in this part too. For as Peter says that the crucified one was made Lord, so Paul too says that he was highly exalted after the passion and resurrection—not exalted in respect of being God (for what is higher than the divine height, that one could say God is exalted toward it?); rather, he says that the lowliness of human nature is exalted, the word showing, I think, the assimilation and union of the assumed man with the height of the divine nature. This, then, we believe the great Peter also signifies when he says that the one on the cross became Lord, having become, through the union with the divine in every respect, that which the divine is.

But even if one allows him to misinterpret the divine word in this, not even so will the argument reach the conclusion at which the heresy aims. For let it be granted that Peter says of him who was in the beginning, “God has made him Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” We find that not even so does the blasphemy gain any strength against the truth. “God has made him,” he says, “Lord and Christ.” To which of the things said, then, must “made” be referred? To which of the terms in the phrase shall we fit the word? For there are three before us: “this one,” and “Lord,” and “Christ.” To which of these does he join the word “made”? No one is so bold against the truth as to say that “made” does not refer to “Christ and Lord.” For Peter says that he, being whatever he was, became Christ and Lord by the Father’s act. The statement is not mine but that of the very man who fights against the statement. For in the very words set before us for examination he speaks thus: “The blessed Peter is speaking about him who was in the beginning and was God, and teaches that this one became Lord and Christ.” So Eunomius says that he who is, and was whatever he was, became Christ and Lord—just as the history says of David that, being the son of Jesse and tending the flocks, he was anointed king: the anointing did not then make him a man, but transferred him, being by his own nature what he was, from a private person to a king. How, then, is the making of the Son’s substance established any more by this, if, as Eunomius says, God made him, who was in the beginning and was God, both Lord and Christ? For lordship is the name not of a substance but of an authority, and the title “Christ” indicates kingship; and the account of kingship is one thing, that of nature another. Now Scripture says that these things came about concerning the Son of God. Let us consider, then, what is more reverent and more consistent. Of whom is it pious to say that he shares in something loftier by progress: God, or man? Who is so childish in mind as to think that the divine is brought to perfection by addition? But to suppose such a thing of human nature is not unreasonable, since the word of the Gospel clearly testifies of the Lord to growth in his humanity: “Jesus increased,” it says, “in stature and wisdom and grace.” What, then, is it more reasonable to infer from the apostle’s words: that God, who was in the beginning, became Lord by progress, or that the lowliness of human nature is taken up to the height of dignity by its communion with the divine? For the prophet David too says, as in the person of the Lord, “But I was established king by him,” which is much the same as saying, “I became Christ”; and again, as from the Father to the Lord, “Rule in the midst of your enemies,” which is the same as Peter’s “Become Lord of your enemies.” As, then, the establishing in kingship signifies not the constitution of the substance but advancement to the dignity, and he who bids him rule does not then bid what does not exist come into being, but gives to what exists authority over the disobedient, so too the blessed Peter, when he says that he became Christ, that is, King of all, added “him,” to separate the word from the substance and from what is contemplated about it. For he made him the things mentioned while he was already what he is. If, then, it were pious to say of the transcendent nature that it became something by progress—a king from a private person, lofty from lowly, lord from slave—it would perhaps be fitting to apply Peter’s words too to the divine substance of the Only-begotten. But since the divine, whatever it is believed to be, is always the same, above all addition and incapable of diminution, it is wholly necessary to refer the word to the human. For God the Word, what he was in the beginning, that he is now and remains for ever: always King, always Lord, always Most High and God, having become none of these by progress, but being, in the power of his nature, all that he is called. But he who was exalted from man to the divine through the assumption, being one thing and becoming another, is properly and truly said to have become Christ and Lord. For he made him Lord from a slave, and King from a subject, and Christ from one under rule; and he highly exalted the lowly, and to him who had the human name he granted the name above every name. And so came about that ineffable mixture and coming together, the human littleness blended with the divine greatness. Therefore the great and God-befitting names are properly fitted to the human, and conversely the Godhead is named by the human ones. For the same one both has the name above every name and is worshiped by all creation in the human name of Jesus. For “at the name of Jesus,” it says, “every knee shall bow, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” But so much for this.

But since he says that the word “Lord” is predicated of the substance of the Only-begotten, not of his dignity, and calls the apostle as witness to this when he says to the Corinthians, “Now the Lord is the Spirit,” it may be timely not to leave this error of his uncorrected either. He determines that the word “Lord” signifies the substance, and brings the saying just quoted as proof of this supposition. Let us see, then, whether the passage before us has anything in common with it. “The Lord,” it says, “is the Spirit.” But he who interprets Scripture as he pleases calls the lordship a substance, and thinks that by these words he brings his argument to a proof. Now if Paul had said, “Now the Lord is a substance,” we too would have gone along with what is said. But since the God-inspired word says that the Lord is the Spirit, while Eunomius says that the lordship is a substance, I do not know where his argument gets its strength from, unless perhaps he says again that the word “spirit” too stands in Scripture in place of “substance.” Let us examine, then, whether anywhere the apostle, in using the word “spirit,” indicated the substance by the term. “The Spirit himself,” he says, “bears witness with our spirit”; and, “No one knows the things of a man except the spirit that is in him”; and, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life”; and, “If by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live”; and, “If we live by the spirit, let us also walk by the spirit.” And who could count the apostle’s sayings on this? Nowhere among them do we find the substance signified by this word. For he who says, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit,” indicates nothing other than the Holy Spirit, who comes to dwell in the mind of the faithful. For in many places in his writings he also calls the mind “spirit”: when it has received the communion of the Spirit, the dignity of adoption comes to those who have received it. And as for “No one knows the things of a man except the spirit that is in him”: if “man” is predicated of the substance, and “spirit” likewise, then the man is made out by these words to be two substances. And he who says that the letter kills, but the spirit gives life—I do not know how he sets a substance in contrast with the letter. Or again, how does this man think that Paul, when he says that we must do away with the deeds of the body by the spirit, refers the meaning of “spirit” to the substance? And to live by the spirit and walk by the spirit—this would be altogether senseless if the meaning of “spirit” were taken of the substance. For in what else than our substance do all of us who are alive have our share in life? And then the apostle gives us advice about this—to live by substance—as if he were saying, “You share in life through yourselves and not through others”!

If, then, this sense can nowhere properly be found, how is it that here again, imitating the interpreters of dreams, he bids us take “spirit” in place of “substance,” so as to conclude by syllogism that the word “Lord” is applied to the substance? “For if the spirit is substance, and the Lord is the Spirit, the Lord is found to be substance after all.” Oh, how irresistible is the force of the argument! How can one slip out of and undo this inescapable necessity of demonstrations? The Lord is predicated of the substance. How does he establish this? Because the apostle says, “Now the Lord is the Spirit.” What, then, has this to do with substance? Why, the arts of demonstrative method bid “spirit” to be put in place of “substance”! These are the achievements of Aristotelian technical skill. That is why we, who are uninitiated in this wisdom, are pitiable according to your account (though he who tracks down the truth by such a method is not altogether to be called blessed), because we understand the apostle in such a way as not to think that he put “spirit” in place of the substance of the Only-begotten. How, then, will you fit what follows? For the thought is not bounded by these words. For when Paul has said, “Now the Lord is the Spirit,” he went on, “And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” If, then, the Lord is the substance, and the spirit is substance, what in turn is the substance of the substance? For according to your account the Spirit, which is the Lord, is one substance. Again, he speaks of another spirit belonging to the Lord, who is spirit—that is, according to your interpretation, another substance. So, by your account, the apostle means nothing other than a substance of a substance when he writes plainly, “the Lord is the Spirit” and “the Spirit of the Lord.” But let Eunomius take the written words as he pleases. What we know about this is as follows. The God-inspired Scripture, as the divine apostle names it, is the Scripture of the Holy Spirit.

Its intention is the benefit of human beings. For “all Scripture,” it says, “is God-inspired and profitable.” And the benefit is varied and manifold, as the apostle says: “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” But such gain is not to be had by readers at first glance; rather, the divine is hidden beneath the body of Scripture as beneath a veil, some legislation or history being put in front of the things contemplated by the mind. That is why the apostle says that those who look at the body of Scripture have a veil over their heart and cannot see through to the glory of the spiritual law, being hindered by the veil laid over the face of the lawgiver. Therefore he says, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life,” showing that in many places the obvious interpretation of what is written, unless it is taken in the fitting sense, produces the opposite of the life that is pointed out through the spirit. For the spirit lays down for all human beings the perfection of virtue in freedom from passion, while the history of what is written sometimes contains an account of incongruous deeds and seems, as it were, to run along with the passions of nature; and if anyone attends to these according to the obvious sense, the letter will become a teaching of death. So of those who read what is written in too bodily a way he says that the veil is laid over the senses of the soul; but for those who turn their contemplation to what is intelligible, the glory lying in the letter is uncovered, stripped as it were of a mask. And what is found through the loftier understanding he says is the Lord, which is spirit. For when one turns to the Lord, he says, the veil is taken away: “Now the Lord is the Spirit.” And he says this setting the lordship of the Spirit over against the slavery of the letter. For as he opposes what gives life to what kills, so he contrasts the Lord with slavery. And so that we may not fall into any confusion about the Holy Spirit when we are taught by the word “Lord,” and be led to think of the Only-begotten, he secures the statement by repetition: having said that the Spirit is Lord, he also names the Spirit “of the Lord,” so as to show by the honor of lordship the transcendence of his nature, and yet not to confuse in his statement what is distinctive of his hypostasis. For he who calls him both Lord and Spirit of the Lord teaches us to understand him as something distinct beside the Only-begotten, just as elsewhere he speaks of the “Spirit of Christ,” doing this very thing well and mystically, outlining what is reverent in the sequence of the doctrine according to the gospel tradition.

So we, the most pitiable of all, initiated by the apostle, pass over from the letter that kills to the spirit that gives life, having learned from him who was initiated in paradise into the unspeakable things that all that the divine Scripture says are utterances of the Holy Spirit. For “the Holy Spirit spoke well in prophecy”: he says this to the Jews in Rome and then brings in the words of Isaiah. And to the Hebrews, putting the Spirit first in the words, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,” he brings in the words of the psalm spoken at length in the person of God. And from the Lord himself we have learned the same: that David did not remain in himself—that is, did not speak according to human nature—when he set forth the heavenly mysteries. For how could anyone, being a man, know the heavenly dialogue of the Father with the Son? But being in the Spirit, he said “Lord,” and said that the Lord spoke to the Lord. For “if David in the Spirit,” he says, “calls him Lord, how is he his son?” So it is by the power of the Spirit that the God-bearing saints are inspired, and for this reason all Scripture is called God-inspired, because it is teaching from the divine inspiration. If the bodily veil of the word is taken away, what remains is Lord and life and spirit, according to the great Paul and according to the word of the Gospel. For Paul said that one who has turned from the letter to the spirit no longer grasps the slavery that destroys, but the Lord, who is the life-giving spirit; and the lofty Gospel says, “The words that I speak are spirit and life,” as being stripped of the bodily veil. But understanding the Spirit to be the substance of the Only-begotten we will leave to the dreamers. Or rather, out of great abundance we will make use of their arguments too, and arm the truth with the enemy’s arrows. For it is permitted for the Egyptian to be plundered by the Israelites, and for us to make their wealth our own adornment. If the substance of the Son is called spirit, and God too is spirit—for so the Gospel says—then the substance of the Father too is certainly called spirit. But if their only argument is that things expressed in unlike terms are also unlike in nature, it surely follows that things spoken of in the same way are not estranged from one another in nature either.

Since, then, according to their account, the substance both of the Son and of the Father is called spirit, it is clearly proved by this that there is no difference of substance. For a little after this Eunomius says: “Of different substances the appellations that signify the substance are certainly different too; but where there is one and the same word, what is shown by the same appellation will certainly be one as well.” So he who catches the wise in their craftiness has in every way turned the long labors of the speech-writer, and the countless sweats he spent on what he labored over, to the support of our doctrine. For if God is called spirit in the Gospel, and Eunomius makes out the substance of the Only-begotten to be spirit, then, since there is no difference between name and name, neither will the things signified by the names differ at all from each other in nature.

And it seems good to me to pass over unexamined the feeble and blowless shadow-boxing that he has written next, in accusation of our teacher’s words. For the argument itself, crying out its own weakness, is a sufficient refutation of the vanity of what was said, and to grapple in contest with such things is like trampling on the dead. For having set out with great confidence a saying of our teacher, having first slandered it and spat upon it and promised to show that it is worth nothing, he suffered the same as little children, whose immature and untimely understanding and untrained senses do not give them an accurate grasp of what appears. That is why, often thinking the stars are a little above their heads, they pelt them with clods when they appear, out of childish folly; then, when the clod falls, they boast to their playmates with clapping and laughter, as though the shot had reached the stars themselves. Such is he who has shot at the truth with children’s darts: having first set out those surpassingly bright words of our teacher, like stars, he has flung his earthy and unstable arguments from below, from his trodden and groveling mind; and they, raised only so high that they had nowhere to fall from of themselves, were turned back by their own weight.

For the saying of the great Basil runs, word for word, thus: “Yet who in his senses would agree with this argument, that things whose names are different must differ in their substances too? For the appellations of Peter and Paul, and of human beings in general, are different, but the substance of all is one. Therefore in most respects we are the same as one another, and differ one from another only in the properties contemplated in each. Hence appellations signify not substances but the properties that characterize each individual. So when we hear ‘Peter,’ we do not understand his substance from the name—by substance I now mean not the material substrate—but we form an impression of the properties contemplated in him.” This is what the Great one says. But with what good aim the one who fights against these words takes his shots at us, anyone with leisure to waste on useless things may learn from Eunomius’s treatise itself. For I do not care to insert the nauseating babble of the orator into my labors and to pillory his ignorance and folly in the midst of my words. For he goes through a kind of praise of significant words that make the subject plain, and in his usual style he composes and glues together rags of little phrases thrown away at the crossroads. And again poor Isocrates is nibbled away, plucked of his words and figures for the composition of the subject at hand; and there are places where Philo the Hebrew suffers the same, contributing to him little phrases from his own labors. And not even so was this much-embroidered and many-colored web of words brought to completion; rather, every attempt, every putting forward of ideas, and every technical preparation collapsed of itself. And as usually happens with bubbles, when drops falling from above onto a body of water produce foamy swellings, which form and at once burst, leaving on the water no trace of their own formation, such are the bubbles of the speech-writer’s ideas, extinguished as soon as they are put forward, without anyone touching them. For after those insoluble constructions, and the dream-philosophy by which he said that the division of substance is grasped by the differences of names, his argument—like a mass of foam carried down a stream, which breaks up when it strikes something firmer—borne along at random and striking the truth unawares, dispersed into nothing this unsubstantial, bubble-like structure of falsehood. For he says in these words: “Who is so stupid and so far outside the human condition that, when talking about men, he would call one ‘man’ and the other ‘horse,’ when comparing them?”

I would say to him: You rightly call stupid the man who errs so badly about words, and I will use you as a witness in support of the truth. For if it is the height of stupidity to call one a horse and the other a man when both are truly men, it is certainly equal madness, when the Father is believed to be God and the Son to be God, to call the one created and the other uncreated; since, as humanity there, so Godhead here does not admit the turning of the name aside to something of another kind. For what the irrational is to man, that creation is to the Godhead, being equally unable to admit the same definition as what is superior to it. And as one cannot fit the same definition to the rational and the four-footed (for each stands apart from the other by its distinctive property), so neither will you interpret the created and the uncreated substance in the same terms, since what is said of the one substance is not found in the other. For as rationality is not found in a horse, nor the single hoof in a man, so neither is Godhead found in creation, nor being by creation in the Godhead. Rather, if God, then certainly uncreated too; and if created, not God—unless, of course, someone by a certain usage and custom of speech applies the bare name of Godhead to a creature, just as horsemen have given human names to some horses. But neither is the horse a man, even if it is called by a human appellation, nor is the creature God, even if some bestow on it the word “Godhead,” granting it an empty sound of two syllables. Since, then, the argument of the heresy has run into the truth of its own accord, let him advise himself to abide by his own words and not to retract his own statements in any way, but to think that he is really stupid and out of his mind who does not name the subject as it is, but says “horse” instead of man, “sea” instead of heaven, and “creature” instead of God.

And let no one think that creation is set over against God without reason; let him look to the prophets and to the apostles. For the prophet says in the person of the Father, “My hand made all these things,” in a figure calling the power of the Only-begotten a “hand”; and the apostle says that all things are from the Father, and all things through the Son. And the prophetic spirit agrees in a way with the apostolic teaching, which also came about through the Spirit. For there the prophet, in saying that all things are the works of the hand of him who is over all, distinguishes the nature of what has come into being from the one who made it; and the one who made all things through his own hand is the God over all, having the hand and working all things through it. And here again the apostle makes the same division of beings, attaching all things to the creative cause but not counting what makes among all things, so that through this the difference of nature between the created and the uncreated may be clearly taught, and what makes may be shown to be one thing in its own nature and what comes to be another. Since, then, all things are from God, and the Son is God, creation is rightly distinguished from the Godhead; and the Only-begotten is something other than the nature of all beings—not even those who fight the truth object to this. It is wholly necessary, then, that creation be distinguished equally from the Son, if the voices of the saints do not lie when they testify that all things came to be through him.

Since, then, the Only-begotten is proclaimed God in the divine Scriptures, let Eunomius understand his own argument and condemn as utter stupidity the dividing of the divine into created and uncreated, like dividing man into horse and man. For he himself says, a little further on after the intervening babble, that “the natural relation of names to things is unchangeable,” himself voting for the statement that the true appropriateness of appellations to their subject is fixed. If, then, the name of Godhead has been naturally applied to the Only-begotten God—and he will certainly agree, even if he wants to quarrel with us, that Scripture does not lie and that the title of Godhead is not applied to the Only-begotten out of tune with his nature—let him persuade himself by his own words. For if the natural relation of names to things is unchangeable, and the Lord is called God, no difference can be conceived between Son and Father in the concept of Godhead, since this name is common to both. Nor is it this name alone: there is a long list of names by which the Only-begotten is named together with the Father without any variation—good, incorruptible, just, judge, long-suffering, merciful, everlasting, without end—all that indicate the meaning of the greatness of his nature and power, with no lowering of the loftiness of the concept in any of the names as applied to him. But he passes by so great a number of divine appellations as if with his eye shut, and looks at one thing only, “begotten” and “unbegotten,” trusting with a slender and weak persuasion a doctrine tossed and carried about by the winds of error.